Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720

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TRANSFORMING THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

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Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe James B. Collins, Professor of History, Georgetown University Mack P. Holt, Professor of History, George Mason University (ISSN 1542–3905) Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe brings forward the latest research on Europe during the transformation from the medieval to the modern world. The series publishes innovative scholarship on the full range of topical and geographic fields and includes works on cultural, economic, intellectual, political, religious, and social history. Private Ambition and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV’s Government, 1650–1715 Sara E. Chapman The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers During the Wars of Religion, 1560–1600 Megan C. Armstrong “By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age J. B. Owens Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris Sydney Watts Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530 David M. D’Andrea Law, City, and King Legal Culture, Municipal Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon Michael P. Breen Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 April G. Shelford

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TRANSFORMING THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720

April G. Shelford

University of Rochester Press

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Copyright © 2007 April G. Shelford All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2007 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978–1–58046–243–3 ISBN-10: 1–58046–243–X ISSN: 1542–3905 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shelford, April. Transforming the republic of letters : Pierre-Daniel Huet and European intellectual life, 1650–1720 / April G. Shelford. p. cm.—(Changing perspectives on early modern Europe, v. 7 ISSN 1542–3905) Includes bibliographical references (p. 239) and index. ISBN-13: 978–1-58046–243–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1–58046–243-X 1. Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 1630–1721. 2. Europe—Intellectual life—17th century. 3. Europe—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. B1889.H74S54 2007 001.1094'09032—dc22 2007005050 “Cautious Curiosity: Legacies of a Jesuit Scientific Education in SeventeenthCentury France,” by April Shelford from History of Universities 19, no. 2 (2004): 91–128, by Feingold, M (RKC). By permission of Oxford University Press. “Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica,” by April Shelford from Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (October 2002), 599–602, 607–10, 613–16. Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas Inc. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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To my husband, Philip M. Katz

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 The Road to Parnassus, 1648–61

13

Chapter 2 The Lives of Poems, 1653–63

45

Chapter 3 The Empire of Women, 1651–89

77

Chapter 4 The Gate of Ivory, 1646–90

114

Chapter 5 Defending Parnassus, 1666–92

144

Conclusion: A Dialogue with the Future

184

Notes

191

Selected Bibliography

239

Index

257

vii

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ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1

The Growth of Huet’s Republic of Letters (ca. 1648–1700)

9

2

Huet’s “Gatekeepers” into the Republic of Letters (early 1650s)

32

3

Circulation of Latin Poetry (ca. 1658–64) through a subgroup of Huet’s Republic of Letters

61

4

Distribution of Huet’s Ode and Epistle (Winter 1660)

67

5

Genre and Sociability in the Empire of Women

80

6

Time Line of Huet’s Interactions in the Empire of Women

81

7

Huet’s Connections with Scientific Academies

128

ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A butterfly that goes straight has free time. —Kahō

Many years ago, Anthony Grafton suggested to a panicky graduate student that Pierre-Daniel Huet might make a good dissertation topic. He was right. Even as I neared the end of this project—even as I just wanted it to end—new discoveries continued to delight and spur me on. Thus, my first and deepest thanks go to Tony. Not only did he shepherd me through the dissertation, he supported me through my vicissitudes on the academic job market and patiently read and commented on much of the manuscript for this book. Peter Brown and Zachary Schiffman helped shaped this book in important, if different ways. Peter was always generous with his support and advice while I was working on my dissertation. Here I was finally able to follow his gentle and inspired advice that I not ignore Huet’s Latin poetry. In reading my drafts, Zach frequently knew what I wanted to say better than I did, and he consistently urged me to resist circuitous exposition, distracting detail, pointless erudition, and reticence. Mordechai Feingold has been a heroic reader of both the dissertation and the book manuscript. He helped this project along with invitations to participate in a panel and to write an article on Huet’s science, which my colleague at American University, Alan Kraut, furthered with his critique. Robert Aldrich, Mary Beth Winn, Diane Margolf, and Valerie French read and commented on chapters, and Constantin Fasolt gave me a writing tip that helped me around many a writer’s block. I appreciate greatly David Bell’s invitation to benefit from the European seminar at Johns Hopkins University, where I presented a chapter, and I have learned much from participating in the Ancien Régime group in Washington. A special pleasure has been getting to know Orest Ranum with his rare combination of graciousness, erudition, and perspicacity. The best feedback for me has always dispatched me to learn more—and Orest did just that with his question, “Why Terence?” With great affection, I thank my colleagues at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, for giving me the job that kept me in the profession and that widened my horizons as a scholar; xi

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xii

Acknowledgments

American University for wonderful colleagues and the junior leave that was essential for writing this book; and the Camargo Foundation for giving me such a beautiful place to work for a semester—and in such good company. I cannot thank Mack Holt and James Collins enough for their reception of my book at the University of Rochester Press, their assistance in giving the manuscript a final shake, and Jim particularly for his astute and detailed commentary. I am grateful to the University of Rochester Press, especially Suzanne Guiod and Sue Smith, for making the book a reality. I continue to cherish the friendship of Françoise Waquet, whom I met while researching the dissertation, who introduced me to the Republic of Letters, and who continues to inspire me with her creativity, vivacity, and awesome productivity. I remain grateful to the readers of my dissertation— Peter Lake, Theodore Rabb, and Joseph Levine—and to fellow students and friends at Princeton University—Alastair Bellany, Hilary Bernstein, Brad Gregory, Ben Weiss, Kate Jansen, Sylvia Brown, Kate Elliot, Susan Whyman, Cynthia Cupples, Maribel Dietz, Noel Lenski, Robert Margolis, and Elspeth Carruthers. I acknowledge, too, the continued support of John Monfasani, who supervised my master’s thesis and who has continued to give me such good advice, and Warren Roberts, Dan White, and H. Peter Krosby, who did so much to launch me as a historian when I studied for my master’s at the University of Albany. The support of friends and colleagues throughout my academic peregrinations has been indispensable; they include David Armitage, Constance Blackwell, Johanna Bockman, Françoise Charles-Daubert, Mary Evangeliste, Nina Gelbart, Louise Grafton, Aleric Josephs, Sharon Kettering, Mary Jane Leach, Darrin McMahon, Diane Margolf, Laurence Plazenet, the late Richard Popkin, James Robertson, Giorgio Santoni, Harvey Schoolman, Andrea Tschemplik, Kathleen Wellman, Mary Beth Winn, and Andrew Zimmerman. (I know I have forgotten someone—please forgive me!) Love and special thanks go to my oldest friends, Caroline Meyers, who also prepared the graphics for this book, and Susan Medyn. The support of my mother, Dorothy Fischer, has been unwavering. I wish that my stepfather, Ralph Barr, could see the finish, and I wonder what my brother, Karl Shelford, would have made of his sister the academic. Philip Katz, my husband and sensitive (if always challenging) editor, has made this a better book, and he continues to make me a better person.

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INTRODUCTION All over the world, as if on a given signal, splendid talents are stirring and conspiring together to revive the best learning. For what else is this but a conspiracy when all these great scholars from different lands share out the work among themselves? —Desiderius Erasmus

Catastrophe struck Paris one night during the autumn of 1693. The building housing the library of the bishop of Avranches collapsed, sending books, manuscripts, and papers cascading into the street. Word quickly reached the residence of the Jesuit order, which had been promised the library as a legacy. The Jesuits rushed to the scene to retrieve what they could from the ruins and to prevent more thefts by onlookers. The owner of the library, the renowned scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), then sixty-three, bitterly bemoaned the damage in letters to his friends in France and abroad. He himself blamed the collapse on poor construction and materials. But JeanBaptiste Santeuil (1630–97), regarded by many contemporaries as France’s greatest living Latin poet, transformed negligence into nemesis. He composed more than three hundred lines to demonstrate the moral announced in his title: “Huet’s library, swallowed up by an earthquake, whence emerge the best authors, and the worst are punished.”1 In Santeuil’s reimagining of the disaster, the Earth shook, the ground subsided, the foundations succumbed, the house collapsed. The passerby could gaze into a huge abyss, catching sight of Tartarus and the shades of the departed, who suddenly hoped for a return to light. Apollo and the Muses wept. Authors shielded their works from the flames as a wild she-animal protects her cubs. The Muses lent a hand to worthy poets, but abandoned those they disdained. Apollo swept a favored few to safety. In an allusion to a famous session of the Académie Française, Charles Perrault, an ardent “admirer and judge of his own age” who denigrated the great writings of the past, confronted a defender of the Ancients as the source of the pleasing and the beautiful. The Greek and Latin poets liberated from the grave regarded both skeptically. It was not for poets to express implacable hatred; instead, the work of the Muses should reconcile humanity. Scenes of salvation continued to alternate with scenes of loss. Melpomene, the muse of tragic and lyric verse, 1

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rescued poets of the high style, while poets of humbler gifts stole away, clutching half-burned volumes like empty dreams. Finally, Santeuil prophesied the glorious reconstruction of Huet’s library as the Muses laid the marble stones for a new home where they would receive the honor due them. Despite its fanciful framing, Santeuil’s poem was literary criticism, a catalogue of his century’s poetic excellence that also judged lesser talents and settled literary scores. The poets he saved from brimstone—Frenchmen celebrated for their Latin verse—are hardly household names today. When we think of French literary achievement in the seventeenth century, the names of Descartes, Molière, Racine, and Pascal spring to mind. How many today can name the Pléiade latine or the “French Virgil”? Even in the academic world of neo-Latin studies, the second half of the seventeenth century draws comparatively little attention.2 Indeed, the reader might reasonably ask: Why bother with the literary production of a failing parent (Latin) when the daughter (French) was so vigorously demonstrating her capacities for expression, imagination, and ratiocination? Santeuil’s commemorative verse pulls us into a different intellectual culture from the one celebrated by most scholars of the French seventeenth century: the “old” Republic of Letters, where composing Latin poetry was a learned recreation and a valued professional accomplishment.3 His poem telegraphed some of the core values of that republic—the seeking of models, standards, and projects in antiquity—but also underscored its elitism, for composing neo-Latin poetry was an activity reserved for the learned. With his allusion to the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, Santeuil also identified one set of challenges to this elite culture, but there were many others, as this study will show. Finally, Santeuil dedicated his poem to the prominent intellectual who will guide us through the transformation of the republic in the final decades of the seventeenth century, Pierre-Daniel Huet. Huet ultimately took a very dim view of the results of that transformation: “Though it may be true that each century has its own merit, . . . it is not fitting to find [ours] in the cabarets of the Pont-Neuf.”4 Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who edited an early scholarly journal from exile in the Protestant Netherlands, offered a less dismissive judgment when he contrasted an earlier intellectual culture with that of his own day. The sixteenth century had more learned men, he admitted, but the seventeenth had more “illumination.” The reign of criticism and philology had created more prodigies of erudition in the old days, but the study of the new philosophy (i.e., Cartesianism) and the cultivation of vernacular languages had created a new taste. Broad and deep knowledge had disappeared, but the Republic of Letters now possessed “a certain more refined intelligence” capable of exquisite discernment. “People today are less learned and more clever.”5 Both Huet and Bayle were defining (though appraising quite differently) the intellectual changes that occurred during their overlapping lifetimes


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and that resulted in the Enlightenment Republic of Letters. To characterize the end points of that process very briefly, the “old” Republic was a small and close-knit cosmopolitan elite with its roots in Renaissance humanism. Its citizens were linked by networks of correspondence and shared an erudite neo-Latin culture. By the eighteenth century, the republic had become a vernacular intellectual world that was relatively more public, open, and democratic. Thanks to recent efforts, scholars now know much more about the Republic of Letters than when Elisabeth Eisenstein remarked in 1979 that its institutions “remain undefined.” Yet our knowledge of precisely what happened during the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century remains imperfect.6 Peter Miller suggests the complexity of the period when he looks, somewhat wearily, beyond his subject, Nicolas-Claude Fabri Peiresc and the republic in the generation before Huet: “The combination of these complicated narratives, the triumph of the ideology of the New Science, of the moderns, of an Augustinian anthropology, of vernacular popular culture, and of intellectual specialization” displaced the old republic’s activities, draining them of prestige.7 An earlier historian of the republic, Paul Dibon, acknowledged its “veritable metamorphosis” during the seventeenth century, but did not answer his own question: What became of the “survivors who carried the torch” of the old republic?8 This book seeks to answer Dibon’s question. In the process, it contributes to our understanding of the history, organization, and mentality of European intellectual life in the early modern period. Because it analyzes intellectual transformation from the perspective of people who resisted it, it also significantly enhances our understanding of the Enlightenment and the CounterEnlightenment, as well as the origins and the nature of “modernity.” Finally, as a case study, it provides a means to frame questions about the dynamics of intellectual change generally. The remainder of this introduction explicates briefly each of these levels of significance.

Huet as Guide to European Intellectual Life Even a brief sketch of Huet’s life indicates why he functions as an excellent guide to the period. He was born and educated in Caen, a culturally vigorous Norman town, in 1630. His nobility was likely recent and de robe, rather than the more distinguished and ancient pedigree he claimed.9 He began his intellectual career after his education at Caen’s Jesuit collège. With the help of teachers and friends, he began to develop an intellectual network that rapidly grew to include érudits in the United Provinces of the Netherlands and in Paris. During the 1650s, Huet began his work as a religious scholar by editing Origen’s biblical commentaries. He did not complete that effort until 1666, though he published a treatise on translation stemming from the


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Origen project in 1660. Well before these publications, however, he established a reputation for learning with his neo-Latin poetry, which earned him the first of many royal gratifications in 1663. During the 1660s, his interests expanded to include science, which he cultivated chiefly by collaborating with André Graindorge, and vernacular literature, which he pursued through friendships with leading female novelists. He published nothing that detailed his scientific investigations; nor did he publish a novel written during the 1650s, but he did publish a treatise on the genre in 1670. That year marked a turning point in Huet’s career, for he moved to Paris to become assistant preceptor to the dauphin. His supervisor was JacquesBénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), who was then the bishop of Condom and a renowned preacher who would become a forceful apologist for monarchical power. During the 1670s, Huet served as managing editor of the Ad usum Delphini, a series of Latin classics prepared as teaching texts for the dauphin. He then published the Demonstratio evangelica (1679), an imposing Christian apologetic that also introduced his anti-Cartesianism and suggested an inclination to Skepticism. In 1674, he was elected to the Académie Française. In 1676, he became a priest, then abbé of the convent at Aulnay near Caen in 1678; in 1685, he was appointed bishop of Soissons, which he exchanged for the seat at Avranches. Despite increasing ecclesiastical duties, he authored a thorough critique of Cartesianism in 1689, which he followed up with a vernacular satire on the same subject in 1692. He also published a second apologetic work, Alnetanae quaestiones (1690), and a treatise on the location of paradise (1694). In the 1690s, he authored a response to Perrault’s defense of the Moderns. In his last decades, he retired to a Jesuit house where he helped prepare an anthology that included some of his shorter unpublished works and correspondence, and he composed an autobiography.10 Because of his many interests, Huet has appealed to scholars working on subjects as diverse as the history of the novel and early modern religious belief.11 In these contexts, though, he is usually one character among many in a larger story, hence meriting but a few pages. Of the older literature, Léon Tolmer’s 1949 biography remains very useful, but it is too much the account of a proud city’s favorite son.12 In contrast, Huet figures prominently in Katherine Stern Brennan’s indispensable work on Caen’s literary society and in David Lux’s fine study of Caen’s scientific academy.13 Several of Huet’s works are now available in modern editions or translations,14 and the Italian scholar Elena Rapetti has adroitly exploited the archives to plumb Huet’s philosophical thought.15 Yet no one has attempted a portrait of Huet that integrates the neo-Latin poet with the French poet, the bon vivant and friend of female novelists with the serious biblical scholar, philosopher, and scientist. Despite Huet’s intrinsic interest, this is not a conventional intellectual biography. Rather, I examine his life from the perspective he valued most:


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citizen of the Republic of Letters, committed to defending an intellectual vocation that he and his friends considered honorable and moral. As such, Huet was one individual among many in a voluntary community of learning that endured because every member recreated the republic through his own efforts. This does not invalidate more general characterizations of the Republic of Letters, but a focus on the experience of one individual clarifies important aspects of the republic that are frequently obscured by its citizens’ own universalizing rhetoric. The republic writ large existed only as the sum of its members’ social gestures and collaborative output. Organic and dynamic, it lacked a fixed shape. Its internal configurations constantly shifted as individuals made new connections or as internal dysfunctions (like quarrels) and external phenomena (like war) disrupted them. Each individual created his own Republic of Letters, reaching out over time to assemble a network of the like-minded or the merely instrumental. The ideal (yet practically impossible) way to represent the Republic of Letters would be to diagram the connections of every citizen at a given moment. The result would be a multitude of circles of every size in every conceivable possible relation—overlapping, tangential, or utterly disconnected. Draw a circle around the whole, glorious mess, and voilà, there you have the Republic of Letters. By the time Huet began his intellectual career around 1650, the republic was an international community of scholars sharing a neo-Latin intellectual culture. Both inspired and chastened by the accomplishments of classical antiquity, it prized wide-ranging erudition and linguistic skill. A place for work, the republic’s core identity rested on a (sometimes tacit) consensus about the proper responses to the following questions: How do you acquire and produce knowledge? Who has the right to criticize the resulting intellectual “product”? How inclusive or exclusive should the community be? How should members behave with each other? How should this community of learning position itself ideologically vis-à-vis other communities and interact with them? Beyond these commonalities, each citizen’s republic differed because of his individual talents and because of the opportunities and perils of his local context. The divide between Catholics and Huguenots in France, for example, made it unlikely that Huet would respond to religious issues as a citizen of the republic living in England would, though both shared the ideal of transcending confessional difference in order to avoid destructive conflicts.16 France offered engagement with female intellectual activity in a salon environment—but it also presented the challenge of the salonnières’ hostility to erudition. The debates that agitated natural philosophers differed, too, as did the role of the state in encouraging intellectual endeavor or controlling


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the circulation of ideas. Thus, the French setting made Huet’s republic a different place for work than that of a scholar living in Leiden—and his republic experienced very particular strains and challenges as the seventeenth century drew to a close. Conflicts with communities of learning who had different answers to the questions above transformed the Republic of Letters. Generally, those hostile to the old republic rejected both the mastery of classical languages as a necessary prerequisite to advancing knowledge and the exemplary power of the Ancients. They asserted the intellectual competence of individuals beyond the charmed circle of the learned. They also cast into doubt the traditional humanistic connection between learning and virtue, offering a new meaning of civilized. These challenges to humanistic inquiry clustered around two poles of intellectual endeavor, the literary and the scientific. In the transformation of the republic, they were mutually reinforcing, and individuals working in either area (sometimes both) articulated similar rhetorics of antierudition in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Finally, these conflicts were frequently deeply gendered as mixed-sex salons offered new models of intellectual sociability and rejected erudition as worthwhile knowledge, and as opponents cast different intellectual styles, even intellectual change itself in gendered terms. Coming to grips with such a diverse cast of players and such a broad sweep of topics challenges our comparatively narrow disciplinary and methodological perspectives—but Huet helps make good our lacks. Because his interests and endeavors were so diverse, because he participated in so many intellectual groups, and because he articulately contributed to so many contemporary debates, he illuminates the connections between aspects of a combative intellectual culture that are typically handled in isolation.

Creating “Modernity” The period this book covers has long been considered central to the making of modern European culture. We only need recall Paul Hazard’s magisterial La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (1935) and Jonathan Israel’s recent Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (2001). The history of the Republic of Letters has not been considered in this wider context, because much of the scholarship has emphasized the social aspects of intellectual life. I admit, too, that I have been reluctant to consider Huet and his republic in such an explicitly forwardlooking context. Like Lisbet Koerner in her study of Carl Linnaeus, I have resisted analyzing how “modern” (or “unmodern”) my subject was; like her with Linnaeus, I have similarly tried to understand how Huet himself understood his intellectual world.17 Huet made it difficult to persist in


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such a course, however, because his career collided with the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns began “officially” in 1687. It was hardly the culmination of Huet’s career, but he would have recognized it as the culmination of tensions building in French intellectual life for decades and occasionally flaring in earlier skirmishes.18 Most important for us, Huet participated in the battle as an Ancient. By focusing on him, we can rescue a complex intellectual identity from the stereotypes of the Moderns, the battle’s putative “winners,” thus revealing an intellectual “type” as rather more than “willfully obscure and ‘conservative.’”19 This approach also makes humanist learning—the intellectual tradition and practice of the old republic—central to the making of the Enlightenment. Just as humanists during the Renaissance defined themselves against the medieval scholastics, early Enlightenment thinkers defined themselves against humanist érudits (however much their own intellectual skills had been sharpened by a humanistic education!). The opponents squared off in the final decades of the seventeenth century with the same weapons their precursors had used in that earlier struggle: frequent and willful misunderstandings, stereotypes, and satire. Scholars like Hans Baron and Joseph Levine noticed this some time ago, and others have written perceptively on the ubiquity of antihumanism in late seventeenth-century France.20 Still, the case that Huet and others like him made has not received sufficient attention; as a result, we have an incomplete view of the developments that followed. This book argues that the cultural choices available at century’s end were more complex than a view from the Moderns’ perspective alone allows. The choices were not simply between a new science and an old, a new literature and what preceded it, the vernacular over Latin, or politesse versus more assertive styles of intellectual exchange. Each choice implied an orientation toward authority and tradition that had a deeply ethical dimension for Ancients like Huet, and each threw into question who should have access to the world of ideas. Huet did not become an Ancient because he rejected innovation or refused to acknowledge his own era’s achievements. His whole career attests to a nearly unquenchable curiosity, an openness to new literary forms, a willingness to extend knowledge of the natural world beyond anything ever imagined by the Ancients. But he and others like him chose to orient themselves differently toward traditional sources of authority than the Moderns did, because they believed that the Ancients provided an indispensable ethical compass. He and others like him railed against vernacular publications not simply because they were intellectual snobs (they usually were), but because they believed that some ideas were so inherently dangerous, debate had to be confined to responsible individuals possessing sufficient expertise and discretion. In short, the period of transition through which Huet lived was a conflict over opposed intellectual values. The battle


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over the right to claim citizenship in the Republic of Letters bridges the temporal divide between Huet’s youth and the eighteenth century, and it helped create both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment.21

A Culture War? Joan DeJean has asserted that the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns was a “culture war.” Her suggestion has real merit and brings me to the third and final level of significance of this book: Can we postmoderns learn anything about the dynamics of intellectual change in general from Huet’s very specific period of transformation? I believe we can, though I vehemently discourage facile comparisons. I limit myself here to raising questions rather than attempting answers. First, for academics now, Huet’s story is part of their history. As such, it raises questions about the opportunities and costs of professionalization and specialization, and about the engagement of intellectual elites with lay publics (and vice versa). Intellectual conflict has social consequences, too, which often surface in debates about education: What should we teach our children? What do they need to know? What is relevant and useful? Huet and his contemporaries raised and argued about all these questions. They were as obsessed by the “useful” as we are, and they were equally concerned about the values that they believed inhered in a particular pedagogical program. If we consider the humanist curriculum that Huet defended and that Cartesians like François Poulain de La Barre attacked (chapter 5), it is deeply paradoxical that, for all their bluster, the Moderns left largely in place the structure and the content of education as young men received it.22 Could we say the same for higher education in the United States since the 1960s? Do the excluded groups that demanded entry to our academe and who challenged the legitimacy and authority of the intellectual wares on offer have anything in common with the salonnières who, shut out of their own society’s educational institutions, created their own intellectual forums and subjects? Has American academia acknowledged, much less comprehended, the changes in intellectual sociability prompted by the influx of women, for example? Looking at the competing models of intellectual sociability and the gendering of intellectual endeavors in Huet’s period might prove useful for framing illuminating questions about our intellectual culture. Finally, inverting DeJean’s formulation—simply asking the question whether our culture wars are yet another round in the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns—opens new possibilities for understanding both the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries. Some final remarks on the book’s organization: It focuses on the period depicted in figure 1, that is, the growth of Huet’s Republic of Letters over more than fifty years. This is his republic at its most expansive, comprising


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Figure 1. The Growth of Huet’s Republic of Letters (ca. 1648–1700)

all the individuals with whom he interacted.23 We would need a third dimension to represent change over time adequately. Obviously, many individuals Huet met in 1650 would not have been alive in 1690. Despite changes in membership, however, some groupings endured for decades, for example, the community of Jesuit érudits that Huet first encountered at midcentury. Huet also continued to forge new relationships in the United Provinces into the 1690s and beyond. In contrast, Caen’s scientific academy lasted but a decade, as did Huet’s connections with England’s Royal Society. Finally, the schematic does not indicate how various groups differed in membership from the standpoint of gender, which had ramifications for intellectual collaboration between men and women and consequences such as the gendering of intellectual endeavors and styles. I have organized my chapters around specific themes, so there is chronological overlap. Each chapter plucks out one or more groups represented in figure 1 and examines in detail their functioning and importance for Huet. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss roughly the same period. In chapter 1, his Jesuit instructors school Huet in the skills necessary for humanist scholarship and


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Introduction

instill specific intellectual values, while mentors within and beyond the collège’s walls initiate him into the practices of intellectual friendship and introduce him to learned circles in Paris and beyond. The second chapter, “The Lives of Poems,” enhances our understanding of the intellectual ethos of Huet’s republic by focusing on subgroups that composed neo-Latin poetry. This was simultaneously a social, scholarly, and creative activity in the Republic of Letters, and it demonstrated citizens’ devotion to collaborative effort and classical culture. Despite its erudite character, it had public uses, too, and an intellectual like Huet could use verse to secure patronage. In chapter 3, “The Empire of Women,” we follow Huet into the world of female intellectual striving. This brought together learned women and novelists in convents and salons. To participate successfully in these milieus, Huet had to behave differently—though he ultimately refused to accept the antierudition expressed there, which was fundamentally opposed to the republican values detailed in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 4, “The Gate of Ivory,” recounts Huet’s involvement in still another community of learning, this one focusing on science. Once again, he cultivates a network of sociointellectual connections in and beyond Caen; once again, he confronts challenges to his ethos of learning, this time coming from Cartesian science. The final chapter, “Defending Parnassus,” picks up and further elaborates the conflicts that have been emerging (sometimes simmering) in earlier chapters. It argues that, by the 1680s, an ideologically coherent challenge to the Republic of Letters had arisen through a combination of literary and scientific trends and linking (from Huet’s perspective) salonnières, Jansenists, Moderns, and Cartesians. Huet’s responses to this challenge were varied and directed at different audiences, but all were informed by the intellectual ethos of the old republic as Huet understood and practiced it. Erudition did not disappear from intellectual life with the transformation of the Republic of Letters. Huet could have had a very nice chat about his religious investigations with Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for example. Latin remained an important force in European culture until the twentieth century, and the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters was no more unitary or stable than Huet’s had been. Nor was Huet forgotten. Authors of the Encyclopédie cited his work on Origen, skeptical philosophy, and ancient mythology; David Hume benefited from his treatise on Skepticism; the Jamaican slave owner, Thomas Thistlewood, noted Huet’s invention of a meteorological instrument in his commonplace book; and a member of the colonial government of Guadeloupe quoted Huet’s Latin poetry in a letter home in the 1770s. On the eve of the Revolution, Huet found a place in Louis-Pierre Manuel’s L’année française, a four-volume work that celebrated, according to its title, “the lives of men who had honored France, either through their talents, their services, or above all by their virtues.”24 The prestige of such erudite endeavors decreased, however, as philosophes like Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) successfully identified them with an inferior form of cognitive ability, memory, as opposed to reason, and


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Introduction

11

as they acquired the dismissive label antiquarian. As Edward Gibbon put it: “In France . . . the learning and language of Greece and Rome were neglected by a philosophic age . . . the new appellation of Erudits was contemptuously applied to the successors of Lipsius and Casaubon.”25 More than one colleague has suggested to me that Huet’s story has a tragic element. In a sense, Huet was no different from today’s academic toilers: He prepared for a career assiduously. He was willing to make the personal sacrifices that he believed the Muses demanded. He emulated the intellectual heroes of his youth. He produced a chef d’oeuvre that demonstrated mastery of his field. He performed the seventeenth-century equivalent of attending conferences and presenting papers. He cultivated the right connections. He was not entirely selfless, of course. He never intended to starve in a garret, and he died a rich man. He also proceeded with a justified expectation of respect. He hoped that, if he excelled, he would someday be regarded as highly as illustrious predecessors like Erasmus and Scaliger. Then the rules changed . . .


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Chapter 1

THE ROAD TO PARNASSUS, 1648–61 Le coeur humain est un abysme d’une profondeur, où la fonde ne peut aller, c’est un mystere impenetrable aux plus éclairez. —René Rapin

The Last Citizen of the Republic of Letters The old bishop worried about his posthumous reputation. In his final decade, Pierre-Daniel Huet devoted three books to shaping his legacy: an anthology of selected correspondence and short scholarly treatises, an autobiography, and a miscellany of essays.1 All are rich sources for scholars of the seventeenth century. Yet to the degree that they were autobiographical, they were difficult works for Huet to compose. His dilemma emerges most clearly in the autobiography, Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (1718). Huet had trouble finding an appropriate model. He strove to reconcile contradictory objectives, justify the endeavor to himself, and anticipate likely criticisms. Only with difficulty—and only at the conclusion—did he finally secure a “specific retrospective point of view” that enabled him to put an “interpretive meaning on his past.”2 Only then did he fully subsume self-promotion into selflessness by commemorating the intellectual community he had served so long and well. Initially, Augustine’s Confessions was Huet’s model. This choice reflects how, after Petrarch, Augustine became “the paradigm for all representations of the self in a retrospective literary structure.”3 The spiritual autobiography was also the most evolved and acceptable way of speaking about one’s self in the seventeenth century. Was any model more appropriate for a bishop writing an autobiography than the autobiography of a bishop who had invented the genre?4 In his first paragraph, then, Huet solemnly and eloquently invoked the example of Augustine, who ascribed anything laudable in himself to God’s beneficence and any evil to his own agency. Augustine’s Confessions had long inspired Huet to “wipe away the filth of my early life,” a need he felt more urgently after a near-fatal illness. But he had another reason to write: Every day, friends entreated him to write his life story to 13


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Transforming the Republic of Letters

preserve the memory of the era’s leading intellectuals. He ended the brief introduction with a prayer for God’s help to undertake the work humbly and gratefully.5 Huet never relinquished the Augustinian model, but he failed to live up to it. His Commentarius lacks the Confessions’ intimacy, drama, and eloquence, though it offers appealing details like the fields of flowers he and his companions traversed as they approached Stockholm.6 Most of all, Huet chronicles his scholarly activities and interactions with the eruditissimi, doctissimi, and clarissimi savants whom he befriended and with whom he sometimes quarreled. Nor is the Commentarius particularly spiritual or introspective, though Huet conscientiously ascribed to Providence many circumstances of his family history—most importantly, his father’s conversion to Catholicism—and briefly commented on his own religious development. Yet he rarely quoted or alluded to the Bible, which is odd for a scholar who studied it so intensively. A nineteenth-century review of Charles Nisard’s French translation captures the essential difference between the two bishops’ works: “[Huet’s] confessions lack what charms in Augustine’s: conversion.”7 The scholar René Pintard asserted that Huet was so captivated by the love of letters that “he had forgotten his religion,” but Huet’s friend, the Abbess de Rohan, described him more accurately as “pious without being overly devout.”8 The struggles of faith of a Pascal were not Huet’s, and the road from Caen led to Paris, not Damascus. In the end, Huet could not write a spiritual autobiography, because he lacked the interiority the genre demanded. In taxonomic terms, what Huet did write resembles most a “récit de vocation,” a form of secular autobiography in which the author, often a man of letters, “retraced his social origins, his early education (with some scenes indicating his precocious vocation or some revealing trait), his studies, his readings, his career, his encounters.”9 He could have written an intellectual autobiography, of course, responding to Gottfried Leibniz’s wish that authors “give us the history of their discoveries and the steps by which they arrived at them.”10 Huet knew the autobiographical efforts of other intellectuals, but he condemned the immodesty of Cardano, Erasmus, and both Scaligers.11 Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637) presented another model for intellectual biography, but Huet’s antiCartesianism made it impossible for him to regard Descartes as exemplary of anything. More important, Huet rejected the individual and intellectual autonomy that Descartes claimed. In the end, Huet could not write a fully secular autobiography, because he regarded the enterprise as morally dubious. Make no mistake: He was quite convinced of his superior gifts and wanted very much to broadcast them. In a letter to his nephew written in 1702, he exploded with resentment at what he perceived as his current obscurity: “There is no place in Europe where I am not more respected than I am in France . . . There is no place in France where I am not more respected than in Caen.”12 But


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The Road to Parnassus, 1648–61

15

talking about himself conflicted with the Christian virtue of modesty, which was even more imperative for a bishop to possess. Thus, he wanted to leave posterity with the attractive image penned by Abbé de Tilladet, the editor of the Dissertations (1712): a bishop “retired so piously to important ecclesiastic and religious works” and “so modest and reserved about all his intellectual creations.”13 How could an autobiography not violate the Christian injunction to humility? How could it not appear boastful? Huet’s scattered and contradictory comments about the Dissertations make clear that he sensed the incompatibility of his goals, even if he never explicitly acknowledged it. Tilladet prefaced the anthology with a plea that readers should pardon him for not obtaining the authors’ permission to publish their works. Many were dead, and he ardently hoped that Huet, still alive and “the most distinguished among them,” would not be offended.14 In his autobiography, Huet disingenuously claimed that he would have suppressed the Dissertations had he been consulted.15 Yet the abbé had advised Huet before publication to find someone more qualified to write the preface than he was; nevertheless, Tilladet was willing to write it if Huet insisted.16 Huet sent the Dissertations to one friend, writing that Tilladet had “extorted permission from me” to publish the documents.17 He sent it to another, writing that Tilladet’s work was neither unknown nor repugnant to him.18 In fact, Huet must have collaborated with him, because only Huet could have provided many of the documents published in the anthology. Copies of nearly all the letters, often corrected by him, still reside in the Bibliothèque Nationale, with a list in his hand that strongly resembles the Dissertations’ table of contents.19 The letters that open the collection—a vitriolic exchange between Huet and his long-dead teacher Samuel Bochart—could only have come from Huet, for he had discreetly filed the last letter away at a mutual friend’s urging more than fifty years before. So Huet misrepresented his actions. We might be tempted to dismiss this as a minor failure to live up to Christian standards or as the kind of insignificant inconsistency that was bound to arise in a society where individuals were constrained to play parts they did not always believe. Certainly, Huet knew from personal experience that the social and religious injunctions to modesty could lead to ludicrous results. “You give a man the praises due him,” he wrote in the Huetiana, “and he violates modesty when he accepts them, violates truth when he rejects them.”20 Dismissing Huet’s white lies as trivial or mere social performance misses the point, however, that individuals can nevertheless experience a painful tension between the incommensurability of social demands and religious values and their personal actions. More important, Huet’s troubles stem from his sincere belief that collective identities should take precedence over individual autonomy, and that modesty was an essential prophylactic against the fundamentally antisocial sin: amour-propre, or self-love.


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Seventeenth-century ideas about self-love branched from one, solidly Christian trunk.21 They became ubiquitous in moralists’ writings as textual interest in Augustine increased. For Augustine, self-love distinguished the terrestrial city of man from the celestial city of God. In the former, love of self led to scorn of God. Turbid and inward looking, it sought to dominate others and to rival God, craved even deceitful praise, and made a person tempestuous, seditious, and envious. In contrast, love of God was holy, directed toward the community, sought the common good, submitted to God, possessed tranquility, preferred truth to flattery, and was amiable.22 By the seventeenth century, self-love had become central to understanding human motivation.23 A favorite topic of religious and lay moralists, it was frequently discussed in other genres too.24 A 1658 manual for the honnête femme warned that, “on account of this vile passion, the most beautiful creatures in the world have become hideous, and through it even the angel more brilliant and beautiful than a star became the Prince of Shadows.”25 The most familiar accounts of self-love are La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1665) and Pascal’s Pensées (1670), but the theme and a constellation of related concepts—presumption, pride, vanity, and vainglory—were firmly in place when these were published. Condemning self-love follows logically from the view of social cooperation and collective good that Huet presented in an essay in the Huetiana, “A man is a part of a whole, not a whole.” There he wrote how an individual’s survival depended on his being linked to the rest of humanity as in a great chain. The chain moved only when the links cooperated; similarly, a link moved when it received an impetus from other links, which it then passed on. Material, social, and spiritual disaster resulted when an individual broke those connections; he “falls into disorder because he has abandoned himself to his amour-propre, the source of all vices.”26 Amour-propre had dangerous consequences for intellectual endeavor, as Huet’s assessment of Montaigne in another essay of the Huetiana makes clear. While Huet considered Montaigne’s prose somewhat praiseworthy, he accused him of offending the law of modesty.27 Ruled by his vanity and amour-propre, Montaigne had become his own panegyrist. He had declared “in all his work that he desires to depict himself there as he is ‘naturally’ and to present himself before the public gaze . . . [But] shouldn’t we be convinced that the original merits being viewed, studied, and imitated by all the world? Moreover, where could such an idea come from other than a great depth of amour-propre?”28 This is not the last time we will hear Huet accusing intellectuals of self-love. As this account proceeds, such accusations will assist us in understanding Huet’s intellectual values because they usually signal his perception that the intellectual ethos he had learned from the Jesuits and internalized as a citizen of the Republic of Letters had been violated.


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Obviously, Huet would not want his intellectual endeavors tarred with the brush he so liberally applied to Montaigne and other intellectuals. But how could he avoid charges of immodesty when writing an autobiography? He finally did by identifying his life with the history of the Republic of Letters and incorporating his actions into the res gestae of that collectivity. Thus, he evaded accusations of egotism and honored the republic’s spirit of collaborative endeavor. He was no longer an individual, but an intellectual type and spokesman of a collective body. This strategy reflects the ideas expressed in the Huetiana, as well as the corporatist mentality of the Ancien Régime and the guildlike structure of the Republic of Letters. Huet’s autobiography also rendered the republic a valuable service. In Polyhistor (1688), Daniel Georg Morhof wrote that men of letters must transmit to posterity the achievements of learned men.29 In 1727, Jean-Pierre Nicéron complained that those who could best perpetuate the memory of learned colleagues failed to do so.30 Not Huet, for he recorded the memories of the great men of letters he had known personally. He also proactively and defiantly responded to would-be critics that all aspects of his life—his thoughts, intellectual achievements, moral qualities—were the concern of learned men alone.31 By choosing to write in Latin, he reinforced the point, dismissing the “vulgar” who lacked the linguistic passport into his world.32 As with the Dissertations, he still found it necessary to assert that friends had virtually “extorted” the autobiography from him. Again, he adduced the devout purpose of repentance. Still, the scale that inclined toward Augustine at the beginning of his autobiography sloped sharply toward men of letters at the end, weighed down by a concluding, lengthy list of classical and modern precedents. Yet Huet was memorializing an erudite world that no longer existed—and he knew it. By the time he wrote his autobiography, the Republic of Letters had been so radically transformed that he only contemptuously acknowledged its presence. He had outlived the republic that he had entered as a young man. Nearly every one of the erudite friends whom we will meet in these pages had died, some decades before. This was the final, very poignant reason why Huet wrote: When he died, who would remain to honor him as surviving citizens had always honored their deceased compatriots? It took years for Huet to become a citizen of that vanished republic, and the remainder of this chapter begins to trace that process. During the 1640s, the Jesuit collège in Caen provided him with the technical skills and intellectual values necessary for citizenship; in 1648, his beloved teacher, Pierre Mambrun, began to educate him in the republic’s basic social practices and intellectual ethos. By chapter’s end, Huet will have done much to establish himself as a promising young intellectual, and he will practice the art of intellectual friendship adroitly to begin constructing his own Republic of Letters piece by piece.


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To Instruct and Delight When Huet matriculated at Caen’s Jesuit collège, he joined the largest, most far-flung intellectual community in existence. The Society of Jesus was a rigorously trained elite intent on reclaiming Protestant Europe and claiming heathen lands for the Catholic Church. The Jesuits gave Huet a formation and a psychological and moral grounding that he never transcended. They provided stability, guidance, and emotional succor for a young boy whose family had been shattered by death (both parents had died by the time he was six, and he and his sisters were raised apart from each other) and whose intellectual precocity isolated him from other children. “Truly I was not yet even a boy, but still a babe when I was entrusted to [your] discipline,” Huet wrote to the general of the order in 1692, and he had always found among the Jesuits “not only the most faithful friends, but the most learned teachers, and moderators of my zeal.”33 In 1699, he told his nephew he would see him in Caen after he visited “my good friends, the Jesuits,” at the collège of La Flèche.34 He bequeathed his library, the cherished work of a lifetime, to the order. The Jesuit education he received also set him on the road that scaled Parnassus. As savants, the Jesuits participated in the Republic of Letters; as pedagogues, they helped reproduce it by training their students in the studia humanitatis. For Huet, the teacher-student relationship was an apprenticeship in the interaction critical to the republic’s functioning: intellectual friendship in a homosocial environment. Finally, the Jesuits gave him access to a wider intellectual world beyond the collège. The goal of the Jesuit curriculum was not to produce érudits, though it provided essential training for anyone with scholarly ambitions. “The aim of our educational program is to lead men to the knowledge of our Creator and Redeemer,” admonished the very first line of the Ratio studiorum (1599), and it frequently reiterated this objective. 35 Simply put, the point was to mold orthodox Catholic and morally upright gentilhommes. In the sixteenth century, French establishments had the explicit goal of training young men to occupy positions of authority to further “the revitalization of faith and the reformation of morality for the entire community.”36 Jesuit collèges also appealed to many parents because they prepared their sons for professional training. Less prosaically, Jesuit education sought to reestablish the proper relationship between God, the pursuit of knowledge through reason, and human beings. This was the Jesuit pedagogical mission after the Reformation, a period when, in Montaigne’s words, self-love and intellectual presumption led many to “overturn the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils and so horrible a corruption of morals.”37 Thus, the Jesuits sought to channel intellectual inquiry into a course defined by steep embankments: in religious matters, the demands of faith and Catholic tradition; in natural philosophy, Aristotle; in letters and ethics, the Ancients. The ideal


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result was an individual who, neither credulous nor skeptical, could think for himself, but who could also resist the temptation of his own or others’ dangerous opinions. We perceive these objectives in Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta (1593), a gloss of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum that enumerated acceptable teaching texts. Wanting to elevate humanity, Possevino wrote, “God made us strive for both religion and wisdom. He gave us the ability to investigate whatever we see; he placed us in the center of the universe so we could more readily view our surroundings and inquire into the causes of all things.”38 Possevino also acknowledged the dangers of human inquiry or, as he put it, the desire for an inappropriate liberty. A lively mind resembled a fleet horse: A good trainer drew the horse away from treacherous terrain and loosed it in a safe, open field. Intellectual novelty and license disturbed public peace and religion. Because some would prefer their own raw notions to those sanctioned by time and the sages, Jesuit schoolmasters had to develop their students’ minds and their piety.39 Nor should education inspire, in La Rochefoucauld’s words, “a second amour-propre.”40 As another Jesuit pedagogue put it, a student learned that “true knowledge makes a man aware of what he knows and what he does not know; otherwise, he is not truly wise.”41 To achieve these goals, the Jesuits developed a curriculum that charted a via media between humanism and scholastic logic and science, devoting a cycle of study to each.42 Jacob Pontanus explained the importance of the first cycle of humanistic study in a brief composed at the same time as the Ratio studiorum: The humanities were inherently ethical, thus well suited to achieving a moral education; they were the “life, spirit, drive, blood and bone” of all other disciplines.43 “We call them [humanities],” commented the pedagogue Louis Richeome in the sixteenth century, “because they civilize youthful spirits, and guide them to humane conversation through knowledge of the languages and customs of diverse peoples.”44 In the words of a nineteenthcentury scholar, “the Jesuits rushed to open the doors of their collèges to the authors of Greece and Rome, though they took care to deracinate them.” Plucked from their historical contexts, the Ancients became exemplars relevant to all times and places who educated young men in beauty and good taste.45 The better pagans became a “foundation course for a deeper understanding of the Bible,” not a threat to Christian doctrine.46 They had left a treasury of moral exempla to transplant from poor pagan to good Christian soil, as “the Hebrews, leaving Egypt, stripped its treasures and made [their] sanctuary’s ornaments from them.”47 Nevertheless, because the classics contained material contrary to their religious and moral agenda, the Jesuits did not permit students to browse freely through the canon. Instead, compilers judiciously culled the edifying from the works of Horace and Catullus, for example, so students first encountered these authors through carefully edited anthologies.48 Jesuits also wrote textbooks to develop particular skills.


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Like the Ratio studiorum, textbooks are normative and prescriptive; they do not tell us what actually occurred in the classroom, much less what Huet experienced. Still, they provide information on curriculum and insights into the values that a Jesuit education sought to instill. The goal of the humanist cycle of Jesuit study was perfecting rhetorical skills, “the keystone of humanist culture.”49 Huet probably received his first lessons from Cyprian Soarez’s De arte rhetorica. First published in 1562, its distillation of the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian was used into the eighteenth century.50 In the proemium, Soarez explained that to train a student in rhetoric was to train him to think. “The similarity between reason and rhetoric is so great,” Soarez began, “that the Greeks, who were preeminent not only in understanding, but also in speaking, used the same word for both, and the Latins, rivaling the prudence of the Greeks, did nearly the same.”51 Indeed, rhetoric was the image of reason. God placed reason in the mind, which rules the whole body; likewise, he placed the seat of rhetoric in the body’s highest and noblest part, the head. Reason was the light and splendor of life; rhetoric was its shield and ornament. Just as reason ruled and moderated the soul, so rhetoric persuaded others. As light was to the sun, so rhetoric was to reason, and reason and the sun ruled everything in their respective domains. Although Soarez began with praise of the pagan Greeks and Romans, he concluded by evoking the superior power of the “Christian eloquence” of the church fathers. After introducing his subject, he moved systematically through the different elements of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio. Rhetoric required eruditio too. For example, when an instructor explicated one of Cicero’s orations, he might discuss at length the history of Rome, its political evolution and important institutions—but only enough “to satisfy the understanding, [and] always discreetly enough so as not to exhaust the subject.”52 This curriculum required a mastery of Latin and (to a lesser extent) Greek. Richeome justified the elevated status of linguistic training by declaring that “the word alone makes us men,” but Jesuit pedagogues also believed that the rote learning necessary for language acquisition was most appropriate to young children’s abilities.53 In teaching Latin, redactions of Despautère’s Commentarii grammatici, first published in 1515, became so ubiquitous that the author’s name became synonymous with Latin manuals.54 While textbooks taught grammatical basics, pagan authors provided the best models of Latinity for students to imitate. Because the Jesuits believed that the church fathers had lived in a period of linguistic decline, the Romans dominated.55 Cicero was omnipresent, though Ovid, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Sallust, Julius Caesar, Propertius, and Tibullus also figured prominently.56 Jesuit instructors organized their classes by age and ability following the Parisian model, and the day’s labors generally comprised two two-and-ahalf hour sessions. Prelection, the minute examination of a text, was the


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pedagogical tool.57 For praxis, let us follow the example given by the Jesuit teacher Joseph de Jouvancy in Ratio discendi et docendi (1692).58 Geared to beginners, it is based on one of Aesop’s fables by Phaedrus, “The Fox and the Tragic Mask (Vulpis ad personam tragicam)”: Personam tragicam forte vulpes viderat: O quanta species, inquit, cerebrum non habet! Hoc illis dictum est, quibus honorem et gloriam Fortuna tribuit, sensum communem abstulit. (A Fox beheld a Mask—“O rare The headpiece, if but brains were there!” This holds-whene’er the Fates dispense Pomp, pow’r, and everything but sense.)59

Jouvancy proceeded step by step through an appropriate prelection. First, specify the subject: what a fox said when encountering a theatrical mask. Comment on sentence construction and clarify ambiguities. “Personam” could mean a person, for example, but it also referred to the mask worn during performances. The adjective “tragic” signaled that Phaedrus meant the latter. Analyze each word in detail, specifying the gender and declination of nouns, and the conjugation, mode, and tense of verbs. For “erudition,” remind students how clever foxes are. After all, the French proverb cautioned one to be a fox with a fox, so a fox was a good choice to dispense a witty moral lesson. The instructor should explain what a tragedy was. “Cerebrum (brain)” might prompt a vocabulary lesson in words for other parts of the head. A lesson in Latinity should draw attention to the elegance of a particular word order. Review words related to those in the passage. Present synonyms to compose a new version. Finally, explicate the fable’s moral: How common sense and prudence (above all, Christian prudence!) prevailed over riches and the most highly esteemed natural qualities.60 Jouvancy’s examples of prelections for more advanced students were progressively more sophisticated and complex, but the method remained the same. Other exercises ensured that students would be able to write and speak as well as read Latin. They had to translate passages from Latin into French, Greek into Latin, or prepare a Latin prose paraphrase of a Latin poem. The instructor could not review each student’s assignments, so he selected a few to correct publicly and fastidiously. Inside and outside the classroom, students were constantly tested on their knowledge. In class, they set upon each other in the disputatio, a debate that could grow quite heated. During lunch, they were quizzed. Public declamations supplemented classroom debates, as did theatrical productions with moral and historical themes (see chapter 2). Finally, students groaned under the burden of homework, which required assiduous imitation of classical authors, especially Cicero.61


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These activities continued from October to August. Finally, teachers administered examinations, determined grades (which remained confidential), decided whom to advance to the next level, and awarded prizes. Woe to the student who received an assessment like Gaspard de Lesnaut at the conclusion of the first level of logic: His grades summed him up as dullwitted, often absent, rascally, and ignorant. Huet no doubt received notices resembling those of Louis de la Londe, one of Lesnaut’s classmates: His report card noted his intellectual acuity, extreme diligence, good behavior, and zealous application.62 François Dainville elegantly summed up the intended result of this first cycle: The student had learned not only how to read Greek and speak Latin; he had communed with the best and the most beautiful in classical thought. The ancient world, “with all the charms and hues of its eternal youth,” lived once again through his efforts. He had learned literature, history, mythology, and geography through the Ancients, and, by plumbing their depths, his intellect had matured sufficiently to embark on the second cycle.63 We should not identify pedagogical objectives with achievements, however. How much did Jesuit students actually learn? How much did their instruction delight them? Satire gives as incomplete a picture as curricula and textbooks, but Le Parnasse reformé (1671) is a useful and amusing counter to Dainville. In it, Apollo convened a meeting to reform French culture. One by one, ancient and modern authors detailed the literary crimes committed against them. Cicero blamed the “pedants” for the appallingly poor quality of eloquence in contemporary society; they had destroyed his work with their commentaries and exiled his writings to classes for beginners. Children read serious orations intended for august assemblies; they regarded them as punishment, they could not understand them, and they memorized them only to forget them immediately. A parlementarian seconded Cicero’s criticism; he had seen young men in the courts still covered with the dust of the collèges declaim absurdly about causes they scarcely comprehended.64 More important here, successful students like Huet gained the technical skills and educational background needed to enter an intellectual world based on the humanist canon, communicating in Latin, and transcending the boundaries of town, province, and state. Certainly, the Jesuits used the humanist curriculum to secure confessional ends. Rhetoric served to develop intellectual gifts, but it was also a weapon in the order’s armory to combat heresy.65 Protestant instructors in England, the Netherlands, German lands, or even Massachusetts Bay made similar use of their training. Yet the educational revolution of the studia humanitatis also created “an intellectual unity that endured beyond the shattering of religious unity” during the Reformation.66 Similar curricula, common pedagogical techniques, and shared educational values countered the centrifugal force of confessional difference. Protestant and Catholic students alike had heads crammed full of Cicero


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and Virgil. Doctrinal differences divided them, but the humanist identification of learning and virtue united them.

Teachers and Mentors A curriculum cannot teach itself. A teacher does, but not as a conveyor belt links the steps in a mechanized process of fabrication. A teacher can learn pedagogical techniques, and the Ratio studiorum addressed teacher training at several points, as Jouvancy’s Ratio discendi did more systematically. Teaching is a relationship, however, and pedagogical success depends to some degree on the emotional alchemy between individuals. That relationship need not be warm: Teachers can terrorize students into learning. Nor need it be particularly individualized: Lectures can be both effective and efficient. To be transformative, however, requires more. Huet identified the necessary quality nearly three centuries ago: a lively commitment to the student that transcends the intellectual.67 Animated by such a concern, a teacher becomes what Pierre Mambrun (1600–61) was to Huet: father to his soul, “not only my teacher, but a friend and like a parent to me—and so he will remain for as long as I live.”68 Jesuit pedagogy was student-centered in a seventeenth-century sense. Its emphasis on spiritual development encouraged nurturing and emotionally rich relationships between teachers and their charges. The Ratio studiorum urged the professor of advanced studies to “pray frequently for the spiritual welfare of his students and be an example to them by his dedicated life.” He should be available to answer questions after class and not show favoritism. He should attend as much to the needs of the poor students as to those of the wealthy, devoting “himself in a special way to the progress of each and everyone.” The instructor of beginners “should endeavor both in the classroom and outside to train the impressionable minds of his pupils in the loving service of God.” “In private talks, too, he should instill in his pupils habits of virtue,” though without appearing to “entice” anyone to join the order. Again, the Ratio studiorum cautioned against being “on friendlier terms with one pupil than with another”—advice apparently ignored in Huet’s case.69 In the Ratio discendi, Jouvancy also emphasized the teacher’s commitment to his students’ welfare. The teacher had to possess whatever moral qualities he wanted the students to develop. He had to respect the students, for if the students perceived that he did not, they would become discouraged. He had to assert his authority effectively, delicately balancing respect, love, and fear. The second required the soul of an attentive father and a pious mother toward all, but especially toward the poor and boarders. He had to adjust his demands to his students’ abilities: if he could not praise everyone’s progress, at least he could praise everyone’s efforts. An


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instructor had to respect himself, too, especially in the face of the common belief that teaching children was base and degrading. If nothing brought a man closer to God than service to others, what greater services could there be than dissipating ignorance, illuminating intelligence, and liberating the will by extricating it from vice?70 Again, the Ratio studiorum and Jouvancy’s Ratio discendi codified expectations and objectives, not achievements. Like a law code, the very existence of such instruction suggests the challenges of achieving the order’s pedagogical ideals. Nevertheless, close relationships between teachers and students were not unusual. Just as Descartes characterized his relationship with Father Charlet of La Flèche in filial terms, so Huet regarded Mambrun.71 Huet met Mambrun when he taught philosophy at Caen for a few years in the 1640s. Mambrun introduced Huet to geometry with Plato’s words that no one could enter into the mysteries of philosophy without it—and intervened aggressively when Huet’s passion for geometry made him reluctant to explore other subjects.72 Huet spent time with Mambrun during vacations, and Mambrun compared their relationship to that of Plato and his disciples. As a mentor, he guided Huet through a difficult period. Mambrun’s letters of the early 1650s suggest Huet’s frequent despondency and uncertainty about where to devote his energies. Mambrun shaped the scholar Huet became, constantly reminding him that learning, hard work, orthodoxy, and virtue were indissolubly linked. Their relationship was an apprenticeship in the human connection critical to the functioning of the Republic of Letters: intellectual friendship in a homosocial environment. He instructed Huet in a rhetoric of affection that confirmed and strengthened those special bonds. Their letters document an evolution from a master-student to a collegial relationship, and they created a space for collaborative intellectual endeavor. Well-known for his neo-Latin poetry, Mambrun helped Huet hone his creative gifts and acquire a currency useful in the republic’s gift economy and the environment of cultural patronage of Louis XIV’s early personal reign (see chapter 2). Finally, he facilitated Huet’s entry into the Parisian intellectual world. A letter from Mambrun dated December 1648 reveals that Huet had contacted him about resuming their relationship (Huet’s collège days ended in 1646).73 When he wrote, Huet had a student’s understanding of the art of letter writing. From the beginning, letter writing occupied an important place in the Jesuit curriculum—indeed, Possevino devoted eleven-and-a-half folio pages to it in the Bibliotheca.74 Not surprisingly, Cicero’s letters were incorporated into every level of instruction, though Possevino recommended other authors too and cautioned against mere imitation.75 The stylistic trend from Erasmus to Justus Lipsius had been to loosen the constraints of classical rhetoric in favor of a familiar style that made a letter a mirror of the soul (a conventional metaphor even in antiquity). With Lipsius especially, the letter


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became “a private space opened up by friendship.”76 Yet however intimate in tone, a letter was an exercise in “self-presentation or self-fashioning rather than self-revelation or self-analysis,” according to Judith Henderson.77 Thus, we should never mistake the required “natural” style for hasty, spontaneous jottings. Letter writing was hard intellectual work. Huet’s many drafts prove as much, while his selection of fair copies of his letters—with a heading in his own hand stressing their elegance, pure Latinity, and exceptional erudition—indicate his pride in particular compositions.78 A social practice, letter writing initiated, confirmed, and strengthened ties within the Republic of Letters. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) eloquently evoked the affective reality letters created: “The purpose of the letter is that though physically separated we may be united in spirit. In a letter the image of the living presence emits its glow between persons distant from each other, and conversation committed to writing unites those who are separated.”79 Letters had a semipublic quality, too. As one of Huet’s contemporary’s put it: “But men must write to each other to maintain the commerce of the spirit by that of the senses, so that our light shines before men as well as in our minds, so that our minds are not like those dark lanterns that illumine only the bearers.”80 Letters were not to be hoarded, though an author could ask his correspondent to keep a letter to himself as Huet once asked Graevius, his close friend at the University of Utrecht.81 They were read aloud at learned gatherings, such as those hosted by the Dupuy brothers in the royal library. They were copied and distributed among friends, as Jean Chapelain circulated Daniel Heinsius’s letters in Paris. “And thus was constituted little by little a true public for a vast group of correspondents, a collectivity with irregular and vague boundaries, but one composed of attentive and demanding readers.”82 When Mambrun responded to Huet’s request for friendship in 1648, he was initiating Huet into this complex art. First, he expressed his pleasure that Huet still had such affection for him. Every day brought news of Huet’s good reputation. Truly he was about to enter “le grand monde.” “When you desire to apply yourself to something, you will achieve far more than those who came before you. I expect far more from you than I ever have of anyone thereabouts.” He found Huet’s letters pleasing and promised to respond. In closing, he sent “a little something” (probably a Latin poem) to show that he remembered their old pastimes. Mambrun’s consistently pleasant, even banal, tone can be misleading, for implicit in his gracious words was the asymmetrical power relationship of masterpupil. It was Huet’s place to request his former teacher’s attentions; it was Mambrun’s privilege to accept or deny. Mambrun’s authority over Huet derived from his having been his teacher, not from his age. Huet was many years younger than Gilles Ménage and Alexander Morus, both of whom we will meet later, yet Huet addressed them with a casualness that would


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have been shocking in a letter to Mambrun. Huet also wrote to Ménage and other French colleagues in French. While Mambrun’s first letter is in French, nearly all the others are in Latin, the language of Jesuit pedagogy and the lingua franca of the Republic of Letters. Mambrun expressed high expectations of Huet, though he tempered them with encouragement. When he promised to write and sent a gift, he obliged Huet to reciprocate. Letters must be answered, one gift called forth another—thus was the Republic of Letters formed. Mambrun generously seasoned his letters with classical allusions, which confirmed his and Huet’s membership in an intellectual elite. There was more to this than intellectual exhibitionism or snobbery, however. The Ancients were good to think with—and they were good to feel with. Mambrun’s frequent quotation of Terence in the early 1650s shows how classical culture furnished a rich set of referents for the circumstances of their lives on which they could draw to define their relationship and defuse difficult emotional situations. First, Mambrun’s choice acknowledged Huet’s maturity. Though Terence had long been admired for “the purity of his style, [and] the grace and natural simplicity of his discourse,”83 he was problematic from a Christian perspective. After all, the action of these plays turned on young men scheming to secure courtesans, on rape, and on infanticide. Erasmus held that his comedies, “when read in the proper way, not only have no tendency to subvert men’s morals but even afford great assistance in reforming them.” But many scholars, Catholic and Protestant, disagreed. According to one Calvinist schoolmaster, the threat Terence posed to good morals was “too heavy a price to pay for even good colloquial Latin.” Moreover, Loyola forbade teaching Terence in anything but thoroughly expurgated texts “lest [his comedies] harm [students’] morals more than profit their wits.”84 Second, the comedies gave Mambrun a graded emotional register and a choice of voices in which to speak, because they featured relationships between fathers and troublesome sons. Mambrun used them to frame and reframe his position vis-à-vis Huet. Playful, he inverted the power dynamic of their relationship by assuming the submissive posture of a slave; irate, he assumed the role of a stern father. In the summer of 1650, for example, Mambrun deployed four quotations from three comedies in a letter barely a page long—all to rebuke Huet for his whining!85 His opening sentence and first quotation punctured Huet’s pomposity (and perhaps alluded to the fact that Huet would soon gain control over his inheritance). Apparently Huet believed that his friends would feel sorry for him if he wrote mournfully in a “gilded” style. Yet a bit of talent did not justify inflated prose, as Phidippus reproached his brother in The MotherIn-Law: “Because, forsooth, you’ve got a small bequest fallen to ye, you puff yourself up finely!” In the bantering tone of Syrus the servant, Mambrun scolded Huet for abusing his “papa”: “He might have been ashamed to fall


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upon a poor old man like me, who not long since dangled him in my arms, when he was no higher than this.” He warned Huet in the words of a character in The Brothers: “If he thinks he can say whatever he has a mind to, I’ll make him hear something that he has no mind to.”86 Then he compared Huet’s peaceful life in Caen with his tumultuous life in Paris. Huet could wander the fields of Normandy; Mambrun lived amid constant disputes. Huet indulged his musings along a riverbank; a harassed Mambrun paced the rue Jacob, serving others’ talent, never his own. Yet Huet bitterly complained, while Mambrun endured it all silently. “I never saw a dispute on more unequal terms than the one that has happened today between us,” he quoted The Brothers again, “I, with being thumped, he, with beating me, were both of us quite tired.”87 In the fall of 1651, Mambrun quoted Terence extensively again, this time in anger.88 Huet apparently had solicited advice on a particular course of action. Given the date, he might have mentioned the possibility of traveling to Sweden with Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), the Huguenot scholar who tutored him in Hebrew. “You’re asking my opinion?” Mambrun began bluntly. His quotations from Adelphi suggest that he was torn between two models of fatherly conduct. In the play, Demea’s strictness is matched by the sweet temper of his brother Micio, who had adopted one of Demea’s sons. Confronted with the disorderly conduct of one son and the secret machinations of the other, Demea eventually chose to adopt Micio’s manner—though with reservations. Similarly, Mambrun conceded that Huet was free to do as he pleased. However, he quoted at length (and with some expurgation) Micio’s scolding of his adoptive son, whose poor judgment and lack of foresight worsened the consequences of his bad behavior.89 But where Micio cast his son’s errors as youthful high jinks, Mambrun characterized Huet’s errors as sins that would make him miserable and whose snares he would escape with great difficulty, if at all. Few who descend into the inferno ever find their way out again, Mambrun warned: “If Christ does not liberate you, you will die a slave.” If we could have asked Mambrun in 1648 what future he envisioned for Huet, he might have responded with the hope that Huet would become a Jesuit and continue the order’s traditions of superior pedagogy and Latin poetry. Three developments made that impossible, however, and created a stormy relationship until 1654: Huet’s desire to study Hebrew and other biblical languages with Samuel Bochart; his decision to accompany Bochart to Sweden; and a spiritual turning point in Huet’s life. By far, Huet’s association with Bochart, a Huguenot pastor and internationally renowned scholar, posed the greatest threat to Huet and Mambrun’s relationship, and it might even have aroused suspicions regarding Huet’s Catholicism, given the Huguenot heritage of his family.90 What convinced Huet to run such risks? Bochart’s enormous erudition. Thirty years his senior, Bochart had received a superb education at Sedan,


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Saumur, and Leiden; he had mastered Arabic, Syriac, and Aramaic in addition to the usual trinity of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.91 Contemporaries such as Gerard Vossius extravagantly praised him (though Richard Simon dismissed him as a diligent peruser of dictionaries).92 In his autobiography, Huet recalled how Bochart’s sprawling Geographia sacra (first part, 1646) shamed him for his ignorance of Hebrew and Greek—indeed, it compelled him “to abandon all other studies until I possessed those others, even if only imperfectly.”93 Bochart had intended a limited treatment of the location of paradise, but instead authored a hefty tome treating in minute detail the history of the division of the earth between Noah’s sons and the dispersion of humanity after the Tower of Babel.94 Philology and etymology—words and more words, especially Hebrew words—these were the clues that Bochart tracked through ancient sources. Indeed, the older the better, because the oldest sources more likely contained truth. “Truth necessarily precedes falsehood, as falsehood is nothing other than a corruption of truth,” he wrote. Similarly, the prisca theologia revealed by God in the most ancient of times had been corrupted by ancient pagans.95 Obviously, the Bible was the supreme source, a complete record of human history capacious enough for all the world’s peoples and chronologies, and the Hebrews and their culture had chronological priority and superiority in holiness and sophistication. Thus, Bochart discovered the great flood raging through Lucan and Plutarch, and Noah and his sons transformed into a variety of Near Eastern and Mediterranean pagan deities. Once Huet began studying Hebrew with Bochart, his energy never flagged. He thoroughly absorbed the praxis and syncretic tradition of religious scholarship Bochart represented, and he furthered it by eventually identifying every major pagan deity with Moses in the Demonstratio evangelica (1679). In 1680, he enthused about Hebrew studies when complimenting the German scholar Johannes Braun (1628–1708) for his research into Judaism. Investigate the Talmud, Huet urged, referring him to a well-traveled and erudite friend who had collected many Hebrew codices.96 Until the end of his life, Huet devoted part of each day to studying the Hebrew Bible—and he never stopped believing that anything worthy of origins had Hebrew origins, and that every biblical detail deserved thorough investigation and explication. Nearing eighty, he was still at it, filling a letter to a friend in the Netherlands with dismissive reactions to a scholar’s theories about the writing instruments of the Hebrew scribes, the ancient city of Ophir, and the location of paradise.97 Mambrun obviously objected to Bochart’s religion. He could be relatively lenient with people who deviated somewhat from Catholic orthodoxy. In January 1652, for example, he sent regards through Huet to a mutual friend whom he claimed to love despite his Jansenism, because he was erudite and Huet loved him.98 But Mambrun had scant tolerance for a Huguenot.


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While he did not devote his apostolate to refuting Protestant error, Mambrun was a Jesuit, and the order was committed to extinguishing such “heretical” beliefs. Thus, an undated letter in French probably written during the Fronde (1648–53) acknowledged Huet’s studiousness with approval, but dismissed his “conversations with Bochart.”99 Writing in December 1651, he failed to see the point of Huet’s studies with Bochart. Why this interest in languages that Mambrun considered barbarous and inelegant? Was it not all leading to an imprudent curiosity in foreign things? He reluctantly accepted Huet’s study of Hebrew, but he should flee Arabic and Chaldean. Surely, it sufficed to understand Greek and write Latin!100 Mambrun’s doubts about Huet’s desire to learn Hebrew reflected the caution and ambivalence expressed in the Ratio studiorum and the suspicion shared by other prominent Catholic religious leaders.101 Though theoretically committed to teaching all three biblical languages, the Jesuits frequently lacked qualified instructors in Hebrew.102 Moreover, the professors of sacred scripture were enjoined to deploy learning from Hebrew sources only to “defend the version [of Holy Writ] approved by the Church.” The Ratio studiorum warned them not to enhance the prestige of “rabbinical writings,” especially those composed after Jesus’s lifetime, even when they cited them to support the Vulgate or Catholic dogma. Nor should the instructors extensively discuss Jewish authors even to refute them or those Christian authors “who have trusted too much to the rabbinical writers.”103 Moreover, they should always privilege the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament miraculously produced by seventy translators during Ptolemy’s reign in the third century B.C.E. As bad as Huet’s studies with Bochart were, worse was to come. In February 1652, Huet announced nonchalantly that he would accompany Bochart on a trip to Queen Christina’s court in Sweden. If anyone could dissuade him from going, Huet admitted, Mambrun was the man, but his bags were packed.104 A letter of May 1653, posted by Huet after his return, indicates how much Huet’s blithe departure had damaged their friendship. Nevertheless, though Huet wanted to restore their relationship after his trip, he would not grovel. Thus, he admitted that he had left without saying farewell, but he reminded Mambrun that he had written while he was away. Mambrun had complained bitterly about his leave-taking, but now he was back. And to what? Quarrels and violent disapproval, as if he were still in Sweden! Surely if he were the prodigal son, Mambrun should show the spirit of the prodigal’s father. He then sought to distract his old teacher with entertaining details of the places he had visited and the people he had met.105 Mambrun roared back. Did Huet really think he was interested in these barbaric lands peopled by savages and heretics? Did Huet not see how bitterly these details reminded Mambrun of their separation? By going, Huet had shown contempt for their relationship, and Mambrun


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warned him against returning false love for true. However, he softened at last. He congratulated Huet on befriending so many learned men, and he rejoiced that Huet had decided to undertake a serious scholarly project, an edition of Origen’s biblical commentaries.106 During the spring of 1654, Huet experienced a spiritual crisis that he later identified as a turning point. His description of it appears near the midpoint of his autobiography.107 By his own account, he felt the need to delve deeply into his own conscience in an effort to redirect his spiritual energies from profane pursuits to an adoration of God. To that end, he intended to retreat to a Jesuit house to accomplish Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Of course, Mambrun was enthusiastic about Huet’s intentions. He eagerly sought to further them, firing off a letter of recommendation to the rector of the Jesuit establishment at Caen on May 6.108 Yet even as the ink was drying on Mambrun’s letter, Huet was wavering—and Mambrun knew it. He found Huet’s indecision vexing, but sought to coax him gently into following through on his resolution.109 Huet was no doubt sincere about his desire to perform the Spiritual Exercises; like a good son, he no doubt wanted to please Mambrun. However, the letter that Huet wrote in April detailing his spiritual state casts doubt on the strength of his vocation and Mambrun’s prudence in endorsing it. There Huet reminded Mambrun of the disgust with the world that he had expressed in a previous letter; now he was trying to cast off the lethargy that overwhelmed him whenever he had too much contact with humanity. He had retreated into the solitude of the countryside. His companions were a few volumes selected from his library—indeed, life was not worth living without them. Huet found little to praise either in his fellows, who wasted their lives, or in his native Caen, with its corrupt customs and contemptible devotion to letters. He continued his lament with a quotation from Lucretius: O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!

In how great perils, in what darks of life Are spent the human years, however brief!110 In closing, he assured Mambrun that he remained dedicated to his studies and that he delighted most in religious study.111 Nevertheless, the bookishness and literary self-consciousness of Huet’s description of his spiritual state suggests more love of letters than of God. So Huet retreated neither to Caen nor La Flèche, explaining in his autobiography that fiery youth, the charms of study, and the world’s seductions had enslaved his heart.112 Once burned, twice shy, Mambrun discouraged Huet when he was later suddenly seized with a desire to join the Jesuits.113 Huet and Mambrun’s relationship had weathered the most serious storms by 1654, but it was never placid. Mambrun recognized the limits of his power, but he remained deeply committed to Huet’s interests as he understood them. In September 1659, he became angry over rumors that Huet


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was about to marry. As usual, he spoke plainly: None of Huet’s friends would approve such a choice. Worse yet, everyone, even the “vulgar,” seemed to know about it.114 Huet responded with silence, prompting Mambrun to complain in his next letter how remiss Huet was in letting a month pass without some communication. Nevertheless, Mambrun also realized how much he had alienated Huet. Perhaps he should have been less harsh, Mambrun conceded in a letter written in October. Still, even if he had hurt Huet’s feelings, he did so as a vitally concerned friend. After all, as Proverbs had it, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; Although the kisses of an enemy are profuse.” He invited Huet to avenge Mambrun’s “calumny” by diligently identifying the faults in the unfinished eclogue that he enclosed.115 Beyond being a spiritual advisor, Mambrun was an intellectual mentor. He encouraged Huet to pursue worthy scholarly projects, and he frankly criticized whatever work Huet submitted to him. In an early vernacular letter, Mambrun declared his pleasure at Huet’s efforts in Greek, praising his epigrams.116 In November 1651, he wrote of his delight in Huet’s Latin poetry, but he objected to his carelessness and worried about his tendency to despair. Huet should rework his verses, so Mambrun could review them in a more perfect form.117 “Now you know I dislike your midnight lucubrations, they’re so crude and unformed,” he wrote Huet in January 1652. “Send them to me again,” he urged, “when you’ve reviewed them most diligently and in a better frame of mind.”118 Yet, as in his first letter to Huet in 1648, he balanced demanding expectations with warm support. In December 1651, he addressed Huet’s mounting discouragement with his studies. This was not a setback, Mambrun assured him, but an indication of good judgment. Only intellectual lightweights were consistently satisfied with themselves. He also advised Huet against the trap into which so many young scholars fell: taking up a project enthusiastically, then coming to hate it as the first rush of excitement dissipated. Losing intellectual steam was inevitable, and whatever had been accomplished in that initial, euphoric state would always require much reworking. Scholarship is laborious, but perseverance would lead to a splendid result.119 Mambrun did not reserve the role of intellectual censor for himself alone, and both men remained intellectually engaged with each other’s work until Mambrun’s death in October 1662. In the fall of 1651, Mambrun solicited Huet’s criticisms of some of his verse (chapter 2 discusses their poetry in more detail).120 Conservative in his literary tastes, Mambrun believed that French poets produced inferior works because of their ignorance of Aristotle’s Poetics, a lacuna he intended to fill with a treatise on epic poetry.121 Early in 1652, Huet took issue with one of Mambrun’s points: that Aristotle had faulted Homer for using a deus ex machina to resolve the action of the Odyssey.122 Huet split hairs a bit finely, but Mambrun was still eager to know his opinions, as a letter written soon after attests.


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Figure 2. Huet’s “Gatekeepers” into the Republic of Letters (early 1650s)


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“You have written nothing back about my book, or are you fed up?”123 During the winter of 1661, Mambrun thanked Huet for his suggestions as he revised the treatise for a new edition.124 In February 1661, he sent a copy to Huet with a letter in French: “A man who has seen and read nothing but Aristotle can very well lose all his Latin.” He blamed his linguistic amnesia on his new project, a commentary on Aristotle, and he solicited Huet’s advice.125 In the spring, Mambrun closely examined Huet’s book on translation, De optimo genere interpretandi; he provided his former pupil, now his colleague, with sixteen pages of comments.126 “What could you do that would be more pleasing to me?” Huet thanked him in May. “Truly this is the sweetest fruit of friendship, to be assisted by the most loving and faithful counsels.” Then he proceeded to a detailed defense of all his intellectual choices.127 Besides candid criticism, scholars furthered each other’s projects by introducing them to other learned friends. Thus, Mambrun facilitated Huet’s entrée into the intellectual milieus of Paris and, in the process, helped him lay the basis for his own network. In this, Mambrun acted as a “gatekeeper” for the Republic of Letters, a function that nearly every citizen, including Huet, performed. During the 1650s, Mambrun, Bochart, and Moisant de Brieux acted as Huet’s chief gatekeepers, opening up a world of contacts. Some of the connections in figure 2 are speculative, because Huet rarely identified the people who made his contacts possible. We should note, too, the overlap between gatekeepers’ networks, which could serve an aspiring intellectual like Huet very well. Moisant de Brieux (discussed in chapter 2) could further Huet’s interests with the Duc de Montausier (1610–90), who became Huet’s most important patron. Moisant de Brieux had also befriended Gerard and Isaac Vossius, father and son, in the Netherlands long before Bochart, who was also friends with the two men, and Huet ventured north. He could second Mambrun’s recommendation of Huet to Jean Chapelain and Gilles Ménage. Once a new contact had been established, he (occasionally she) might reinforce the efforts of a primary gatekeeper or introduce Huet to entirely new people. Ménage, for example, became very important in mediating Huet’s contacts with Parisian women, and Rapin helped Huet establish relations with Guillaume de Lamoignon (1617–77), the first president of the Parlement of Paris who sponsored intellectual gatherings at his home in Bâville. In short, figure 2 can only suggest the complexity and density of the interactions that went into the construction of an individual’s intellectual network. As an established scholar of good repute, Mambrun enjoyed excellent relationships with many learned men, religious and lay, and he could vouch for Huet’s character and abilities. He did so with the many Jesuit érudits, old and young, living in the capital. These included Jacques Sirmond, then in his nineties; Huet discovered that his zeal for studies had not flagged and his reputation for kindness was well deserved. Huet repaired to another member of the old guard, Denis Petau, as if to the


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Pythian oracle, convincing him to set aside his immense and final work, De theologicibus dogmatibus, to discuss poetry. A younger generation—Philippe Labbé, François Vavasseur, René Rapin, Gabriel Cossart, and Jean Commire—became partners in poetics. Huet renewed his acquaintance with Etienne-Agard Deschamps, formerly an instructor at Caen’s collège, who had since endeavored to prove that Jansenism derived from Calvinism. He met Jean Garnier, too, who gave him lessons in the kind of careful work that would serve him well as Origen’s editor.128 Good manners demanded acknowledgment of kindnesses received, so Huet probably wrote many thank-you notes like the one he sent to Sirmond in May 1650. Sirmond probably found its self-consciousness amusing—indeed, he might have mentally paused for breath to get through Huet’s first sentence, loosely translated as: Illustrious Sirmond, as you recently received me, a mere provincial and very much your junior, not only graciously, but kindly; and from my first visit shared your learned work with me and fortified my inexperience with the most salutary counsel; and, after but a few days admitted me into the company of your most intimate friends, I would be unworthy and ungrateful if I failed to acknowledge the extraordinary favor that you showed me with some small sign at least of the pleasant memory of your kindness.129

The very senior Sirmond might have been charmed, too, by the young Huet’s offer to transcribe the “ancient” inscriptions, coins, and manuscripts available in Caen. However awkward, Huet’s effort shows that he was learning the rituals and rhetoric of the Republic of Letters—and how opening one door could lead to opening another. Mambrun was also friendly with secular érudits and learned noblemen. These included the Comte d’Avaux and other members of the de Mesmes family, whose hôtel in Paris housed one of the city’s best libraries. Huet was particularly interested in cultivating two of Mambrun’s friends, Gilles Ménage and Jean Chapelain. Mambrun was not averse to furthering these connections, though he found Huet’s ambition off-putting.130 In an undated letter, he acknowledged both Huet’s desire to befriend Chapelain and Ménage and Huet’s awareness of Mambrun’s reluctance to press the matter too zealously. Still, Huet wanted to meet them, so he would arrange an introduction, and “they will love you on my account.” Nevertheless, Mambrun repeated an earlier warning he had given about behavior unbecoming to the cause of the Muses. He adjusted some lines from the prologue of the third book of Phaedrus’s fables to stress a message of selfless service. In Phaedrus’s words, “You must change your aspirations and your way of life.” As Mambrun had renounced marriage in order to serve the Muses, Huet, “blind but with beautiful eyes,” had to renounce striving for favor and his preference for pleasant over learned labors.131


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Beyond Caen Bochart also helped Huet enter the intellectual community of Paris. He probably recommended Huet to his friend Gabriel Naudé, Cardinal Mazarin’s librarian, who offered advice on acquiring a library and warned him about cunning booksellers.132 Bochart also probably sponsored Huet’s entrée into the erudite gatherings of the Dupuy brothers, which met in the king’s library. One of the oldest and most august of Paris’s intellectual circles, its attendees were as diverse as the topics discussed; if conversation flagged, there was always “on a table, a nearly complete collation of manuscripts prepared for an edition of a Greek text, or a copy of a text of Flavius Josephus, an old diploma, or a charter.”133 An intellectual crossroads, the Académie Putéane was a link to other Parisian learned societies and salons; through its hosts’ correspondence, it connected the capital to the provinces and foreign lands. Many participants, including the hosts, were of an older generation that “regarded itself as the successors of the Erasmuses and the Scaligers”; in contrast to salon politesse, it offered an aggressive form of intellectual exchange that, like a “cruel light,” exposed all error.134 As important as Bochart’s introductions into Parisian learned circles were, nothing was more significant than his invitation to Huet to accompany him to Queen Christina’s court in Sweden. Initially, Huet declined, opining to a friend that Sweden’s crags and rudeness compared poorly with Italy’s nearly perpetual spring and its many monuments of antiquity. Bochart replied by evoking Scaliger’s Batavia, the Netherlands’ many illustrious scholars and splendid cities, the vestiges of Gothic antiquity to be found in Denmark, and the promise that such a journey held for Huet’s future career.135 Persuaded, Huet followed in the footsteps of many young men whose peregrinatio academica took them to northern rather than southern climes during the seventeenth century, reflecting an emerging stereotype of Italian intellectual decline.136 Ultimately, Sweden disappointed Huet. The queen had withdrawn from her studies on the advice of her physician, whom Huet depicted in sinister colors. Christina was odd even in an eccentric intellectual universe, and she apparently aspired to include savants in her cabinet of curiosities.137 Descartes died there in 1650, and Gabriel Naudé visited briefly after the dispersal of Mazarin’s library during the Fronde. Huet apparently struck her as collectible, and she would not permit him to leave until he promised to return. In the Commentarius, Huet described her as having a weak and pliant disposition that made her dependent on others’ judgments.138 Although he suspected that she might abdicate, he did not foresee her conversion to Catholicism, which would shock Protestants and please Catholics in 1654. She did share her well-known horror of marriage with Huet, vehemently advising him against it.


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In the final analysis, Christina interested Huet less than her impressive library. Indeed, visiting libraries was a priority of any peregrinatio academica. Christina’s had been increased by the booty that Gustavus Adolphus brought back from Germany, enriched with the library of Gerard Johann Vossius, and would be further augmented with volumes from Denis Petau’s and Mazarin’s libraries. Huet profited long enough from her hospitality to transcribe Origen’s commentary on St. Matthew. In the prince’s library in Denmark, he found a manuscript of the ancient author on astrology, Vettius Valens, which he mentioned sometimes in later correspondence and which he probably intended to edit.139 In Hamburg, Huet worked in the library overseen by Peter Lambecius, whom he had already met in Paris. A second priority of the pregrinatio academica was meeting érudits. Doors opened to Huet everywhere thanks to Bochart, especially in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which hosted the greatest concentration of érudits. What made the Netherlands Europe’s warehouse and its intellectual crossroads? The answer lies partly in a flourishing publishing industry that profited greatly from French censorship.140 Second, the universities of the young federation aggressively recruited the best and the brightest. Many foreign scholars were persuaded to make their homes there, including Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, and Claude Saumaise. Descartes found a temporary home, and his philosophy found its earliest adherents in the universities (chapter 5). In Amsterdam, Huet also renewed his acquaintance with David Blondel, whom he had already met in Paris and who had just assumed the chair of Gerard Vossius. Huet’s future friend Johannes Graevius remained in Utrecht despite the beckoning of universities in his native Germany. The intellectual wealth of the Netherlands was further enriched by individuals fleeing persecution in their native lands. Menasseh Ben Israel, whose parents had fled persecution in the Iberian peninsula, debated with Huet in the temple at Amsterdam for three days, unwittingly inspiring Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1679). Huet’s future editor, Christophe Sandius, immigrated after his religious views got him into trouble in Prussia. Pierre Bayle paid the price for his confessional vacillation with exile in Rotterdam after 1681; many coreligionists joined him after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Of course, the Netherlands had its own distinguished scholars, such as Isaac Vossius, the son of the celebrated Gerard; originally, he was supposed to accompany Huet and Bochart to Sweden, and he later squared off against Huet on a question of optics (chapter 4). If the Netherlands was the promised land of erudition, Leiden was its Jerusalem, the university its temple, and its scholars the high priests of the intellectual arts Huet desired to master. There philology was the master discipline of history, politics, and eloquence; indeed, “philology, whether classical or oriental, practiced as the science of sources, was held to be the nourishing mother of the other disciplines, as much and par excellence of


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theology as of medicine, mathematics, and law.”141 A typical activity of scholars schooled in this paradigm was preparing editions of ancient (or at least very old) texts. This process involved restoring a text as much as possible to its original form, perhaps making a translation, then providing a critical apparatus to help the reader understand it. An editor had to know the original language of the work and the cultural and historical context of both the language and the work itself. Otherwise, he could not accurately emend or translate, because he would not understand what the author had meant to say. So this intellectual endeavor tended to militate against specialization. An editor had to be familiar with whatever topic the author chose to discuss—indeed, he often needed to know more than the author had. He had to possess eruditio, copious and diverse knowledge—though the scholar with the well-stocked mind sometimes abused his reader’s patience. Finally, the editor needed good judgment, because “most textual problems are soluble only through hard thinking, not the mechanical collating of manuscripts.”142 Thus, Huet’s harshest criticism of the work of other scholars was always to condemn their judgment as rash. Huet’s first scholarly project, an edition of Origen’s biblical commentaries, illustrates well the chief features of the scholarship sketched above.143 It began when Huet leafed through that manuscript in Christina’s library. In it, Huet found an eminently worthwhile scholarly project. Humanist scholars in Renaissance Italy had revived patristic as well as classical pagan texts;144 during the seventeenth century, French scholars and publishers made Paris the “uncontested capital of Patrology.”145 Yet Huet’s choice was risky, too, given Origen’s reputation for heterodoxy and the fact that scholars looked to the fathers for support of their positions in doctrinal debates (chapter 5). Nevertheless, the dolorous state of Origen’s works amply justified the intellectual rescue mission that Huet undertook. After returning to France, he mobilized his intellectual network to find as much manuscript material as possible. He wrote to Ismael Boulliau (chapter 4) and Jacques Dupuy, for example, about manuscripts in the king’s library, and to Ménage, who mediated with a possible source in Rome.146 Collating existing manuscript sources and, in this case, existing translations was hardly the end of Huet’s editorial tasks. When Origen did not identify his authorities, Huet tracked them down. For example, when Origen commented on John 4:22, “Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship; for salvation is of the Jews,” Huet wrote a mini-treatise that drew on sources from Jerome to John Selden (1584–1654), discussing whether the ancient Jews had a cult of angels and summarizing what was known about worship of the moon and sun in ancient civilizations.147 Years of such labor resulted in two volumes of parallel Greek texts and Latin translations, copious annotations, indexes, and a lengthy examination of Origen’s opinions on fourteen theological questions. As the years passed,


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Huet no doubt frequently recalled Mambrun’s comment about the cooling of a young scholar’s enthusiasm for a great project, and he frequently complained about the Origen project in letters. In January 1662, after nearly a decade of labor, he characterized it to Ménage as “an ungrateful work that steals the finest hours of my life.”148 Such disenchantment was unimaginable, though, when Huet visited Leiden and met the university’s luminaries. Unfortunately, his account in the autobiography is more gossipy than scholarly. He sought out Jacob Golius, the famed Orientalist; he was especially impressed by J. Friedrich Gronovius. In contrast, Daniel Heinsius was a disappointment. Huet found little to remind him of Scaliger’s once-brilliant student (though he later thought quite highly of Heinsius’s son, Nicolas). He described in repulsive terms Marcus Boxhorn, professor of eloquence, and, after Heinsius’s death, chair in history and politics. But Boxhorn was of the Heinsius faction, and Heinsius and Claude Saumaise (1588–1653) were brouillés in one of those legendary disputes that sometimes disturbed the peace of the Republic of Letters. In contrast, Huet could not speak highly enough of Saumaise, a sentimental favorite of the trip. A youthful prodigy in Greek and Latin poetry, Saumaise had studied with Isaac Casaubon in Paris and converted to Protestantism at the University of Heidelberg. He made his reputation with a work on Roman imperial history and earned the enmity of the French clergy with works of religious controversy. Courted by Venice, London, and the Hague, he finally accepted the offer of the university at Leiden, rebuffing Richelieu’s and Mazarin’s efforts to lure him back to France.149 Yet pride and truculence tarnished his reputation. He could not live without engaging some illustrious enemy in combat, wrote one contemporary, and he was only satisfied with crushing an opponent.150 Despite Saumaise’s reputation for irascibility, the senior scholar welcomed the junior Huet warmly. Responding to Huet’s thank-you note posted from Sweden, Saumaise claimed with the understatement typical of the Republic of Letters that he had only done his duty—and that only moderately well. He also expressed the hope (unfulfilled) that he might join Huet in Sweden so they could leaf through the volumes in the royal library together.151 When Huet arrived in Leiden, Saumaise was quarreling in print with Milton over the English regicide. Saumaise’s second in his battle with Milton was Alexander Morus (1616–70), who became another favorite of Huet’s and who was precisely the kind of person to give Mambrun nightmares. Being a Huguenot pastor was bad enough, but add to that Milton’s well-founded accusations of moral turpitude and lechery.152 Despite impressive intellectual gifts and skill as a preacher, Morus’s arrogance and predilection for the fair sex repeatedly got him into trouble. Indeed, when Huet visited Leiden, his behavior with Saumaise’s maid was creating a scandal. Whatever his failings, Morus and Huet became fast friends, trading neo-Latin poems and


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speculating about Huet’s career prospects in a conversation Huet recorded in his autobiography. It was obvious that Claude Saumaise would not live long. Yet who would succeed the great Scaliger’s successor? “What if you yourself?” Morus asked. Huet laughed, but Morus was serious. So was Huet, who objected that, even if he were intellectually equal to the task, the university would probably not hire a Catholic, and he would never convert. Morus dismissed Huet’s worries about confession. Such differences were settled easily enough: Do what you please in private, be discreet in public, and do not start controversies.153 Such confessional suppleness credits a contemporary’s judgment of Morus as a man of “of learning and genius, but little religion or judgment. He is unpolished, ambitious, restless, fickle, bold, presumptuous and irresolute.”154 It is no exaggeration to say that this peregrinatio academica launched Huet’s intellectual career. Its good effects lasted longer than Huet and Bochart’s friendship, which collapsed in 1666 in a bitter dispute over Origen.155 It established Huet as a young man worth watching long before he had published a single scholarly work—indeed, before he began a serious scholarly project. It secured him the support of established scholars in Europe’s most important intellectual center. It laid the foundation for a Dutch branch of his intellectual network, one that endured for decades despite the death of friends and the disruptions of war and that continued to provide information on trends and publishing opportunities beyond France into the 1700s.

Amo, amas, amat When Huet looked back on the period during which he was establishing himself in the Republic of Letters, he emphasized that he sought friendship from the “princes of letters”; he noted with satisfaction, “I was loved by many.”156 Friendship was the Republic of Letter’s emotional infrastructure. Knowledge circulated because its citizens loved knowledge and they loved each other.157 Like erudition and linguistics, the connections that intellectuals forged with each other set them apart from the “vulgar” and frequently provided a respite from the social and political realities governing a citizen’s daily life. In the republic, friendship was a relationship that men entered into freely as equals and whose obligations they willingly assumed. These bonds made them, in Pierre Bayle’s words, all “of as good a lineage . . . all equal . . . all brothers, like the children of Apollo.” 158 In Mambrun’s words, intellectual friendship was a bond formed between learned men that, as “experience teaches us,” was stronger than any based on blood.159 For a young man alienated from relatives by education and intellectual aspiration, it created a “‘family’ of his own choice,” one with a distinctive form of sociability and one whose rituals and rhetoric constituted an ars amoris.160


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Scholars have surveyed the classical sources of the ideal of intellectual friendship and described its appropriation and dissemination by early modern writers.161 Arising from a natural inclination, intellectual friendship was honest and disinterested. “It is not the case, therefore, that friendship attends upon advantage,” wrote Cicero in De amicitia, “but, on the contrary, that advantage attends upon friendship.”162 The Republic of Letters adapted classical ideals to its own needs, however, retaining “all the classical phraseology of Roman political friendship transformed into a spiritual system.”163 It was virtuous, because true friendship could only exist between virtuous men. Friends shared everything, according to Erasmus—even their souls, wrote Pierre Charron (1541–1603), which were so “submerged and drowned in each other that, like liquids thoroughly combined, they are incapable of separating, nor would they wish to.”164 The utility of intellectual friendship in the Republic of Letters is obvious. My discussion has demonstrated that one function of correspondence was creating a space for work. To truly become a space for collaborative endeavor, scholars needed more than friends who conscientiously transcribed manuscripts in distant libraries and relayed news about recent publications; they needed honest judgments and frank opinions. Ideally, citizens of the republic were trustworthy; they represented themselves and communicated honestly their intentions and opinions. It speaks volumes when Huet wrote to his nephew in 1702 after decades spent at court and in Parisian society, “I have lived long in the realm of dissimulation.” And volumes more when he scolded him for keeping secrets, because he thereby deprived Huet “of one of the greatest sweetnesses in life, which is to be able to unmask and open up.”165 Intensely hierarchical and competitive, French society demanded self-fashioning, the skillful preparation of a face to meet other faces, continuous maneuvering to secure advantage, and the concealment of ambition beneath a fig leaf of modesty. Chapelain was not just engaging in self-deprecating charm when he assured Huet in 1658 that he would repay the gift of his poems “with all that is good in me—which is to say, my sincere friendship, the only good I esteem in myself that is not subject to fortune.”166 In short, the republic offered possibilities for emotional transparency that contrasted greatly with the murky waters of patronage navigated by Huet and his friends.167 Often the line between friendship and patronage blurred, however. Friends in the republic performed services for each other that often resembled those of a patron for a client. The person who could offer exacting criticism frequently could put in a good word at the right moment or pass along a poem or a book to a potential patron. It is no coincidence that several of Huet’s friends worked as editors on the Ad usum Delphini, the teaching texts produced under his direction for the dauphin’s education in the 1670s. As Cicero noted, though, benefits flowed from friendship, not the other


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way around—and Huet’s friends knew the difference. In February 1658, for example, Chapelain graciously accepted Huet’s praise and gratitude, agreeing with his disdain for flatterers. But he also admonished Huet to be more restrained in future letters. “[R]emember that, in treating with me, we both have the souls of philosophers, and that it is beneath us to speak the language of courtiers and to present our true opinions under the cover of false or excessive appearances.”168 A few years later, Rapin was hurt by Huet’s offers of service and protestations of loyalty after Rapin had successfully lobbied on Huet’s behalf with Colbert. Surely their friendship transcended all that! Rapin forcefully reminded Huet that ostentatious professions of friendship undercut the confidence one could have in it, and he begged Huet never to speak to him that way again.169 Clearly the ideal of intellectual friendship was profoundly gendered, a fact with serious consequences for relationships with women who had intellectual aspirations (chapter 3). The “maleness” of intellectual friendship naturally followed from the fact that advanced training was available only in exclusively male establishments. Indeed, these milieus frequently incubated a scholar’s first and sometimes most enduring friendships. Classical models for friendship between young men appealingly combined passion and high adventure. Boys could learn together about how Orestes and Pylades competed in Scythia for the right to die on Diana’s altar, seeking to save the other’s life; even on such savage shores, Ovid wrote, “the name of friendship can stir barbarous hearts.”170 They could read of Macentes’ rejection of his friend’s thanks for bringing him his bride: You speak . . . as if you and I were different persons, when you thank me for what I have done. It is as if my left hand should say to my right: Thank you for tending my wound; thank you for your generous sympathy with my pain. That would be no more absurd than for us—who have long been united, and have become (so far as such a thing may be) one flesh—to make such ado because one part of us has done its duty by the whole; the limb is but serving its own interest in promoting the welfare of the body.171

Such sources suggested the priority of friends over family, as when Abauchas spurned the rebuke that he had saved his friend Gyndanes, rather than his wife and children, from a fire: “I can beget other children easily enough . . . but it would be long before I got such another friend as Gyndanes.”172 Yet little in this scholarly description prepares the reader for the ubiquitous and frequently passionate rhetoric of affection in Huet’s and other scholars’ correspondence. Such rhetoric is generally absent from the contemporary treatises that codified definitions and norms and which scholars today usually consult when analyzing intellectual friendship.173 Just what did this rhetoric mean to the person writing and the person receiving a letter? As already noted, letter writing was a paradoxical activity: The ideal of “naturalness” only resulted


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from hard work and art. Letters thus give conflicting impressions of transparency and opacity, spontaneity and convention, and the heat of some effusions can be disconcerting to modern readers.174 When it comes to establishing the “true” nature of the relationships they document, letters all too often confirm what readers think they already know about the correspondent’s motivation. The difficulty increases when the question of sexuality is involved.175 In the end, interpreting the language of friendship, like interpreting that of patronage, requires considering evidence beyond what appears on the page.176 In Greenblatt’s words, “what the early modern auditor listened for in these rhetorical formulae was the point of what was being said in a given circumstance rather than merely the sense and reference of the utterance itself.”177 Thus, our interpretations of the formulae will be imperfect to the degree that our knowledge of circumstances is incomplete. Here I offer a survey of some of the “love language” in Huet’s letters, which ranged from respectfully restrained to impassioned. It is unnecessary to speculate on Huet’s sexual orientation or activities. Huet and his friends did not write or read eroticism as we do, and eroticism and romance frequently exist without sex. Finally, understanding Huet’s relationships with men cannot be isolated from understanding his relationships with women (chapter 3). Mambrun’s letters were particularly rich in affectionate effusions. Indeed, he seems to have contrived evermore extravagant expressions. “My Peter, I love you more than my own eyes.” “Although I would not doubt your love for me, nevertheless, that reminder of your love delighted me exceedingly . . . Our men here deny what the Lycean philosophers maintained, that is, that anyone can be loved more by another than he loves himself. Certainly I believe that this is true of no one more than it is of me. My love for you proves the falseness of their opinion.” “Beware of thinking, my Peter, that there is any mortal man who either loves you more or who desires more to be loved by you.” Huet responded in kind, if less frequently and with more restraint. “Rare indeed are those letters you write me, yet nevertheless sweet,” he wrote in 1654, “They signify that my love for you is welcome, and they testify with more and more signs your benevolence towards me.” It is a significant moment in their friendship when, in 1659, Huet addresses Mambrun with the same endearment his teacher had long applied to him— “mi Petre”—a symmetry arising from coincidence, but signifying far more.178 For decades, Huet’s friends, Catholic and Protestant, French and foreign, received variations in Latin and in the vernacular on the themes of love and friendship. Huet assured Ménage of his affection repeatedly in the early years of their friendship: “I would be the most ungrateful man in the world if I did not love you with all my heart.”179 “I am overjoyed by the assurances you give me of your friendship. For my part, I will forget nothing—cares, duties, services, fidelity, sincerity, constancy—in order to cultivate and increase it.”180 “Love me, and you will be doing me justice.”181


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Huet wrote to the Huguenot scholar Tanneguy Le Fèvre in 1671: “I love you with good reason, most learned man, because we are from the same pays . . . and because we delight in the same studies.”182 In the same year, he wrote the Jesuit poet Charles de La Rue: “It has already been a long time since I expressed, first, my praise of your surpassing erudition and your remarkable poetic talent, then my love [for you].”183 “I love you with good reason, my Ewald,” Huet wrote to a Dutch friend in 1681, “because you express yourself with equal candor about matters concerning me and those concerning yourself.”184 “I marvel at how long it took that expression of [your] sweetest love for me to arrive,” Huet wrote to Peter Francius in 1698, but assured him that the delay only increased the pleasure Huet took in Francius’s expressions of regard.185 Emmanuel Bury has remarked, “in reading Huet, one sometimes gets the impression that, for him, it was a question of becoming learned so that he could become the friend of other illustrious savants.”186 I would go further: Huet became learned so that he would be loved. This is not to credit all these emotional outpourings with heartfelt sincerity. Huet was always canny with Le Fèvre, for example, for he had his eye on the prize of convincing Le Fèvre to abandon Calvinism.187 Moreover, however ubiquitous such expressions of affection are in Huet’s correspondence, he did not use them in precisely the same way with everyone. Rather, he calibrated them to be appropriate to the relationship. Finally, even his most conventional expressions attest to a sincere belief in the absolute value of friendship, if not to the depth of a particular relationship. Love language included nagging friends about their responsibilities. Many letters began with explaining why the correspondent had not written sooner as if to forestall the recipient’s complaint. Scoldings were frequent, too. Most often, a friend violated the law of reciprocity by not writing often enough. Many of these complaints seem pro forma; others developed into spats. Mambrun frequently complained of Huet’s failure to write, beginning one letter with Cicero’s chastisement, “I think you must be a little ashamed at this being the third letter inflicted on you before I have a page or a syllable from you.”188 Huet responded to Morus’s complaints in July 1653 about Huet’s inconsiderateness, thoughtlessness, and his too-late, too-brief, and too-cold letters. “Oh, how truly, hugely affable!” Huet fumed back. “And thus you attack a friend who has done nothing to merit it, who is otherwise blameless?”189 In November 1661, Ménage similarly rebuked Huet for hypersensitivity and extravagant expectations. Huet had accused him of not sending him a letter by the next post, “as if I had committed the greatest crime against friendship in the world, as if I had stopped loving you.” Yet Ménage had written—he had a witness to prove it. Was it impossible for Huet to imagine some perfectly reasonable circumstance, such as illness, that might have prevented his writing? Was that not


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more likely than believing he had stopped loving him? “[O]nce and for all, I will say to you that you will always be wrong when you complain to me about friendship, as I am impeccable in that regard. That whining humor is appropriate to love, but not to friendship.”190 Ménage’s closing comment must have stung, for it implied that Huet was conducting himself like a lover with a woman rather than as a man with a male friend. Yet, if the love appropriate to intellectual friendship was manly, that did not mean men did not fall in love. How else should we characterize Huet’s breathless letter to Morus on his return from Holland? “Since I was torn from your embrace, not a day, not an hour passes when I do not think about you.” Nothing, Huet claimed, gave him greater joy than recalling their activities in Leiden, and none was more precious than Morus’s ministrations during Huet’s lengthy illness. Yet even in this most intimate communication, Huet summoned up a classical referent: “O evenings, and suppers fit for the gods!”191 The quotation comes from a satire in which Horace evoked a country feast where friends ate and drank copiously. They conversed freely, too, but not about trivial things. Rather, they discussed those things it was harmful not to know: “whether wealth or virtue makes men happy, whether self-interest or uprightness leads us to friendship, what is the nature of the good and what is its highest form.”192 Consider an exchange in 1672 between Johannes Georg Graevius (1632– 1703) and Huet. At the time, they were both middle-aged men. As mentioned above, Graevius had emigrated from Germany to the Netherlands. There he devoted his scholarly life to preparing editions, and he was an admirable citizen of the Republic of Letters—respectable, assiduous, peaceful, and modest.193 He composed his letters in a fine, if sometimes overblown Latin style (to be expected, perhaps, from an expert on Cicero), and they are among the most beautifully written letters Huet received. In November 1672, he began one by cataloguing all the reasons why he had long admired Huet: a poem Huet had written in imitation of Lucretius; Huet’s book on translation and his edition of Origen’s commentaries; the high regard of Graevius’s learned friends for Huet. Admiration had become love, and he could no longer conceal feelings obvious to his friends, if difficult to express. He hoped that Huet would accept him into the company of “those who love you”; as a pledge of his fidelity, he sent a copy of his edition of Suetonius.194 Huet graciously responded that Graevius had simply declared what he himself had long desired. The declaration of love was new, but their love had begun long ago and grown with the years. Together they could hope that nothing would sever that precious connection.195 Nothing did until Graevius died in 1703.


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Chapter 2

THE LIVES OF POEMS, 1653–63 Mais scaves vous bien, Monsieur, que les Rois mesme . . . tout puissans qu’ils sont, ne sçauroient faire un Poëte? —Moisant de Brieux

Listening to Poetry Johannes Georg Graevius remembered well his first experience of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s poetry. In the early 1650s, he was attending a scholarly gathering at the Musaeum in Amsterdam. Alexander Morus presented a long poem in the style of Lucretius, claiming that no one had ever imitated the ancient poet’s style as perfectly. When Morus finished, Graevius exclaimed how wonderful it was that Morus had shared these poetic riches—an excited demonstration of good taste that perhaps convinced the assembly to accept Graevius into their company. Graevius also pledged to seek permission to publish it so others could savor its pleasures. The pledge took decades to fulfill, but he befriended Huet in the meantime. Huet’s letters often included gifts of poems.1 Huet composed Latin poetry from his teens into his eighties—odes, elegies, and eclogues as a young man, hymns and paraphrases of the Psalms as an aging bishop. Huet’s subjects ranged from the prosaic to the sublime, from tea drinking to the chemistry of salt to the decline of learning. Scholars have generally neglected these poems,2 but the effort Huet devoted to them and the pride he took in them suggests the wisdom of taking a closer look. Indeed, he very much wanted posterity to acknowledge his poetic gifts, so much so that a vernacular poet accused him of amour-propre when it came to his poetry.3 Thus, Huet included several poems in his autobiography (nearly all of which were omitted from the nineteenth-century French translation), and he was anything but indifferent to the publication of several editions of his poems before he died. The poems interest us first because they often provide biographical details and evidence of attitudes that counter the image Huet projected in his autobiography. They also yield insights into how a young man could further his intellectual career in seventeenth-century France. Poems did 45


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much to establish Huet’s intellectual reputation before he published a single scholarly work, and they helped him to secure patronage. Most important, neo-Latin poetry—its composition and reception—was a social practice as well as a scholarly and creative activity. Poems were currency in the republic’s gift economy; they initiated and strengthened friendships. They carried emotional messages, too, although these were frequently as cloaked in self-conscious classicizing as they were in learned correspondence. As social acts, poems thus assumed meanings beyond their explicit subjects, meanings that depended on the relationship between poet and recipient. Neo-Latin poetry also illustrates the republic’s devotion to collaborative effort and its commitment to the cultural legacies of antiquity—indeed, Huet and his friends proudly continued the revival of classical poetry in Renaissance Italy.4 It reinforced group solidarity, because citizens used it to celebrate and memorialize each other’s achievements. Demanding a mastery of ancient poetic forms and classical subjects, it underscored the republic’s exclusivity and, as an overwhelmingly male pastime, the gendered nature of its sociability.5 In short, Huet’s poems are social documents and their analysis illuminates how intellectual life was lived in his expanding Republic of Letters.6 I begin with the Jesuits, because composing Latin poetry was a key element of their pedagogy and because it enabled them to reach out to the wider community. Indeed, despite the advances of the vernacular, Latin poetry still figured prominently in French cultural life during the second half of the seventeenth century. This chapter also explores the functioning of two important subgroups of Huet’s Republic of Letters, both of which owed their existence to some degree to a passion for poetizing. Finally, during the 1660s, Huet’s ambitions as a poet and as a rising young intellectual happily converged with a royal propaganda program designed to present Louis’s regime as Augustan.

Becoming a Poet “There are those who instruct children in such a manner that it appears they have no other goal than to make poets,” the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld once groused about the Jesuits.7 He had a point, but criticism only stiffened the Jesuit commitment to Latin poetry. Jesuit pedagogues believed that there was no more effective technique for helping a student learn and understand Latin. Latin poetry was the “soul of eloquence,” while Latin versification could “mold taste, elevate the spirit, and fortify the mind’s vigor.”8 They had the Ancients on their side, of course. Quintilian considered poetry indispensable in developing rhetorical skills, the goal of the first cycle of the Jesuit curriculum. Poetic instruction also developed those intellectual habits generally


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encouraged by the Jesuit curriculum: hard work, collective endeavor, emulation of the Ancients, respect for contemporary authorities, and the development of good judgment. Yet Latin poetry, like all the legacies of antiquity, posed problems for Christian pedagogy, as Antonio Possevino made clear in Bibliotheca selecta.9 He considered poetry a most useful pedagogical tool, particularly for training memory. It nourished the adolescent intellect. Its variety attracted students’ attention and helped them to memorize it. Indeed, poetry that charmed the mind was unforgettable. It was also appropriate for praising God’s works and for providing a respite from cares. Yet even the pagans knew that poetry could lead to moral and public disorder. Lucretius’s De rerum natura contained the most subtle and elegant treatments of natural philosophy, for example, yet also much that an adolescent should never hear: the poet’s invocation of Venus, passages contradicting Christian doctrines such as the soul’s immortality and divine providence, and absurd opinions about the creation of the world through the random collision of atoms. Still, both the Latin and Greek church fathers had diligently studied the pagan poets, not to speak more elegantly, but to confute pagan error. Like the Hebrews absconding with the Egyptians’ treasure and David seizing Goliath’s armor, they found evidence in classical texts, for example, that the one, true God had been revealed to the Greeks. Thus, there was no need to exile the pagans from the Jesuit collèges—an impossible task, anyway, because their work provided the best models of Latinity. Once again, prudent expurgation was critical. Thus, Possevino concluded with a list of “safe” poets, some Jesuit, who wrote on sacred topics and avoided obscenity. A half century later, Pierre Mambrun’s treatise on epic poetry revealed the tenacity of the problem—but also the continuing Jesuit commitment to Latin poetry. Mambrun could not wholly disagree with anyone who condemned poetry as the shameful offspring of voluptuousness. Who would not ridicule Epicurus, a man utterly abandoned to pleasure? Thus, Mambrun desired to exile all those poets who might corrupt morals. Yet he would never accept that hedonism was the dominant impulse in all poetry, much less in epic. Poetry served philosophic and sacred ends, leading the reader to truth and virtue, and epic was the school of men. Nor did edifying verse have to be rebarbative. As a physician used honey to coax his patient to take bitter medicine, so the poet borrowed the Muses’ charms to make unappealing lessons palatable.10 The poet who skillfully combined delight and utility, as Horace advised, would both please and instruct his reader.11 At the end of the seventeenth century, Jouvancy similarly emphasized the instrumentality of poetry. A liberal art that “should give only the best examples in order to mold moral character,” it revealed virtue, pristine and unsullied.12 Huet probably received his first lessons in versification from Despautère’s grammar. Its tenth book presented the basics, demonstrating the rules with


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examples from classical poets and specially composed didactic verses that were clearly meant to be read aloud (the droning of generations of schoolboys is a terrifying thought). Having absorbed Despautère’s basics, Huet might have advanced to the more sophisticated Reformata poeseos institutio (1624) by the Jesuit poet and pedagogue, Jacob Pontanus. Quoting Horace in his opening section, “Whether a poet is born or made,” Pontanus adopted a more discursive approach that always relied on ancient authority. Pontanus knew that he could not compensate for a lack of natural talent. Nevertheless, he could provide instruction in “Art,” that “most certain leader,” that would prevent the poet from giving offense and enable him to perfect whatever gifts Nature had given him. In other words, becoming a poet required hard work, and Pontanus judged anyone who thought otherwise both imprudent and impudent.13 Pontanus recommended six exercises that the aspiring poet could apply to any text. Rewrite it in different words or in a different poetic form. Treat the matter more concisely, then more copiously. Transform a poem into an oration. Translate a passage from Greek into Latin or Latin into Greek, an exercise that taught the expressive capacities and limitations of each language. Change the poem’s meter and genre. Play with the poet’s sense, as if grafting new shoots onto a tree, but so skillfully that no one could detect the additions. Pontanus advised the poet to imitate only the best authors in his chosen genre.14 Imitatio was never supposed to be mechanical and slavish, though. Pontanus worked two conventional metaphors to illustrate that imitation was an organic process. He recalled Seneca’s advice to imitate the bees, which flew from flower to flower seeking nectar to make honey; developing individual capacities similarly depended on choice and skillful combination. Second, imitation was like digestion. The mind was nourished much like the body. Undigested food sat heavy on the stomach, but once transformed, it passed readily into the blood. In other words, through imitation, the student absorbed ancient models so thoroughly into his mental structures that he created with and through them.15 Yet Pontanus admitted that, even after the aspiring poet studied the best models, adopted the genre most agreeable to him, and found an environment conducive to composition, he still lacked a crucial element: judgment. “Judgment is the eye of the mind,” Pontanus opined, “without which even those with sight see nothing and, as it were, dance in the shadows.”16 He recalled Horace’s remark that poets know what they want, yet miss the mark, ending up with monsters instead of wonders—dolphins in trees, and pigs in the ocean.17 Judgment seemed more a gift of nature than a product of art, Pontanus admitted. Ultimately, when an individual’s wit and judgment proved lacking, he had to seek advice from more learned and experienced men, neither refusing their counsels nor blushing at their correction. So much for theory. In practice, when it came to training poets, the results of the Jesuits’ efforts could be worse than mediocre. Evidence suggests that


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grown men frequently recalled with horror their efforts at Latin composition.18 Yet leaving Jesuit poetics with an impression of dullness is distorting. The culture of neo-Latin poetry in the Jesuit collèges was frequently lively, extroverted, and sometimes extravagant. Even a mediocre student probably found it hard to resist the excitement of a theatrical production. Indeed, the Jesuit pedagogue Jean Croiset (1656–1738) argued that even dull students might suddenly shine by participating in such activities.19 In their theatrical productions, the Jesuits presented classical culture not as moribund, but lively, entertaining, and relevant to contemporary social concerns. It also exposed students and audiences alike “to an ideology that encompassed religion, theatre, and the sciences.”20 Featuring tragedies and comedies composed in Latin verse, Jesuit theater promoted the presence of Latin in French cultural life and made collèges cultural centers for their communities.21 In turn, towns and school regents granted subsidies to defray production costs. Lille even paid for the construction of a theater in 1596,22 but a school’s assembly hall and courtyard were more likely venues.23 Performances sometimes attracted thousands, including local elites, ecclesiastic worthies, and even royalty.24 Louis XIV attended performances at Clermont (after 1674, Louis-le-Grand); he favored Jourdan’s Suzanne (1653), a tale of Christian martyrdom set during Diocletian’s reign.25 The “little people” insisted on their fun, too. In Pont-a-Mousson in 1595, they rioted when more exalted folk from neighboring towns filled the hall for The Siege of Jerusalem.26 Periodicals such as Mercure de France and the Mercure galant reviewed performances; Jean Loret publicized them in weekly, verse publications. Not all Jesuit productions were as elaborate as those of Clermont, much less as grand as the performance of Georg Agricola’s Constantinus in Munich in 1574, which made the city its stage, lasted two days, and required a thousand actors.27 More modest collèges still found the means to evoke the palaces of Roman emperors or the armies of the Greeks before the walls of Troy.28 Jesuit theater was as moralizing as other aspects of their pedagogy and as instrumental. As with composing poetry, theater supported rhetoric by giving students the opportunity to declaim their professors’ compositions.29 To further the objective of preparing students for ethical (Christian) action in the world, their dramas “tended to foreground free will.”30 In sharp contrast to French vernacular theater, Jesuit productions showcased manly virtue and piety in a world without romantic love; “heroism, noble birth, virginity, and self-sacrifice were key characteristics of the heroes of Jesuit drama.”31 Jesuit authors did not expose their spectators to violent and irredeemable passions such as Medea’s vengeance. “Some sweeter muses must . . . offer better examples in a purified theater,” the dramatist Father Commire, whom Huet met during his early visits to Paris, wrote to the archbishop in Bourges. “Perhaps some day, when they’re grown, these young men will be inflamed with


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the desire to equal these virtues and be eager for a beautiful death in their turn.”32 A tragedy performed at Caen’s Jesuit collège in 1683 was no doubt intended to inspire future acts of self sacrifice. In it, the young boy and early Christian martyr Celsus remained so steadfast throughout his torments that his brother and school friends converted.33 Indeed, Jouvancy concluded in 1692 that a serious, morally upright work often drew spectators to religion more effectively than the sermons of great preachers.34 Still, Jesuit theater was not stuffy. The Ratio had sought to limit theater to infrequent performances, Latin, and male characters alone.35 Nevertheless, productions became at least annual and often twice-yearly events, and authors included female characters, incorporated innovations like ballet, and increasingly permitted vernacular intrusions. Mambrun even included in his epic Constantinus a lengthy description of a ballet with the edifying theme of resolving conflicts between peoples through religion, rather than arms.36 Although frequently based on ancient or biblical history, Jesuit dramas could be topical. Clermont staged a ballet, Mars Disarmed by Love, to celebrate the Peace of the Pyrenées and Louis XIV’s marriage to the Spanish infanta, and the comet of 1664–65 inspired a ballet in 1665.37 Jesuit theater seconded the king’s efforts against the Huguenots. Dramas about the Christianizing activities of Constantine and Clovis encouraged royal religious rectitude, while Hercules’ struggle with the hydra allegorized Louis XIV’s struggle with the kingdom’s heretics. Beauvais staged a pastorale, Heresy Exterminated, in 1686; students at Harcourt danced Impiety Punished in 1689.38 How many spectators understood the proceedings? Loret confessed his ignorance of Latin, and obviously many could not appreciate a play’s beauties line by line. However, spectators followed the action using a detailed vernacular program or listening (sometimes) to a vernacular summary given between acts. In contrast, the allegorical aspects of the performances and the ballets inserted between acts required no Latin literacy. The accessibility of dance was precisely its strong point, according to Jouvancy; it was “mute poetry, expressing by learned movements of the body all the sentiments expressed by the poets in their verse.”39 In any event, spectators apparently understood enough to justify one periodical’s report that “the tears of the audience . . . never fail to honor the tragedies of Father Porée.”40 Huet apparently never performed in a production (surely he would have boasted about it in the autobiography), and he never showed much interest in theater, Latin or vernacular. Still, Jesuit theater was ubiquitous. As a student and an adult, Huet probably attended performances in Caen, where Jesuit theater debuted with Saul and His Sons Vanquished by Achish two years before his birth. Huet befriended two Jesuit tragedians: Denis Petau during his first visits to Paris, and Charles de La Rue, whose Cyrus was one of the few plays performed more than once. He would not have missed the staging of La Rue’s Agathocles in Caen in 1670. In 1663, he might have attended Titus


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in Rouen, where he spent much time preparing Origen for press. When he tutored the dauphin, Clermont was nearby. As bishop of Avranches, his presence would have been nearly mandatory at end-of-school-year exercises at the local collège. A surviving program in his papers announces the performance of Apollon françois in 1696 (an indication of the incursion of the vernacular on the comedic side at least). In it, Jupiter, noting the town’s dispiritedness, dispatched Apollo to restore science and virtue, piety and the Muses to their rightful places.41 But Latin poetry had a presence in French cultural life beyond Jesuit theater. Mercure galant published Latin poems,42 and poetry competitions, like those at Caen and Rouen, were popular events. The genre had prominent advocates, too, such as Rapin’s patron Lamoignon. Indeed, Nicolas BoileauDespréaux found more than enough neo-Latin poets to satirize in “Dialogue des Poètes” (1674). In it, a harried Horace, charged with introducing the modern bards to Apollo, recoiled before a versifying throng at Parnassus’s gate.43 Composing Latin poetry was generally an avocation. Huet’s fellow caënnais, Moisant de Brieux and Antoine Halley, respectively, held public office and taught. Doctors, lawyers, and soldiers turned their hands to it. Occasionally a poet could devote himself full-time to his efforts, such as the lawyer Gabriel Madelenet, whom Richelieu and Mazarin encouraged.44 Most Latin poets found employment in educational settings, including the Jesuit collèges. Many Jesuits became poets of the first rank, claiming three places among the seven poets of the Pléiade latine: Jean Commire (1625– 1702), Charles de La Rue (1645–1725), and René Rapin (1621–87). They continued the tradition of Denis Petau and his student François Vavasseur, whom Huet met in Paris in the early 1650s.45 In a world before copyrights and royalties, a poet could not earn his daily bread directly from literary production, but Latin poetry might help him secure real benefits. The author of the inscriptions gracing one of Richelieu’s galleries received a chair in the Académie Française. We will learn more later about the royal subventions awarded to writers and artists in the early 1660s. For now, let it suffice to say that three Latin poets figured on the first list, two of whom received 800 livres each, and the third, 600—a good start on the 3,000 livres required to be socially presentable at midcentury.46 A subsidy began the successful career of Huet’s friend Esprit Fléchier (1632–1710), who received his reward for a Latin poem describing Louis XIV’s famous carousel.47 Decades later, Santeuil attracted no fewer than three pensions.48 Even on the eve of the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the serious and often admiring assessments of neo-Latin poetry in Adrien Baillet’s Jugemens des savans (1685–86) attest to the continuing cultural prestige of this literary activity. In his autobiography, Huet described his youthful desire to versify in terms suggesting divine inspiration. He wrote how he judged nothing more glorious and how much he delighted in improvising verse on any subject. Yet


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Huet the adult criticized the poetic education his student self had received. His tutor stupidly snatched Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and other poets from his hands—“our masters and our surest guides on the paths of Parnassus”—and replaced them with “I don’t know what obscure Italian and Flemish versifiers of this century.” It took years, he complained, to see this modern, neoLatin poetry for what it was—glittering baubles lacking everything that made classical verse majestic and beautiful.49

Group Portrait with Laurels The Norman countryside conduced to the expression of poetic gifts—or so Antoine Halley (1595–1676) claimed in an elegy that Huet composed “about the cäennais poets, through whose example [Huet] was invited to poetize.”50 Geographically, the region was located in the happy medium between those governed by the stars of northern and barbaric climes and those of the torrid zone. Apollo performed his ablutions in the local waters and reportedly strummed his lyre in a grotto for an ever-appreciative audience of the Muses. An exhausted Thalia, muse of comic poetry, might spend the night in the flower-bestrewn countryside. After evoking the pleasures of the Norman countryside, Halley urged Huet to follow the same path that the gods, followed by a crowd of poets, strolled on Mount Helicon. One poet was nourished by the milk of Venus herself, another took dictation from Diana, yet another frolicked among the wood nymphs. In the center stood François Malherbe (d. 1628), Caen’s most recent and famous poet, surrounded by youths bearing garlands of roses. His song had the power to move rocks and halt rushing waters. Halley dared Huet to join these illustrious predecessors, promising that there would come a time when, having been crowned with laurel, he would be borne aloft in Apollo’s chariot to the cheers of the crowd. “Thus, Halley urged the youth with friendly admonishments,” Huet concluded, “and with these commands quickened my desires.” Huet’s fanciful elegy attests to Caen’s prominence in letters, particularly poetry. Two neo-Latin poets praised the prosperous town and its fertile countryside; they also claimed august Roman origins for it, a poetic impulse that Huet lauded decades later in his treatise on Caen’s origins, though he faulted historians who “retailed these fables as truth.”51 Madame de Sevigné effused that Caen was the prettiest, gayest, and best-situated town, graced with exceptionally beautiful buildings, churches, and fields, and the source of “all our best minds.”52 Chapelain asserted, “Caen is another Paris for learning and style,” possessing a politesse as exquisite and a learning as profound as the capital’s.53 Caen was thus a very good place for Huet to hone his poetic gifts. Inspired by Italian developments, the caënnais Guillelmus de Mara had helped to create a new Latin poetry in Paris at the beginning of


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the sixteenth century.54 Halley and his student, Moisant de Brieux, continued Caen’s reputation for poetry into Huet’s generation. Whether the imitatio demanded by the genre limited or stimulated the poets’ poetic power is an open question,55 but both Halley and Moisant de Brieux did their best to pour new wine into those old wineskins in poems that served public functions and private needs. Huet lived with Halley for a while when he was an adolescent. He recalled that Halley the tutor pardoned nothing and that he rigorously demanded good Latinity and applied the rules of classical prosody.56 He won so often at the Palinod, Caen’s annual poetry competition, that he was asked to give others a chance by not entering.57 He frequently won competitions in Rouen too. His poetry played a role in Caen’s civic life. In 1640, after the Nu-Pieds uprising, which was provoked by rumors of the introduction of the salt tax, Halley pleaded the town’s loyalty before the chancellor of France, Pierre Séguier, who was charged with punishing the insurgents. The Duc de Longueville, who became governor in 1652, set the theme of that year’s Palinod, “Normandy preserved from war [i.e., the Fronde].” Halley’s entry contrasted war torn France with a peaceful Normandy.58 His poetry welcomed the duke’s second wife to the province and two bishops to Bayeux. “Is any place so agreeable, so delightful in appearance?” Halley asked in 1663 in a poem that greeted the new governor, the Duc de Montausier. “Where is the air sweeter? And where is Nature more indulgent and luxuriant?”59 His prefatory poems plumped for his friends’ books like blurbs on the back of paperbacks today.60 He gushed verse after verse of praise of Huet’s public disputation in 1668 and his De optimo genere interpretandi (1660).61 His verse marked the deaths of notables and other worthy, if more obscure, citizens, such as the curé who ministered to the sick during the epidemic of 1637. Praise came to Halley more readily than condemnation, yet one elegy deplored the appalling poverty of the seaside inhabitants. In a lighter vein, he warned youth against tobacco, evoking the noxious “clouds of smoke produced by that detestable plant, which tipplers inhale . . . then expel through mouth and nostrils.”62 One of Halley’s contemporaries praised his work for combining art and piety; he encouraged him to continue to prove to a licentious age that “one can be a good poet and a good Christian: Tabor and Calvary do not offend Parnassus.”63 A poem Halley wrote on composition itself shows how skillfully he “wed poetry to piety” with a striking simile. The poet was like the silkworm, he wrote, exhausting itself in a labor that also served as its sarcophagus. Yet the poet no more perished than the silkworm encased in the splendid funerary urn of its cocoon. The butterfly flew from its tomb, as the poet, through his work, rose from his. As the butterfly could never escape earth because death soon preyed on it, so posthumous fame was worthless to the poet. Thus, everyone should ardently desire one thing alone: that their souls fly heavenward, from whence they descended.64


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“[Halley] is the author of my verse,” Moisant de Brieux once remarked of his tutor, “as God is the author of my life.”65 A Huguenot, he studied at Sedan, where he befriended Montausier and began composing Latin poetry. He also studied in Leiden with Daniel Heinsius and Gerard Vossius, whose son, Isaac, befriended him. Returning to France, he served in the Parlement of Rouen and purchased an office with the Parlement of Metz. Resigning from the latter in 1635, he spent three years at Oxford and Cambridge. He began his literary life in earnest after his return and marriage. He possessed two homes: one at Bernière on the ocean, where he lived during the summer and composed most of his poetry; the other, the splendid Italianate hôtel de ville overlooking Caen’s square of St. Pierre. In Caen, Moisant de Brieux found “agreeable distractions” in the salons of caënnaises such as Madame de Tilly, who became Huet’s good friend, and he ably composed the light vernacular verse that delighted such mixed company. He frequently visited Paris too, attending the Hôtel de Rambouillet, site of the oldest and most distinguished of the capital’s salons; there he encountered his old friend, Montausier, to whom he dedicated most of his works. He was also friends with what he dubbed the “Triumvir de la France littéraire,” one of whom, Chapelain, contributed greatly to Huet’s success. Moisant de Brieux’s letters betray a keen critical sense and much erudition. He offered the highest praise possible to the sixteenth-century poet Jacopo Sannazaro (d. 1530), calling him the only Virgilian, though he criticized him for unacceptably mingling pagan and Christian elements.66 Queen Christina of Sweden rewarded one of Moisant de Brieux’s first Latin poems with a gold chain. (The risqué poems that his friend Isaac Vossius forwarded to her and which she reportedly relished have apparently not survived.) He published three collections of Latin poetry with subjects ranging from the ever-popular pastorale to an impassioned condemnation of Charles I’s execution.67 Typically, he exchanged poems with Halley and others as signs of friendship. Friends responded in kind, as when they offered verse condolences on the death of one of his sons. That loss prompted Moisant de Brieux to compose paraphrases of the Psalms and hymns.68 In the 1660s, he responded to an outbreak of the plague in Caen with an anguished poem. “Ah, sorrow,” he wrote, “once an emperor’s splendid home, now Pluto’s shadowy abode, here pale, sleepless affliction and emaciated hunger prepare the sickbeds.” The laments of the dying mingled with the mournful cries of owls, and the groans of the young with those of the elderly. Charon’s skiff was so burdened with the dead that he could barely make his way. In closing, Moisant de Brieux joined his fate to that of his city: He would not leave. Nevertheless, he did survive. Burdened by such memories and more family deaths, he spent his last years in a state he called a “living death,” a persistent insomnia described in yet another poem. When he died in 1675, Pierre Bayle declared that “France had lost its greatest Latin poet.”


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In 1652, Moisant de Brieux’s desire to make Caen “a new Athens” inspired him to host the learned gatherings that became known as the Academia Briosa. Huet was elected to membership even before returning from Queen Christina’s court. The academy met in Moisant de Brieux’s mansion Monday afternoons to discuss periodicals freshly arrived from Paris, to resolve literary problems encountered in their individual readings, and to recite and criticize their own compositions and others submitted to them. Some detractors ridiculed the fledgling institution as pedantic, while others thought it dangerous for groups to meet in the private residence of a Huguenot. In fact, Moisant de Brieux forbade libelous talk and discussions of religion—a wise move in a town where Huguenots and Catholics generally got along, though anti-Calvinist sentiment was on the rise. He could soothe the scholarly irascibility that Huet described after decades of firsthand experience: “Complacency . . . is not the virtue of men of letters. They are frank—perhaps too much. They love their own opinions. They defend them warmly, often stubbornly, and they hardly ever favor any that they themselves did not author.”69 While not unique, Moisant de Brieux’s provincial academy was an early establishment and a good place for Huet to begin making a name as a Latin poet after returning from Sweden.70 Its membership constituted a subgroup of Huet’s Republic of Letters; its activities centered on the interests of members who, while they did not all publish scholarly work, all concerned themselves with serious intellectual questions.71 Like most academies, its membership was exclusively male, though commoners mingled with nobles. Members did not speak Latin and Greek during their proceedings (as rumor had it in the early days), but the academicians possessed the linguistic expertise necessary to assess the fine points of erudite work submitted to them for judgment and to settle differences of opinion. Of the sixteen members Moisant de Brieux enumerated in a letter of the early 1660s, six composed Latin poetry, as did Moisant de Brieux, and two translated it.72 We should note that the academy was a self-appointed body of experts that appropriated the right to make literary judgments. “You’ve written nothing to me about the new Caen Academy,” Mambrun wrote Huet in May 1654, “which declares itself the judge of learned poetry.”73 In short, the individuals who willingly subjected their work to the academy’s scrutiny ratified its authority.74 Many poems that Huet composed during his early twenties functioned as social gestures, confirming and strengthening relationships within his expanding Republic of Letters. His first published poem, the eclogue “Vitis,” shows how verse combined creative, intellectual, and social agendas. Like much Latin poetry, it appeared as a feuille volante or small pamphlet. The title page specifies the printer (Adam Cavelier of Caen) and the date of publication (1653), but not the author. The lack of an author’s name preserved the character of poetry as a learned diversion. As one neo-Latin poet quipped, “Make


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verses, and you’re a poet; get them printed, and you’re an author; putting your name on it makes poetry a profession.” 75 Such inexpensive publications were quite fragile; an entire oeuvre could be lost (as it largely was in Charles du Périer’s case) if someone did not anthologize an author’s poems, as Graevius did for Huet.76 By composing eclogues, Huet wrote in a time-honored genre well suited to expressing common poetic enthusiasms and his own interests. Introduced into France during the late fifteenth century, both Mambrun and Moisant de Brieux continued the tradition of the neo-Latin eclogue into Huet’s period. By writing eclogues, Huet imitated Virgil—and who better?—but avoided the difficult genre of the epic. He even followed Virgil’s model, Theocritus, a great personal favorite of Huet—indeed, he claimed that he retreated to the countryside every spring to reread him.77 The eclogue’s scale was appropriate for Huet’s experiments with the pastoral settings that contemporary readers, both learned and vernacular, so enjoyed, and for his experiments in mythologizing.78 Huet wrote five of them, each featuring a metamorphosis à la Ovid, often as punishment for a misdeed. (Much to his delight, his eclogue on the glowworm’s origin was translated into French and published in 1709.)79 With the exception of “Magnes,” which is a didactic poem, these poems were meant to entertain; when dedicated to specific individuals, they accomplished serious social work. When Huet dedicated “Vitis” to Claude Saumaise, he confirmed the friendship that began during his visit to Leiden. The dedication acknowledged Saumaise’s scholarship and seniority. It invited the érudit to refresh himself by setting aside scholarly tasks such as avenging himself upon Milton or studying the Roman army. “Claudius, my love,” Huet entreated, “Do not despise this trifling amusement.” Huet promised great things when, in the future, he set aside pastorale for more exalted tasks; celebrated in Saumaise’s song, Saumaise would mingle with the demigods if he accepted Huet’s gift. The sexuality of the poem, which recounted the “unhappy love” of Vitis (wild vine) for Ulmus (elm), was appropriate subject matter for learned men like themselves. What Chapelain wrote a few years later of an unidentified risqué elegy composed by Huet applies here too: “I found nothing to reprove here with respect to the freedom of love à la manière ancienne, because it is written in an ancient language, which shelters it from any accusation [of prurience], and because it is written for learned men, not for ignorant women.”80 “Vitis” begins with Bacchus glimpsing the “dazzling” nymph from afar as she danced in rural festivities; greatly desiring her, he rushed from his mountain lookout and seized her in a lusty embrace. Vitis accepted his amorous advances willingly, and she was inconsolable when Jove summoned Bacchus to help quell a rebellious people. Drawn by Vitis’s lament, the “most beautiful” shepherd Ulmus sought to cheer her. Vitis decided, if she could not have the god she loved, she would love the man she was with. Returning


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in triumph, Bacchus sought his nymph, only to find her in flagrante delicto with Ulmus. Jove granted his wish for an appropriate punishment, transforming Vitis into a grapevine and Ulmus into an elm. Vitis’s distinctly sexual embrace became the vine twisting around the tree’s trunk. Saumaise died the same year that Huet dedicated “Vitis” to him. His mournful cycle of seven poems in various short forms attests to how much Saumaise’s death distressed him.81 The memorial poem was a well-established genre in the Republic of Letters, and the reliable Pontanus offered several pages of examples and advice for composing it. Exaggerating the deceased’s erudition while deploring the loss to learning caused by his death were standard features—and those are precisely the notes Huet struck in “Ad Leydam Urbem.”82 But his identification of Saumaise with the fate of Leiden and its university also suggests Huet’s awareness of the passing not just of an individual scholar, but a generation of scholarship—and perhaps even the world of erudition it represented. While Saumaise lived, Leiden excelled; with him gone, it languished. Saumaise had made the university a new Athens; deprived of his “happy light,” its precedence in learning was at an end. “Ad Manes Salmasii” struck a more personal note, emphasizing Saumaise’s humanity rather than his erudition. In it, Huet recalled the beginnings of their friendship and Saumaise’s kindness during Huet’s illness; by cherishing his friend’s memory, he sought to frustrate the oblivion of death. The final poem, “Consecratio ad poetas,” insisted that the poets cease weeping, that they exchange tears for roses, violets, and lilies, and that they pour fragrant incense on the altar. For Saumaise, after he had shed his mortal body, was not to be found in Tartarus or the Elysian fields; Jupiter had allotted him a place in the heavens where the gods and those mortal heroes who had loved virtue dwelt. Huet’s dedication of “Epiphora” (literal translation: “a defluxion of humors”) honored his friendship with the very alive Alexander Morus and was the poem Graevius found so exceptional. Here Huet set out to describe the course of an illness in imitation of Lucretius’s descriptions of nature. He intended his song to delight, but more specifically to touch the heart of “learned Alexander.” He also warned Morus not to scorn his gift or leave off reading before coming to its conclusion. The poem told how, deeply wounded by love, Huet went to court the lovely Phyllida. Vanity prompted him to spurn a hat, and he succumbed to a dreadful ailment, whose symptoms he described in lurid detail: the “noxious humor” that spread throughout his body, even into the recesses of his brain, and the foul mucous and catarrh that flowed from his nose. Huet described in equally unpleasant detail his cures: the leech that greedily sucked blood from him, the milk expressed from the breast of a woman who had recently delivered, and the effects of the use of a cupping glass. Restored to health, he concluded with a mock moral: “And you, youths, who are so often wont


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to go a courting, learn from this example—how this punishment cured me of unseasonable inclinations.”83 When Morus was in Paris from 1659 to 1661, the two men continued to exchange poems that attest to the continuing intensity of their friendship. Each lamented the press of other duties that prevented their versifying together, a practice they had begun in the Netherlands.84 Huet’s 1659 poem complains about the Origen project, how it tormented and desiccated his spirit, and expressed his keen desire to see his friend again.85 The “most preoccupied” Alexander began a 1661 poem to “his most learned” friend, who is also the “flower of men” and “half of my soul,” with an opening that echoed Virgil’s description of the Trojans overwhelmed by the Greeks: “Their multitude overwhelms us utterly” (Aeneid 2, 242). Wave after wave of cares beat against Morus, and his labors multiplied more quickly than the Hydra thrusts forth a new, more savage head. Duties and disputes kept him from visiting libraries and intellectual gatherings. He could not even relax with reading a mediocre poet without obligations pressing upon him. He implored Erato, muse of lyric poetry, to permit him the kindness of hearing Greek or Latin spoken. He closed by praising Huet’s “Iter suecicum” and his odes for Périer and Halley, poems so marvelous that “Horace would have desired or would have thought them his own.”86 Such impassioned exchanges make doubly mysterious the sudden cooling of Morus’s feelings, to which Huet alluded without explanation in his autobiography. Naturally, no one gave Huet as many poems as Mambrun did. Mambrun’s intellectual reputation rested on his Latin poetry, but contemporary judgment was equivocal. While praising him as “one of the most perfect and accomplished among Virgil’s imitators” with respect to form, Adrien Baillet wished that he had imitated his model’s spirit as well. Ménage praised him as “a great poet and a great critic, all in one,” but Mambrun was apparently more adept at theory than composition—indeed, his treatise on the epic responded to critics of his Christian epic, Constantinus (1659).87 Incorporated into the text of his letters, Mambrun’s poems reacted to Huet’s mental state or that of their friendship. In August 1650, he dashed off a poem of fortythree lines during some time snatched from teaching responsibilities. He improvised the lament of the shepherd Damon, who, spurned by a woman and forgetful of his snowy white cattle and even his reed pipe, fled to the seaside where he gave himself over to lamenting from sunrise to sunset, day after day.88 “That’s all,” Mambrun wrote in a postscript in French. “And I don’t have time to reread it. But little Peter, whom I forgive everything, will forgive all.”89 In the letter of May 1653 that reconciled with Huet after his Swedish adventure, Mambrun inserted three lines of verse that entreated “my Peter” to act kindly toward him in memory of previous times.90 Mambrun also had a rather more serious ambition: composing a second epic in Virgilian style on the life of Christ. This was not an original aspiration, of


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course. The Italian poet, Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1556) preceded him with Christiados libri sex (1535). Alexander Ross’s Christiados libri xiii (1634) was a highly successful example of the poetic fashion of cutting and pasting lines from Virgil to, in Ross’s opinion, “draw young men away from the reading of shameless poets and lead them to sacred history.”91 But Mambrun had trouble beginning—not surprising, given that he was literally reworking Virgil’s “I sing of arms and the man.” He entreated Huet to criticize an early draft in 1651. Huet responded to another in 1655; he commented that Mambrun’s newest version was inflated, counseled simplicity, and sent suggestions for revision. Mambrun apparently did not heed Huet’s advice; he was still sending drafts in 1661, the year of his death.92 Although he respected Huet’s judgment, Mambrun was a tough critic of Huet’s efforts (chapter 1). In 1653, he praised “Vitis” for its Latinity and elegance, but he found the poem’s subject less pleasing and the dedication to the Calvinist Saumaise disagreeable.93 In March 1660, Mambrun criticized quite sharply poems that Huet’s friends had generally praised, if not uncritically.94 He was generous with praise, though, if he believed Huet’s efforts merited it. In a letter written two months later, he enthused that the odes written for Huet’s friend, Jean Renaud de Segrais (1624–1701), and Périer could compete with anything written during the golden age of Latin poetry, and that neither of Horace’s patrons, Augustus or Maecenas, would have read anything comparable. “Continue, my Peter, and you will surpass all of us in elegance and dignity.”95 Huet did continue, spurred by an enthusiasm that even illness could not dampen. In October 1661, he wrote Ménage that he had dragged himself out of bed to compose his first elegy. He simply could not help it, he claimed, after leafing through some Ovid.96 Huet’s production declined sharply, though, as other projects, interests, and, after 1670, official duties absorbed his energies. He nonetheless responded to Nicolas Heinsius’s gift of his edition of Virgil (1676) with a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside around his abbey at Aulnay.97 As a bishop, Huet honored the erudition of a young noblewoman with an eclogue (chapter 4). For his parishioners, he composed hymns on the miraculous founding of the Abbey of Saint Michel, visible across the bay from his garden at Avranches.98 At the sunrise and the sunset of Huet’s career, poets sought both advice and friendship with their verse. In the late 1650s, Fléchier offered a “little poem,” judging that it was better to appear a poor poet than a poor friend. “You see, Monsieur, that I am not as modest as you thought, that you are mixed up with a bold and confident man who already assumes the rights of friendship.”99 The poetic advances of Peter Francius in 1698 were probably more demure—but were accepted as warmly. “I must not forget to write you about your verse,” he wrote the Dutch scholar, “I take them up whenever I desire to restore my weary spirit, such is their sweetness, their elegance, their richness.”100


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The Christian Augustans When Mambrun delivered his enthusiastic praise of Huet’s odes in 1660, two developments in Huet’s poetry situated him well to benefit from a new program of royal patronage that emerged in the early 1660s: Huet had adopted Horace as a model, which had important political connotations, and he was circulating his poems among a distinguished group of fellow poets and cultural intermediaries. Figure 3 indicates the very active subgroup of Huet’s Republic of Letters through which his poems circulated during the late 1650s and early 1660s. The gray ovals represent poets whose criticisms Huet solicited; the black ovals represent learned gatherings where Latin poetry was read and critiqued. Jean Chapelain appears in a gray rectangle, because he acted both as a critic of Huet’s poetry and cultural middleman between the state and intellectuals. Colbert was no poet, but his role in disbursing royal patronage made him a cultural middleman, too. In Jugemens des savans, Baillet admitted the difficulty of assessing the literary reputation of Charles du Périer (d. 1692) because few of his poems survived. Nevertheless, he deserved praise for sagely recognizing that his talents were best suited to composing lyrics, unlike “a crowd of rash poets who believe themselves capable of anything, and who take on whatever subject presents itself and tempts them.”101 Huet so admired Périer’s poetry that he dedicated an ode to him as the “prince of lyric poets”; his autobiography noted Périer’s “sublime genius,” but also his ignorance of other aspects of belles lettres.102 Périer expressed his esteem for Huet in an ode that prefaced De optimo genere interpretandi and which praised Huet’s ode on the Peace of the Pyrenées and the king’s marriage. Mambrun facilitated Huet’s relationship with Gilles Ménage (1613–92), and Moisant de Brieux no doubt put in a good word, too. Ménage and Huet enjoyed a warm, easygoing friendship that endured until Ménage’s death. Ménage had left Caen for the capital by the time he befriended Huet; there he was well placed to help Huet maintain his Parisian contacts, especially with Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette. Frequenting the Hôtel de Rambouillet since 1639, he probably assisted Huet’s entry into the salon and certainly welcomed him to the weekly gatherings in his home. An abbé with scant interest in religion, he was also irascible and too independent to be a good client.103 He was a first-rate érudit, though, acquiring such a reputation for learning that Queen Christina invited him to her court. Yet he had a reputation for pedantry too and was satirized by Molière in Les femmes savantes. Ménage produced many important scholarly works, and he consulted Huet frequently on his edition of Diogenes Laërtes during the period represented by the diagram.104 As a poet, he was best known for his epigrams in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. His anthology of poetry, first published in 1652, had gone into seven editions by the 1680s.105


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Figure 3. Circulation of Latin Poetry (ca. 1658–64) through a subgroup of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Republic of Letters

René Rapin (1621–87) cut a different figure in the Republic of Letters. His skillful combination of bel esprit and honnêteté prompted one contemporary to accuse him of alternately serving heaven and earth every six months—but Mademoiselle de Scudéry asserted that his great piety proved that “an extremely honnête homme can be extremely devout.”106 Rapin and Huet were nearly exact contemporaries, and their friendship is largely unexplored scholarly territory.107 Rapin circulated in salon society, as did Huet, befriending many of the same women.108 He is known today for his history of Jansenism, though that was not published until the nineteenth century.


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His contemporaries knew him as a literary critic and as one of the poets of the Pléiade latine.109 His fellow pléiadian, Santeuil, believed it impossible to express Rapin’s contribution to Latin poetry, so he suggested to Baillet that he insert the rubric “Ara Rapino” in his Jugemens and leave three pages respectfully blank.110 “Father of Jesuit georgic poetry,” Rapin filled a lacuna left by Virgil in the Georgics with his Hortorum libri IV (1665).111 It was his most successful production, enjoying more than a dozen European editions and several French and English translations.112 Huet knew Rapin through Mambrun. Besides affection and respect for the elder Jesuit, they shared much else: a passion for composing Latin poetry, a dislike of Jansenists, a certain cultural conservatism, social connections, and ambition. Rapin generously put his own connections at Huet’s disposal, introducing him to his friend and patron, Guillaume de Lamoignon. First president of the Parlement of Paris, Lamoignon was a capable Latinist too; he hosted learned gatherings for years at his estate in Bâville before constituting them as a formal academy in 1667.113 Rapin also supervised publication of De optimo genere interpretandi in Paris (if not entirely to Huet’s satisfaction). Finally, he agitated tirelessly for Huet’s interests, from securing a royal gratification to financing for publication of the Origen to upholding Huet’s claim to nobility. Though not a Latin poet, Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) had written some celebrated vernacular poems in the 1640s. In contrast, La Pucelle (1656), his epic treatment of Joan of Arc, earned him nothing but ridicule.114 Long associated with the Dupuys’ academy, Chapelain was also a member of the group that met at the home of the royal official Valentin Conrart, which eventually formed the nucleus of the Académie Française. Although more at ease in the male world of erudition, he attended the Paris salons. While he held no office, he acquired tremendous influence in cultural matters; indeed, one historian has characterized him as Colbert’s “patronage manager.”115 An exquisite politesse infused his letters, which contrived to put him in the recipient’s debt even when obligations or lines of patronage ran the other way. Despite Chapelain and Ménage’s hostility for each other, Huet nimbly maintained warm friendships with both, and he tactfully dedicated an important neo-Latin poem to each. Huet never joined the chorus of withering criticism that prevented publication of the second volume of La Pucelle, and he supported, if unsuccessfully, Ménage’s candidacy for the French Academy in 1684. Poetry constantly circulated among the five poets at the bottom of the diagram, though the density and intensity of contacts varied. They could depend on each other and Moisant de Brieux’s academy for a specialist’s knowledge of classical languages and genres. Huet received the most detailed (and sometimes testy) criticism from Ménage, with Rapin a close second for acuity and comprehensiveness. Huet returned their favors. Submitting work


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for criticism was a desirable preliminary to offering a poem to a patron and publishing. In July 1661, Rapin requested Huet to present one of his odes to the academy if he thought it worthy;116 years later, he wrote to Huet at Aulnay to ask what he thought of his “first try” at an ode that Rapin intended for a benefactor and that he would eventually publish.117 Huet might communicate to Ménage both his own opinions and those of Academia Briosa. In October 1659, he apologized for offering only his own critique because the academy was not meeting; he promised a few days later to convene whatever academicians he could find to review Ménage’s verse.118 These exchanges could lead to wrangling—indeed, Huet and Ménage argued over a single word in several letters, engaging more and more people and citing more and more authorities. In the fall of 1661, Huet had begun to compose “Iter suecicum,” a poem about his peregrinatio academica. He and Ménage disagreed about the correct Latin term for Swedes. “You have to write ‘Suëdos,’” Ménage noted toward the end of November in a long list of corrections, “That is what the Ancients called [them]. ‘Suecus’ is low.”119 On November 29, Huet claimed that he would willingly call the Swedes Suëdos because he believed that that name derived from sud (south) as that of the Norwegians derived from nord (north), which described the two countries’ situation vis-àvis each other [a rather fantastic etymology!]. He would use Suëcos, however, as that was how the Swedes referred to themselves; “for the rest, it hardly matters, because these names were unknown to the Ancients.”120 On December 5, Huet reiterated that he would like to take Ménage’s advice, but now Bochart had dissuaded him from doing so. “His reason was the same one that I offered [in my last letter]: that, because the Ancients knew neither this people nor its name, we must follow present usage.”121 By December 10, Ménage had retreated somewhat from his position that ancient precedent authorized Suëdi, but he had another authority to bolster his opinion: “Monsieur Grotius taught me that one must say ‘Suëdi,’” and not ‘Suëci.’ And, as he was ambassador to Sweden, and as he wrote on the origins of the Swedes, I hold to what he said.”122 Huet was very surprised to learn Grotius’s opinion, he wrote back on the sixteenth, as he had noticed that Grotius consistently used Suëci in one of his publications. Now Ménage was surprised: He had personally witnessed Grotius’s use of Suëdi; if something different appeared in one of his books, that was the fault of whoever prepared the edition.123 On the twenty-third, Huet repeated that the Swedes themselves employed Suëci; consequently, he would continue to use that term, regardless of the fact that Ménage had convinced him about the correctness of Suëdi. “It is a question of whether one should follow usage or reason, because, with respect to authority, I find opinions divided, with able men on each side”—but Bochart and the Academia Briosa had opted for Suëci.124 This exchange shows why people like Huet and Ménage were often branded pedants. Still, there were important stakes in such seemingly trivial


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disputes. Our poets were in a paradoxical situation. They sought to employ ancient forms and an ancient language to express their contemporary realities. To do so, they had to “modernize” Latin to some extent, coining neologisms for peoples, objects, even situations unknown to the Ancients. Who could authorize such innovations? It fell to practitioners whose skills were widely acknowledged and who organized themselves in groups like the Academia Briosa. Yet no one could dictate to anyone else. “When I write something, I make my friends my judges, and I listen to all their criticisms,” Huet wrote to Ménage in February 1662, “then I make myself judge of their criticisms, and I attempt to satisfy them, but only after satisfying myself first.”125 Between 1659 and 1664, Huet circulated three especially important poems through this network: an ode that celebrated the Peace of the Pyrénées and the king’s marriage; an epistolary poem dedicated to Ménage; and a second ode to the king, which I call “Athena” for reasons that will become clear later. All three served the usual functions of poetry in the Republic of Letters: creative expression, social gesture, and boundary maintenance. They also reached beyond the republic, however, to perform the personal function of securing patronage and the public function of glorifying the state. In all three, Huet emulated Horace. It was a natural choice because Horace’s poems were models of Latin poetry. Everything Horace wrote was “graceful, brilliant, and elegant,” Jouvancy asserted, even if his poetry had to be expurgated when presented to students.126 Horace’s treatise in verse on poetics, “Letter to the Pisos (The Art of Poetry),” was influential throughout Europe, and it profoundly shaped the development of French verse—indeed, Boileau owed him a considerable debt with his own “Art of Poetry” (chapter 5).127 Horace’s injunction that poetry should both delight and instruct had become cliché by the seventeenth century, though these goals were sincerely pursued.128 Familiarity with his poetry was widespread among literate French men and women,129 and scholars like Pierre Gassendi generously sprinkled their correspondence with allusions to his work.130 He was the most frequently translated poet in the Mercure galant; a certain Madame de Roque Montrousse provided a translation of one of his odes in 1681.131 Huet’s choice was even patriotic. Denis Petau and his student Vavasseur encouraged colleagues and students to adopt the Augustan style that Horace represented. That would signal, in Fumaroli’s words, “the gallican ambition to make Paris the . . . Rome of the moderns, capital of a France victorious over both a neo-Senecan Spain and a neo-Ovidian Italy.”132 The image of Horace at Augustus’s court resonated with Huet’s contemporaries, though the anachronistic terms they used to describe the ancient poet reveal more about their own social and cultural aspirations than their knowledge of Roman history. Thus, they appropriated Horace as a model of the honnête homme—indeed, one of the most honnête men of antiquity. He was “si galant” and urbane; he possessed a “charmante politesse” and an “esprit poli”;


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his manner of communicating moral lessons was completely appropriate for the worldly society of court and salon. He was the “only poet to teach the duties of civic life . . . the only one who could fashion a man both honnête and galant.” Finally, Horace’s connection with the emperor Augustus was regarded as an exemplar of the poet-patron relationship.133 Huet circulated his epistolary poem and his first ode for the king at the same time. The epistle was a relatively relaxed genre, and Huet’s epistle was essentially an autobiography in verse (see below). The ode was more difficult. While Horace frequently composed odes on pedestrian topics, the genre had become popular for exalted subjects. As Huet’s friend Rapin wrote in Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes (1674), an ode should be as noble, lofty, and dignified as the eclogue was simple, proper, and modest, because it was supposed to “sing the praises of the gods and celebrate the most glorious deeds of men.”134 The subject Huet chose was certainly worthy: the Peace of the Pyrénées between France and Spain, which the marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish infanta sealed. The ode’s imagery—comparisons of war with a terrible storm and Louis’s bride to the evening star, the retreat of a Medusa-like fury to the underworld and her replacement by a cheerful fertility goddess—was hardly original, but the point was to adorn the powerful with a “parure antique.”135 (Huet also took care to praise the Queen Mother, Mazarin, and Lamoignon.) It concluded with the conventional sentiment that such great deeds be preserved from oblivion in poems written by erudite men—which Huet claimed to have accomplished in his closing. After drafting his poems, Huet wanted to know his friends’ opinions of them. In a letter of November 20, 1659, he requested a thorough critique of the epistle from Ménage, excusing up front whatever appeared to depart from good Latin style. He also asked Ménage to forward the poem to Périer for his comments. Just a few days later, Huet sent Ménage the ode. On the twentyninth, Ménage sent his criticisms of the epistle and his and Périer’s comments on the ode. In early December, Huet expressed gratitude for both men’s efforts, though he disagreed rather strongly with some of Périer’s remarks. On December 18, Ménage offered a few more comments on both poems.136 By the end of December, Huet decided that both poems were ready for publication. Ménage volunteered to oversee publication of the ode in Paris, while Huet printed the epistle at Caen. He sent Ménage several copies of the epistle with instructions about where to send them at the end of January. Publication of the ode, Ménage explained, had been delayed by cold weather. By mid-February, however, he reported that 300 copies of the ode had been printed, and that the epistle had been so favorably received that he needed a dozen more copies. Huet requested 150 copies of the ode, and he sent a list of people to whom Ménage should distribute copies. This list included friends whom we already know and others we have not yet met, such as Paul Pellisson, secretary to the


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doomed Fouquet and close friend of Mademoiselle de Scudéry (chapter 3). Still others went to prominent men whose favor Huet desired to cultivate, such as Rapin’s patron Lamoignon. Rapin also distributed copies of Huet’s poems, and he seconded Ménage’s efforts with Lamoignon. In February, he gave the president a copy of Huet’s epistle, reporting that Lamoignon had inquired about his whereabouts and activities.137 One of the most important recipients of Huet’s poems was Chapelain, who had been receiving Huet’s gifts of poetry since 1658 at least.138 Huet only sent him the ode and epistle after they had been printed, however. Given the density of interactions among the poets pictured in figure 3, it is not surprising that Chapelain already knew about both poems. He had written to Moisant de Brieux in January 1660 about the ode, sending his compliments to the author, “a bel esprit whom I respect enormously.”139 Yet the message apparently did not get through, for, in March, Chapelain thanked Huet for the poems, assuring him that he and Périer had “admired [the ode] together, one stanza at a time, rejoicing that you continue to do honor to your virtue and to increase the realm of belles-lettres with your works.” In contrast to his appreciative, if restrained comments on the ode, he lavished praise on the epistle. Chapelain also appreciated the “confidence and friendship” that Huet showed with his request to send his epistle to three distinguished people: Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, a royal official, member of the Académie Française, and host of an academy devoted primarily to scientific discussion; Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch scientist who was visiting Paris and who would be recruited into the Royal Academy of Sciences; and Valentin Conrart, though Chapelain remarked that Conrart lacked the Latin to appreciate the gift.140 The two poems were a great success for Huet. First, the consensus was that he had succeeded brilliantly in imitating his ancient models. When Ménage received the epistle, he responded, “it most felicitously imitated Horace.”141 When Chapelain acknowledged receipt of Huet’s poems, he remarked that, if Louis XIV’s court had possessed a sufficiently refined Latinity, Huet would occupy the same place there as Horace did at the court of Augustus.142 In June, Chapelain further asserted that no one had written epistolary poetry as successfully since the Augustan age; he encouraged Huet to continue cultivating a form that relayed moral and philosophical lessons so enjoyably.143 (In fact, Chapelain’s preference for the epistle irritated Huet, who wrote to Ménage: “I worked very hard on [the ode], and amused myself with [the epistle], and certainly it’s much more difficult to compose a good ode than a good epistle.”144) Rapin remarked of the epistle that no one in France wrote in the genre as “purely” as Huet did.145 Second, disseminated through Huet’s network of associates and friends and their networks of associates and friends, the poems secured the approving attention of people who mattered. Figure 4 gives an idea how efficiently


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Figure 4. Distribution of Huet’s Ode and Epistle (Winter 1660)


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Huet’s friends distributed his poetry and the diversity of people, from Jesuits to natural philosophers, who received them. The success of these efforts no doubt made Huet confident that he would receive official recognition and remuneration from a new program of royal propaganda. “[Louis XIV] wanted History to celebrate a new Augustus in him,” according to Antoine Adam, and “Colbert took on the role of Maecenas.”146 There was nothing new, of course, in artists dedicating their works to the socially exalted, including kings, in exchange for patronage. A good Latin poet could even hire out his talents, as when Huet was commissioned to write a memorial poem for the Count of Seltz, natural son of the elector of the Palatinate.147 Nor were Louis XIV and his minister unique in drafting Latin poetry into a program of national propaganda.148 What distinguished Louis XIV’s program of royal gratifications was the size of the purse (80,000 livres the first year),149 its systematic ideological objectives, its bureaucratic approach—and perhaps its encouragement of exaggerated hopes. “All that’s required to get the poets worked up is to have some agreeable and appropriate verses rewarded by the King,” Le Parnasse reformé complained in 1671. “Every miserable versifier will [then] rush a poem into press to overawe His Majesty, and he’ll never rest satisfied until he’s sent his king to plant his standards on the walls of Memphis or Babylon.”150 In a letter to Colbert of November 1662, Chapelain expressed his approval of a plan to mount an organized program of glorification of the king through the visual and literary arts. Horace had asserted in his “Epistle to Augustus” that poetry was superior to physical likeness when it came to communicating true greatness. Similarly, Chapelain asserted that, of all the enduring symbols of monarchy, “poetry is without doubt the best defended against the damage of time—provided that a great writer is involved in the production of the verses.” Neither physical representations nor prose works had survived in their entirety from ancient times. “Only poetry, beginning with Homer himself, has passed down to us entirely intact.”151 At some point that same year, Chapelain met with a group of learned men to identify potential candidates for the king’s largesse. The notes from that meeting identified Huet as someone who wrote “as a gentleman” in Latin verse and prose and who enjoyed a very high reputation as a result; they also remarked his work on Origen and that he “was very promising.” Huet’s friends Périer, Rapin, and Vavasseur received positive notices too, while Ménage was damned for his lack of originality, pretension, and unpleasant character (indeed, it is a wonder that Ménage received a gratification at all).152 Huet’s name then appears on the list of candidates for royal gratifications that Chapelain sent to Colbert on June 6, 1663: “There is in Caen a gentleman named Huet, a very good poet,” he wrote. “More learned than anyone his age, we might easily engage [him] to do wonderful things, should he be accepted into that group of the elect, an honor he greatly deserves.”153


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In his autobiography, Huet totally misrepresented the period of the first awards. He depicted himself as retired to the country in Caen, “delivered up to all the sweetness of a lazy obscurity, neither knowing nor caring to know what passed in the rest of the world.”154 Correspondence from Rapin depicts a very different Huet, one acutely disappointed that he had not been among the first recipients.155 Yet all was not lost. Rapin volunteered to press Huet’s case with Colbert—and he did energetically.156 He immediately complained to Colbert that Huet had suffered the “greatest injustice in the world . . . I know all the savants, the strengths and weaknesses of each, and he is the strongest of them all.” Moreover, Huet had already worked for the king’s glory by writing an admirable ode on the peace with Spain and the king’s marriage. He would soon publish an edition of Origen’s biblical commentaries, which he wanted to dedicate to his monarch. In short, no one was more worthy, no one would repay the king better than Huet, and his inclusion in the next distribution would only increase the honor of the royal cultural initiative.157 Colbert responded promptly, though the excerpt from his letter that Rapin sent to Huet must have been cold comfort.158 Colbert told Rapin that the king had not shut the door to further patronage. On the contrary, he had set an example, which all other savants would strive to match by “giving signs of their virtue and their merit.” Colbert would mention Huet to the king at the first opportunity. In the meantime, would Rapin provide him with a list of other potential recipients? “I responded that I didn’t want to speak of anyone but you,” Rapin wrote Huet with some huffiness. In a closing aside, he confided that Chapelain had “been a bit forgetful” in pressing Huet’s case. Huet was growing restive, however, and Rapin attempted to calm him.159 Rapin told him that he had to await patiently the results of Rapin’s efforts despite his reasonable sense of injury. At a dinner the previous Sunday, for example, Colbert and Rapin had spoken much about Huet. Colbert “admitted to me that mistakes were made in the distribution, but that they would be remedied in the future”; Rapin promised to “press [Colbert] about this from time to time.” On July 2, Rapin reported a third conversation with Colbert about the gratifications, where the minister assured him yet again that Huet would be remembered.160 Fortunately for Rapin, Huet only had to wait until the end of July when the second distribution was announced. Yet Rapin did not rest, because one gratification did not guarantee another. By then, he had another iron in the fire for his friend: convincing the king (which meant convincing Colbert) that the royal purse should finance publication of Huet’s edition of Origen. (The clergy of France had declined the honor in 1660.)161 Thus, after thanking Colbert on Huet’s behalf, Rapin encouraged Huet to write to the king immediately, making sure that he mentioned his desire to dedicate the Origen to the king. Rapin also advised Huet to compose a new ode for the king “in imitation of those Horace wrote to Augustus.”162


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Huet took the hint, rapidly composing the Athena ode. It was more explicit than his first ode about the importance of poetry to a ruler’s future reputation, strongly implying that, just as Augustus had honored poets like Horace, so Louis XIV should honor poets like himself. Huet began by asserting the connection between the arts, political power, and remembrance. Athena herself descended from her father’s aerie realm to address Louis as she had Achilles. She demanded to know why he trusted monuments and sculptures to transmit his name and glorious deeds to posterity. Time consumes such contrivances rapidly, she warned, just as it destroys all things made by mortal men. Only Calliope, muse of epic poetry, can constrain time; only she dares unravel what a dark fate has woven. Certainly, Huet was aware of the conflict between selfless service to the Muses (a lesson frequently reiterated by Mambrun) and the mercenary aspects of a poet for hire. So much is clear from a letter Huet wrote Ménage that same August in which he rationalized the potentially shameful aspect of writing verse for pay by appealing to the exaltedness of the source of the command.163 However, Huet’s Athena ode implicitly denied that the poet became servile even when the poet’s art served the state. The poet possessed a power the king lacked, a fact that Colbert’s cultural program also assumed: the priceless gift of representation, not just in the present but to future generations. Rarely hesitant to criticize Huet’s work, Rapin was particularly fastidious about this second effort. Thus, while he praised the beauty, the Latinity, and the erudition of a draft in September 1663, he also filled a page with detailed comments, though he sought to soften the impact of his critique by writing, “I don’t presume to have good reason for all this, I’m only communicating my scruples.”164 Perhaps Huet really did take offense, for, in his next letter, Rapin apologized, assuring Huet that he had spoken less out of a sense of his own competence, than a desire to obey Huet’s request for advice.165 Yet Huet must have taken some of his friend’s advice, for Rapin declared that he found the printed version of the poem “more beautiful” than the one he had reviewed at Bâville. He also promised to distribute copies as Huet wished and to give it to Colbert as soon as possible.166 Rapin presented it in person one Sunday in early November. Colbert appeared to be very pleased, Rapin reported, and he accepted the poem into a collection he was assembling for the king. The ode also found favor with others, though Rapin sounded a note of personal insecurity when he expressed his hope that success would not displace Rapin in Huet’s affections.167 Did Louis XIV appreciate the learned efforts of a poet like Huet? In a letter of December 1662, Ménage announced that the king was learning Latin with Périer as tutor. A few weeks later, Périer reported to Ménage that the king had written a flawless composition and would perhaps be able to understand Périer’s odes soon.168 But Huet was unimpressed by Ménage’s good news of the king’s progress. “Should the king acquire some taste for


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letters,” he wrote on January 8, 1663, “we would have reason to hope that the barbarism presently threatening us might retreat for some years.” Nevertheless, he doubted such a hope had any reasonable foundation.169 Huet’s dark comment anticipates a cultural showdown. It would not have mattered whether Louis XIV could savor Huet’s poems as long as support for this form of civic expression remained strong among the king’s advisors. Huet and his poet friends were swimming upstream against a powerful vernacular current, however. Competition between the French and Latin muses dated from the sixteenth century, though “it is somewhat ironic that the author [ Joachim Du Bellay] of the Défense et illustration de la langue française should be the finest Latin poet of France.”170 In the seventeenth century, vernacular literature became the cause of a competing community of learning located in the salons (chapter 3). Here a quick look at Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique conveys the stakes in the conflict and its gendering. Rapin, who generally steered “a middle path between Ancients and Moderns,”171 did not reject vernacular verse per se or the possibility that vernacular poets might eventually equal or even surpass the Ancients. Nor did writing in a classical language automatically ensure Rapin’s approval, whether the poet wrote in the first century before Christ or the sixteenth afterward. Contemporary vernacular poetry was inferior, he argued, for two reasons: the willful rejection by vernacular poets of the best models and advice for poetic creation (the Ancients), and a foolish investment of literary authority in inappropriate groups (the mixed-sex gatherings of the salons). In other words, Rapin implicitly defended the communities of learning discussed in this chapter—the erudite Republic of Letters writ large, and the subgroups of the Academia Briosa and Huet’s circle of poet friends. Given his Jesuit education and vocation, much that he writes is familiar—but he did not claim to offer an original theory. He intended to restate Aristotle’s poetics, which constituted the only rule any poet would ever need.172 It was “nature made into method” and “good sense reduced to principles.” A poet only achieved perfection by following these guides; he only failed if he did not.173 When it came to the age-old question whether a poet was born or made, Rapin believed in the necessity of natural talent (génie)—indeed, he stressed it. However, he also held that natural talent without art produced nothing worth reading. Inasmuch as his contemporaries rejected the rules and ancient exemplars, they condemned themselves to producing poetry that was trivial in every respect: in the intellectual capacity that inspired poetry and that its composition exercised (mere imagination versus true genius), in subject, in expression, and in effect. Rapin’s assessment of contemporary tragedy illuminates the gendered character of his literary critique. French tragedians, he charged, appealed to the interests and the capacities of their spectators, “women, who have set


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themselves up as the arbiters of these diversions, and who have usurped the right to judge.”174 So romantic love found its way into tragedy and degraded the genre, because it was inherently opposed to the majesty appropriate to tragedy. No wonder, Rapin opined, that the pleasures of modern tragedies lasted barely two years, while those of the Greeks endured after two millenia. The Ancients knew better than to mix gallantry and love with tragic themes; they had comedy for that. By ignoring such basic distinctions, contemporary authors made “the new” tragedy “overly effeminate.”175 Rapin’s litany of modern tragedy’s sins ranged from frivolous subjects and fussy language to soulless speeches. All conspired to rob tragedy of its intended, transformative effect on the spectator. Nothing remained to shock, ravish, or surprise. Unmoved, he or she left the theater the same person who had entered. Tragedy was mere entertainment; it ceased being a moral experience. Rapin published his thorough critique of the Moderns in the midst of a decade-long battle during which the defenders of Latin suffered a public setback: the Quarrel of the Inscriptions. At issue was the language of the inscriptions on a new triumphal arch.176 Some of France’s best neo-Latin poets, Santeuil among them, argued that they should be in Latin. The Jesuit Lucas delivered a harangue at Clermont on November 25, 1676, that vigorously defended the use of Latin as eternal, immutable, and universal, thus most appropriate for advertising Louis’s glory to all nations and to future generations.177 Colbert backed the advocates of French, a treachery that Santeuil denounced in later poems. The arch itself was never built, and Latin inscriptions continued to adorn public monuments (indeed, that was one of the chief tasks of the Academy of Inscriptions, founded in 1663). Yet the Latinists had lost their monopoly.178 In 1685, Louis ordered that the Latin inscriptions begun in the gallery at Versailles be replaced with French texts. In his public representations, Louis XIV continued to don the armor of a Roman emperor, but the new Augustan age would speak French.

Huet at the Crossroads Rapin’s Réflexions and the Quarrel of the Inscriptions anticipate a more troubled period in Huet’s career and in French culture. These first two chapters tell a happier story: how successfully Huet was socialized into the Republic of Letters, how efficiently he extended his intellectual networks in France and abroad, how effectively he used an erudite literary genre to consolidate relationships and to lay the foundation for a successful career. Chapter 1 began with the autobiography Huet wrote as an old, embittered man; chapter 2 now concludes with an autobiography in which Huet sounded a different, generally optimistic note.


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In contrast to the Commentarius with its ineffectual echoes of Augustine, Huet found the epistolary poem a congenial form for autobiographical reflections. It provided a way of speaking about himself in tune with his formation and inclinations and the intellectual world to which he now fully belonged.179 Following Horace’s maxim, the epistolary form should delight, but it had a serious purpose, too. It was personal, but in an intentionally conventionalized way. In short, it was well suited for crafting a representation of self. Huet never intended to plumb the depths of his soul or celebrate his individuality, even if such anachronistic goals had occurred to him. Nor was the epistolary poem that he composed and dedicated to Ménage any more (or less) transparent or authentic than the Commentarius. To paraphrase Robert S. Sayre, like any autobiography, Huet’s epistle reveals as much about the assumptions of his audience (learned men like himself) as about his own “self”; it is a cultural, not just a personal, document. A coming-of-age tale, it recounts how Huet realized and eventually embraced his scholarly vocation because a community of friends and mentors intervened aggressively at a perilous moment during his adolescence. It tells how Huet became an intellectual—more important, how he became an ethical actor in a community committed to serving the Muses. Huet began with a lament, a trope familiar from Huet’s correspondence with Mambrun. He reviewed the difficulties he had encountered in serving the Muses.180 He claimed to write while weak in body and spirit and consumed by a great unhappiness. Constant cares fatigued this “servant of the Muses,” distracting him from the more wholesome exercise of his intellectual gifts. The intolerance of provincial life troubled him. The citizen who cherished a quiet life of modest public duty scorned military men. Whoever wielded the arms of Mars condemned the merchant. Whoever worshipped Apollo and the Muses (including Huet) wasted his life examining books and ridiculed everyone else with pedantic absurdity. The rustic despised the city; the city dweller turned up his nose at the odor of the countryside. Each raged against the other, asserting the superiority of his way of life and disparaging those of other people. Ménage had it easier in Paris. Everyone there minded his own business, and one could always hide away, oblivious to any but one’s own concerns. If only the Fates had similarly blessed Caen’s citizens! Then they would discharge their duties and settle their differences amicably without fear of scurrilous tongues or the criticisms of haughty women. Still, if the Fates denied Huet and his city that much, he still had the freedom to complain. Huet then recounted how he came to embrace the seemingly thankless task of serving the Muses, drawing on an honorable humanist trope originating with Cicero and popularized by Petrarch.181 Not yet fifteen, Huet confronted the same choice that a youthful Hercules faced at the crossroads: Virtue or pleasure? “Entreated by austere virtue,” Huet determined to embrace the former and spurn the latter. He set to work educating a “noble


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heart” in honorable things and devoting himself to the study of antiquity. “Study demands immense labors, but sweetly,” and he mused somewhat rhetorically whether his efforts would be fruitful. Yet Huet could not pursue his choice in peace. A good man, whom Huet cherished because of his friendship with his deceased father, criticized him sharply. “What good will this do you, O most stupid youth?” What was more insane than accumulating a mountain of books? What greater waste of youth was there than reading the decayed monuments of antiquity? Huet would fail to improve himself and become useless to his town and his relatives; he would be a laughingstock to gentlemen and a source of grief to his friends. He urged Huet to reverse course immediately: Enter society, be joyful, amuse himself with his peers, dress smartly, and find a rich wife. Thunderstruck, Huet promptly abandoned “the sweet Muses” and began to sleep until noon, perfume his hair, and seek the company of attractive women. No sooner had Huet embarked on this new course when “faithful and intimate friends” such as Moisant de Brieux, Bochart, and Halley intervened. The chastisements of “distinguished Mambrun . . . wise in Calliope’s precepts” stung the most. Mambrun called Huet back to his first love by holding up to him his shameful life. Huet had abandoned virtue and submitted to vice. “Now idleness and deceitful nonsense please you?” Huet now found honorable things contemptible and frolicked with “distinguished” peers. “But these were not the expectations you gave of yourself when you devoted your youth to the consuming, noble cares of Apollo,” Mambrun reminded him. “And if all virtue has not fled your heart, drive out voluptuousness, and return to your earlier life.”182 Ashamed, Huet repented and hastened to renew his devotion to letters, though the clamor and malice of the vulgar continued to torment him. Huet did not conclude the epistle, however, with a chastened version of himself scrambling back onto the path of virtue. Instead, he closed with a version of one of Phaedrus’s fables—precisely the kind of homey tale on which young students cut their Latin teeth. An old man, a young boy, and a small donkey were making their way along a road when a passerby commented on the folly of their not riding. So the two mounted the donkey. Soon after, another traveler disapproved of how cruelly they were burdening their animal. So the old man ordered the young boy to walk. Yet another traveler chided the old man for caring so much about his own comfort. Should he not pity someone of tender years? So the old man dismounted and set the young boy on the donkey’s back. Following behind, he goaded the donkey with sharp blows. Still another traveler remarked that he ought not beat the donkey, but force the boy to walk. The fable was no more original than the exemplary tale of Hercules at the crossroads, and Huet was not the only author to rehearse it during the seventeenth century (La Fontaine published another version in 1668).183 Yet Huet’s point was not originality; rather, he


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adapted the fable to his own purposes and administered a moral lesson. Thus, miserable indeed was the man who cared about the reproaches of others, Huet concluded; you had to proceed untroubled once you had chosen a particular course. As in “Epiphora,” Huet had some fun in his epistolary poem. Yet overall it expressed the very serious ideal that Huet embraced the rest of his life: that the Muses had singled him out for a life of strenuous, even heroic service. It shows how fully he identified the pursuit of learning with the way of virtue; this prompted him to reject incompatible opportunities, such as a position with the Parlement of Rouen and marriage and family. Without any enemy in particular (those would come later), Huet declared himself at odds with the world. Perhaps this representation contradicts the Huet we have seen in these first two chapters: a man vigilant for the main chance who eagerly secured his portion of worldly goods. Never mind. The point is that by the time Huet was thirty, he had traveled a long way up Parnassus. If he had not yet reached its summit, he had achieved a vantage point high above many of his fellows—and with more than a little help from his friends. Huet would no longer have the assistance of perhaps his most devoted, if most challenging and querulous friend, though. Pierre Mambrun died on October 31, 1661. Letters from Rapin confirmed the news and expressed sympathy for a loss that Rapin also felt keenly.184 “Above all, let us speak about the death of poor Mambrun,” Huet wrote two weeks later to Ménage, “which moves me as terribly as if I had lost a father. I knew him from my childhood, and, for as long as I knew him, I loved him, and I received from him all possible proofs that he loved nothing in the world as much as me.”185 To console himself and to memorialize his friend, Huet turned to the literary passion the two men had shared: He composed a Latin poem. The poem was to be published with other testimonials in a collection assembled by Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, a friend of Mambrun and dedicatee of two of his poems.186 In fact, Huet dedicated his memorial poem to Montmor, which gives it a Janus-like nature: On the one hand, it looked back on Huet and Mambrun’s friendship; on the other, it looked ahead to Huet’s scientific interests during the 1660s, because Montmor hosted a Parisian scientific academy that Huet attended. Thus, the poem typically served multiple functions—memorializing a friend and an important citizen of the Republic of Letters, confirming friendship among his survivors, and securing the favor of a prominent contemporary. As Huet had once sent his poems to Mambrun for comment, so he subjected this one to newer friends. Ménage submitted his criticisms in letters.187 Marginal comments on an extant draft suggest that Huet reviewed the poem with two other colleagues, probably Rapin and Chapelain, perhaps even in person. If so, the intimate group that criticized Huet’s draft was a direct result of Mambrun and Huet’s friendship. Although many comments are illegible,


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the frankness that characterized Huet’s relationship with Mambrun continued in his friends’ critique. “Obscure in expression.” “Harsh.” “Not natural.” The last ten lines are crossed out altogether; perhaps “R” and “Ch” thought Huet tugged too hard at the heartstrings and invoked the prophetic spirit of poetry too long.188 Huet began his elegy by claiming that he had taken up his lyre three times to mourn Mambrun, but grief frustrated his attempts. He briefly recited Mambrun’s virtues, intellectual gifts, and poetic achievements; he summarized the education and Polonius-like advice he received from his beloved teacher. The three lines that begin Huet’s description of their experience together capture particularly well the emotional tenor of his and Mambrun’s relationship—and perhaps the relationships between teachers and students before and ever since. Huet recalled how, as a brash youth, he boldly dared to wander into Minerva’s path. “Where are you off to in such a rush?” Mambrun asked. “You’ll be safer if you go with me.”189


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Chapter 3

THE EMPIRE OF WOMEN, 1651–89 Je veux que vous soiés ma Reine Mais je veux etre votre Roi. —Huet, poem for Madame de Coulanges

A Gendered Intellectual Geography “When you set to work, you work for the learned; when you amuse yourself and relax, you work for us, and you do not disdain our sex.”1 With these words, the Marquise de Lambert thanked Huet for sharing his novel Diane de Castro and for giving her a copy of his treatise on novels. Huet composed Diane de Castro, ou le faux Inca when he was twenty-five, and decades passed before he permitted anyone to read it. The marquise probably composed her note early in the eighteenth century.2 Certainly, the letter struck a nostalgic tone. Believing that literary taste had declined, she looked back to Lafayette’s works as “perfect models” of the genre. She praised Huet’s novel for its inventiveness and for setting a good example. “As we have been banished, Monsieur, from the land of reason and learning, and have been left the empire of the imagination, we should at least dream nobly, and intelligence and feeling should have some part in our illusions.” Here I want to extend the marquise’s distinction of female and male learning to create an umbrella concept, “The Empire of Women,” that will cover the range of female intellectual endeavors discussed in this chapter. The phrase intentionally suggests a contrast with the Republic of Letters. Superficially, the two “states” possessed similar modes of communication and sociability, social bonds, and genres of intellectual expression. Conversation, correspondence, love, friendship, collaboration, and poetry were central social practices and intellectual activities in both the Empire of Women and Huet’s Republic of Letters. Citizens of both worried about authenticity and transparency. Yet, as the terms “empire” and “republic” imply different principles of organization and interaction (hierarchical versus egalitarian), so the same words signal different social and intellectual realities that were frequently characterized in gendered terms. The two states engaged throughout 77


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the century in a running “debate between pedantry and honnêteté, between rules and freedom, between knowledge and taste.”3 Finally, by directing our steps toward the Empire of Women, we visit a place where cultural forces were massing to transform the Republic of Letters. Relationships between states, however, are rarely as oppositional as propagandists would have us believe—especially those sharing a border. The boundary between the Empire of Women and the Republic of Letters was porous, though nearly all of the traffic moved from the republic to the empire. Huet and many of his male friends enjoyed sojourning there and derived real material benefits from doing so. Like many early modern states, the empire had provinces with distinctive characters. The province of learned women enjoyed cordial relations with the republic, while the kingdom of the cartésiennes bristled with guard towers (chapter 5). Moreover, women liked to travel. A learned nun could be a salonnière, and a vernacular novelist could ambivalently engage with Latin literature. Thus, while this chapter serves to introduce some of the conflicts that transformed the Republic of Letters, it also recovers the lived intellectual and affective reality that Huet and his female friends created and sustained for decades despite philosophical divisions. This account of Huet’s friendships also adds substantially to our knowledge of his life. It reveals tensions largely submerged in the autobiography’s portrayal of the pious bishop, but which surviving snippets of gossip and contemporary assessments suggest: that Huet’s “knowledge of [the Tricotais] served more to draw attention and get him to Paris and the court” than his prodigious and precocious learning, a judgment prompted by an eighteen-year-old Huet’s expert dancing at one of Montausier’s balls; or that the elder Huet was “a true sage, loving the world and pleasure, abandoning himself in turns to society and to retreat, grieving that he lacked piety, yet nevertheless a good bishop.”4 The fact is Huet always liked women. His affectionate relationships with them began with his mother, whom he described as possessing a “delicate and penetrating intelligence” and a keen perception of the ridiculous that made her an unsurpassed storyteller. “I lost her at six years, and though that age is hardly sensible to tenderness, gratitude, and the sweet passions of the heart, I can nevertheless assure you that I never experienced such an enduring and penetrating pain.”5 As a man, Huet thoroughly enjoyed flirting. He also had a gift for friendship with women, and he was sincerely enthusiastic about his friends’ intellectual endeavors. Thus, Huet was naturally attracted to salon society, probably first in Caen, then in Paris. Moreover, these social venues offered more than the company of intelligent, comely females. During the 1650s and ’60s, they were intellectually exciting and culturally vigorous, naturally attractive to a young man drawn to creative activity. Moreover, as Viala has stressed, a successful career in letters required participation in a


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variety of cultural milieus to make connections, secure sponsorship, and establish a reputation through a variety of reinforcing interactions. Moving between these sociointellectual spaces—from the homosocial, learned academy to the mixed-sex, but female-dominated salon—required real skill, because the erudition a young man flaunted in an academy would provoke disapproval in a salon.6 Participating in both worlds ultimately posed a fundamental problem for Huet: how to reconcile the hostility of mondain culture to the ethos of learning that had first claim on his loyalty. His friendships with women raise larger questions, too, about the possibility and nature of intellectual friendship between men and women in the early modern period. If intellectual friendship was the ground from which intellectual endeavor emerged in the Republic of Letters, and if that ideal was homosocial, how could one interact with women who had intellectual aspirations? Generally speaking, women were inferior to men in French society according to the laws of nature, yet, in the social setting of a salon, women were superior according to the laws of gallantry. If a working relationship between intellectuals required equality, what kind of working relationship was possible between individuals defined a priori as unequal? In her wildly popular novel Clélie (1654), Madeleine de Scudéry provided three routes from “new” to “tender” friendship in the Carte du Tendre that delighted her readers.7 In contrast, we will follow Huet on one, meandering path through the Empire of Women. After discussing the education of women generally, this chapter proceeds through several themes—the learned woman, salons, conversation, the problem of authenticity in a competitive society, the relationship between literary genres and friendship, and Huet’s treatise on the novel. These do not proceed in strict chronological order, and some of Huet’s female friends appear in more than one context. To minimize confusion, figure 5 presents brief descriptions of Huet’s female friends in order of appearance, and figure 6 presents in chronological order the events discussed in this chapter. Like sojourners in the world depicted in Scudéry’s map, we will encounter dangers (duplicity, pedantry, matrimony) and safe havens (conversation, love, friendship). Huet’s friendships with women are also a way to investigate the interlocking genres and modes of sociability that characterized female learning, which here includes activities other than publication. We meet women who only corresponded with Huet and (no doubt) conversed with him, because conversation and letter writing were related social and literary skills, and because this respects the more fluid notion of “authorship” during the period.8 The concluding discussion of Huet’s treatise on the novel proves that, however much Huet enjoyed salon society and acquired a certain cultural bilingualism, he eventually rejected the larger cultural ambitions of female learning.


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Figure 5. Genre and Sociability in the Empire of Women


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Figure 6. Time Line of Huet’s Interactions in the Empire of Women


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Educating Women Huet was already bishop of Soissons (1685–89) when he encountered the young noblewoman, Marie-Élisabeth de Rochechouart, at fashionable Bourbon, whose salubrious waters were celebrated by Rapin in his poem on gardens.9 She was reading while her companions engaged in more lighthearted activities. When she saw Huet, she concealed her book—but not fast enough. Huet insisted on seeing it. Reluctantly, she surrendered a Greek edition of Plato’s dialogues. She wanted him to keep it secret, but she also wanted his help. Huet gave it gladly, writing in his autobiography that he found her extraordinary learning and modesty captivating.10 Huet obviously did not expect to find such erudition in a young lady who was the daughter of a duke and the lady-in-waiting to a duchess—and for good reason. The education even of elite women was haphazard, reflecting society’s ambivalence about how educated women ought to be.11 (Here we are concerned exclusively with women of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes; literacy rates dropped sharply further down the social ladder.) Two factors did encourage improved education for women after the sixteenth century: the recognition by Catholics and Protestants alike of the mother’s role in fashioning good Christians, and the increasingly complex role that (elite) wives assumed upon marrying. Yet this did not much improve the chances of a woman receiving advanced training, nor did a vigorous continuation in the seventeenth century of the querelle des femmes. Before 1660, at least fifty “feminist” publications argued the case for female dignity, emphasizing education more than previous authors had.12 Still, the eloquent, wellreasoned appeals of female intellectuals like Marie de Gournay (1565–1645) and Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) went unheeded.13 In the eighteenth century, the Marquise de Lambert still scolded men for “neglecting [women’s] education, filling their minds with nothing solid, and destining them solely to please.”14 Arguing for the advanced education of women meant arguing against notions of female moral and intellectual weakness based on a potent mix of Christian theology and ancient medical teachings.15 A study of Théophraste Renaudot’s scientific conferences (1633–42) reveals that while ancient conceptions of the physical world were retreating, Aristotle, Plato, and Galen still dominated descriptions of women’s physiology, which in turn defined women’s social roles. Most conferees agreed that women’s inferiority was due to “natural” differences arising from different humoral natures (cold and wet for women, hot and dry for men). The “humidity” of a woman’s brain prevented her from acquiring knowledge and developing good judgment, thus making female education futile. An educated woman might also be tempted to assert an authority over her husband “contrary to the institution of marriage.”16 Female educators shared this limited view of female


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intellectual capacity. “We have as much memory, but less judgment than men,” asserted Madame de Maintenon, governess of Louis XIV’s children and later his wife. “We are more distracted, more frivolous, less inclined to serious things.”17 Because men and women possessed different physical and moral constitutions, the classical education that promoted virtue in young men might put young women in moral jeopardy. Boastful because of their beauty, Bossuet wrote in 1660, women would become even more so if convinced they possessed intellectual distinction. Thus, society rightly denied them access to advanced study, “not so much . . . out of fear of engaging their minds in a too lofty enterprise, but of exposing their humility to a too-dangerous test.”18 Abbé Fleury, preceptor to royal pupils, agreed that advanced studies would only make women vain.19 Fénelon straddled the fence in his Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687). Some women might be permitted to learn Latin, but he restricted Latin instruction to well-behaved and serious girls who were not motivated by “vain curiosity” and who would not show off.20 As Wendy Gibson has observed, even positive statements of women’s intellectual capacities were hedged with qualifications that nullified them in effect.21 Finally, advocates of female education had persistently failed to address the question, “Education for what?”22 The humanist curriculum provided essential training for public life. If women were a priori excluded from public life, if injunctions to modesty and social disapproval inhibited writing and publishing, what was the point? Erasmus’s recommendations, which Anna Maria van Schurman reiterated, proved unpersuasive: that education for women of the upper orders actually made women better wives, prevented idleness and its evil consequences, and attracted the mind to virtue.23 It is hardly surprising then that “no matter what school a girl went to, there was little danger she would emerge a scholar.”24 Clearly, women faced daunting obstacles when it came to acquiring even the basic intellectual skills needed to participate in a rich intellectual culture—which was precisely the point. Once a young girl learned to read the vernacular, would she piously confine her attentions to worthy works, or would she read novels? Would she, like the nuns supervised by one of Huet’s friends, even peruse forbidden books smuggled into France from Dutch publishers?25 Finally, as Huet’s encounter with Rochechouart proves, some acquired training in Latin and Greek. Because the doors of the collèges were closed to them, women generally received such instruction in the home from private tutors, frequently at the instigation of a male relative. Huet’s friends Jean Chapelain and Gilles Ménage tutored Madame de Sevigné, who became accomplished in Italian, Spanish, and Latin.26 Huet played a similar role in the education of Maria Dupré. Her uncle, Roland Desmarets, taught her Latin, Greek, rhetoric, poetry, and philosophy,27 and he requested Huet to write to her in Latin in 1662. Huet began with a letter


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that praised her excellent intelligence, the pleasantness of her writing, and many other gifts of body and soul.28 He promised to answer her letters, closing with the salutation, “Farewell, most excellent maiden.” Dupré replied that she was embarrassed by the incommensurability of his compliments and her modest gifts; nevertheless, she had ambition. She sent him a philological work written in epistolary form, adding that she could think of no greater pleasure than his approval.29 Huet’s response was encouraging. He was pleased that she wanted to mingle with the “princes of letters.” If she continued undeterred by “the vain advice . . . [and] . . . importunate chatter of inept women,” she would rank first among educated women—and even compete with erudite men. He gallantly declared himself pleased that she had proven so worthy of praise, “since I previously decided to praise you to everyone.” Yet she had one fault: she was too serious. “Take care, young woman, ‘about whom hovers Mirth and Desire,’ not to be so severe that you repel both! Other women have laughed, even the learned.”30 He gaily reinforced his advice with a short poem. “We poets are a joyful race,” because Apollo and the Muses commanded it. “Oh, set aside that pinched appearance, Dupré, your excessive studies have made you gloomy!”31 Emphasizing the gendered aspects of Huet’s interactions with Dupré obscures other important features. What is most noteworthy about Huet’s letters to Dupré is how much they resemble the early letters of his teacher, Pierre Mambrun, to him. Dupré was not as advanced as Huet had been, so Huet adjusted to her weaker linguistic skills. In all other respects, we find the same features in Huet’s letters as in Mambrun’s: praise and encouragement, a promise to fulfill one’s epistolary commitment, the integration of learned quotations into the text (Huet pinched “about whom hovers Mirth and Desire” from Horace), and the gift of a poem. Nor did Huet take the Latin poems he sent Dupré less seriously than those he sent to his male erudite friends. He subjected the poems he wrote for her to Ménage’s judgment, for example, prompting a testy exchange in which Ménage declared one of Huet’s objections as “the nullest of all nullities.”32 Huet supported Ménage’s efforts to teach Latin to Madame de Lafayette (apparently Rapin helped, too). An enthusiastic supporter of female intellectual activity, Ménage published a catalogue of the learned women of antiquity in 1692 and even proposed several women for membership in the Académie Française.33 In August 1661, he wrote Huet, “It’s been two years since [Lafayette] took it into her head to learn Latin.”34 Like Huet, Ménage wrote Latin letters to his female pupil, adjusting his prose to a beginner’s capacities. He wrote of current events, because readily identified subjects are easier to understand with a limited vocabulary. In September 1661, for example, he discussed the sudden imprisonment of Louis XIV’s finance minister Fouquet and Fouquet’s secretary, Pellisson, an event that shook le


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monde and threatened the fortunes and peace of mind of friends like Scudéry. To comment on Fouquet’s uncertain fate, but also to indicate verb tenses and insert a bit of erudition, he quoted an oracular raven that, according to Suetonius, alighted on the capitol a few months before the demise of an unpopular emperor: “‘Est bene’ non potuit dicere, dixit ‘erit’” (It could not say, ‘It is well’; It said ‘It will be’). A letter from October 1661 promised that Lafayette and Ménage would read together one of Ovid’s Epistolae Heroidum or another Latin text at their next meeting. “Again and again I encourage you, dearest Laverna, not to abandon the study of Latin.” Ménage even considered her progress in Latin sufficient to add some Greek to their private curriculum. A letter of 1663 suggests steady progress; another of March 1664 indicates that Ménage’s choice of Ovid’s Epistolae was inspired. Ménage was not surprised that she thought so highly of them, as “nothing is more ingenious, nothing more skillful, nothing more elegant.”35 It is difficult to square Lafayette’s reports of her mixed progress with Segrais’s claim that she surpassed her teachers within three months.36 Male gallantry inclined toward hyperbole, while female modesty tended toward understatement. Thus, Lafayette wrote to Huet in October 1661, “I will not speak Latin well for a long time if I continue [as I do]”; she complained that she had not been able to study because of recent travels. She persevered, though. A year later, she acknowledged the receipt of some Latin verse from Huet: “I can . . . assure you that I’ve read them; but I could not assure you without presumption that I understood them; nonetheless, with the help of M[onsieur] Ménage, you can well believe I’ll arrive at the goal.” We do not know what she made of Ménage’s suggestion that she learn Greek, but she bridled at Huet’s suggestion about Hebrew. He never would have made such a suggestion, she wrote in July 1663, if he knew how badly her Latin studies progressed. She claimed to know no more than when she began. “Nevertheless, I take the liberty to read Virgil, as unworthy as I am.” Indeed, she objected to Huet’s representation of Aeneas. If the ancient warrior had been as timorous and pious as Huet maintained, Aeneas would have hidden rather than make war on Italy and go to Vespers rather than accompany Dido into a cave.37 Lafayette sometimes dropped her Latin studies altogether. Such was the case in February 1663, though she assured Huet that she had read his ode “without anyone’s help.” However playful, the letter’s defiance suggests a desire to retreat from the world of erudition into which Ménage and Huet sought to guide her. It expresses the typical hostility of the salonnière for learned men.38 She assured Huet that she had singled him out for special treatment by even bothering to read his ode several times. She refused to do the same for other “Messieurs of Antiquity,” whom she threw over as soon as she had to puzzle out a difficulty; she would rather “have all my learning destroyed than construe sentences.” She even taunted Huet with


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her intellectual philistinism. “[ J]ust seeing the cover of a book gives us a headache,” she wrote in 1665 of her and her friends, “and reading the most beautiful work in the world taxes our powers of comprehension if it exceeds the length of a madrigal”—words that would echo darkly in Huet’s critique of French culture many years later.39

The Learned Woman Did Huet’s willingness to assist Rochechouart, Dupré, and Lafayette indicate a belief in the equality of female intellectual capacity? He clearly took pride in the achievements of the women he befriended, recording them in his autobiography as he would those of any male érudit, and he endeavored to further their efforts. It seems likely, however, that he recognized the exceptional intellectual achievements of some women as just that—exceptional. Of these, perhaps the most exceptional were those whom he might characterize as truly “learned.” But, as chapters 1 and 2 have demonstrated, being “learned” for a man meant participating in a particular form of intellectual friendship that created a space for collaborative endeavor. Did any woman in Huet’s orbit possess the skills, commitment, and opportunities to undertake collaborative intellectual endeavors of an erudite variety? More important: Was Huet receptive to such collaboration? The most likely candidate was Anne Dacier (1654–1720), daughter of the famous érudit Tanneguy Le Fèvre. She is famous today for starting the second round in the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in 1699 with her translation of Homer.40 Yet the astrologer who cast her horoscope at birth had rejected its prediction of “a brilliance that could not be fitting for a girl.”41 She befriended Huet and Ménage, who dedicated Historia mulierum philosopharum (1692) to her.42 Adrien Baillet’s praise of her in Jugemens des savans (1685–86) typically confounded gender and ethical concerns. Her mastery of the “difficult science of criticism” had silenced “the most envious of men,” who denied that women had the tenacity for erudite projects; it also shamed “most of her sex, who live soft and idle lives, and who have no other study but amusement and malicious gossip.”43 Yet when Huet hired her as an editor for the Ad usum Delphini, she was still the modest young woman her father described in 1671: “She doesn’t want anyone to know that she knows Latin and Greek . . . I do wish she wasn’t so timid.”44 The Ad usum Delphini originated in the education of the crown prince. It was to be a new edition of Latin classics adapted to the “needs of the studious young man,” Huet explained to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in 1673. Finding competent editors was difficult, however, “for we know that the number of Scaligers and Saumaises in the world is few indeed, especially in this age when senility overtakes the despised study


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of humane letters.” As a result, Huet estimated that “a third of the work will be excellent, a third decent, and the rest barely passable.”45 Dacier quickly repaid Huet’s confidence, however—so much so that he entrusted her with four volumes.46 In his autobiography, he praised her work in glowing terms; he was proud too that she chose him as dedicatee of her Callimachus, which “she adorned . . . with many particulars and with learned notes surpassing the capacity of one of her sex.”47 A series of letters to Huet reveal Dacier’s diligence, care, and reliance on his editorial counsel. She solicited advice on typography, borrowed his Scaliger, and prodded him (albeit respectfully) to return proofs. Her shyness did not inhibit her from complaining about the Duc de Montausier’s stinginess when it came to her edition of Aurelius Victor’s Historiae romanae compendium (1681). Even when she presented the duke with the new edition in July 1681, she wrote to Huet, he persisted “in treating me worse than a printer.” Although Huet’s mediation failed to get her the funds she claimed she was entitled to, she did not blame Huet. Rather, “this little disgrace” was a lesson in caution. Nor did she regret the effort, which, she boasted, resulted in a volume superior to others in the series. She only hoped Huet’s satisfaction would equal her labor, “for there is no approval I desire as passionately as yours.” Huet and Dacier’s relationship was not all business, however. Writing in 1681 after Huet had become abbé at Aulnay, she declared that she understood why he abandoned Paris for the country, especially if it were as beautiful as the ode it inspired that he had sent her. Not even Horace’s descriptions of Tivoli could compare, she declared. Yet reading about his rural activities did not compensate for his absence. “The Muses enjoy themselves greatly in your beautiful library. Come, then, and do not deprive them [of your presence] any longer.”48 Despite her problems with Montausier, Dacier enjoyed a very rare opportunity through her relationship with Huet. She not only accomplished the same kind of projects that a male érudit might undertake, but published them under her own name. Yet she did not enjoy a continuing intellectual friendship similar to those Huet enjoyed with Ménage or Rapin in France or Graevius in the Netherlands. As Huet and Dacier both lived in Paris, they probably had substantive (and, alas, undocumented) conversations. It is telling, though, that she offered no advice on Huet’s ode. In other words, he apparently did not submit it as a work-in-progress for criticism, but offered it solely as a gift to enjoy. Dacier’s achievement was that much more impressive, given that a woman typically published even the most respectable projects anonymously or pseudonymously. The novel was always morally suspect, of course, but Lafayette even hesitated to claim authorship of her literary productions among friends. In a letter to Huet, Ménage concealed the identity of the “amiable [poetess] Doris” (a.k.a. Lafayette), because she


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did not want anyone to know that she composed poetry.49 Also, Lafayette chastised Huet for telling his sister that Lafayette was the author of La princesse de Monpensier, which she had sent to Huet as a gift for her. “Giving her my books like that, she will think I am a true, professional author,” she scolded. “Do something to repair the damage that this notion could do, spoiling the opinion that I want her to have of me.”50 For Lafayette, being a “professional” author violated both the noble injunction against doing anything resembling work and the female requirement of modesty. Modesty weighed especially heavily on the religious. On the one hand, the convent provided an amenable place to exercise intellectual gifts for many nuns. On the other, with learning came a sometimes unbearable tension between intellectual aspiration and Christian humility. Such was the case with Madame de Bellefont, a member of the noble family that had helped establish Caen’s Jesuit collège. She acknowledged Huet’s gift of the Origen commentaries shortly after publication in 1666. She possessed “a knowledge of Latin rare among persons of her sex,” as Huet put it, thus could appreciate the commitment and effort the work had required.51 She noted the “judicious discernment” that encouraged the reader to trust Huet’s judgments. Origen would have been overjoyed, she wrote, “if he had foreseen that you would study his writing so attentively . . . [he] would have chosen you very willingly for a judge, and, after the glory of having you for a translator, he would have been very content to have you as a protector.”52 Her comments on Huet’s Origen confirm the qualities her biographer, the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours, recorded in 1686: her natural honnêteté and sweetness tempered the rudeness that sometimes accompanied learning and gravitas.53 Yet Bouhours’s conventional hagiographic prose could not conceal the anguish that compelled Bellefont to renounce learned activities. Even her christening had signaled intellectual gifts beyond the capacity of her sex, because she “took the book from the person baptizing her and leafed through it in a surprising way” during the ceremony. She learned Latin despite mediocre tutors; she read ecclesiastical history and the church fathers when most girls read “bagatelles.” She became abbess at the Convent of the Trinity in Caen, then founded a new reforming convent in Rouen. Learned men sought her company and her criticism before publishing. Yet she terminated “those completely innocent” encounters after a serious illness, declaring her disgust with profane learning. In the end, she wrote, intellectual endeavors posed too great a temptation to vanity.54 Similar concerns haunted MarieÉlisabeth de Rochechouart’s sister, the abbess at Fontevrault who, according to Huet, concealed her exceptional erudition as if ashamed of being learned.55 No wonder some nuns claimed that their knowledge of Latin was divinely infused, a gift of God rather than a product of study. 56 Despite the intense social pressures on women to conceal their intellectual gifts, Huet insisted that the Abbess de Rohan publish La morale du sage.


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He met her in Caen when she was abbess of the Convent of the Trinity, and their association continued when she became abbess at Malnoue in 1654. Her talents were exceptional, according to the character study Huet contributed to Divers portraits (1659). There he praised her eloquence—and her writing even more. “[Y]our terms are chosen carefully, your ideas are developed clearly and richly, and your ideas are well considered, so much so that your writings could be taken more for the works of an Academician than someone of your sex; you excel by virtue both of your natural gifts and those you have acquired.”57 In his autobiography, Huet recalled that La morale began with a conversation during a visit in Caen. She needed a good translation of the Psalms and Solomon’s precepts to educate her flock of “ignorant girls.” Huet suggested that she do the translations herself. She would try if he would help.58 Because of its pious nature and purpose, Rohan’s project was acceptable from contemporary religious and gender perspectives. Nevertheless, the Jesuit Antoine Verjus, author of the introduction, took great pains to protect her reputation for modesty. He stressed that the decision to publish had not been hers, but that of “honorable men” who “snatched [La morale] from her hands,” because they had decided that “nothing should prevent such a precious treasure from being concealed any longer.”59 He also (rather paradoxically) assured readers that she always adhered to the literal sense of Scripture, though she often produced ideas different from those in other translations, giving the original “even more grace and power (if such were possible).”60 The fact is, Rohan made Solomon’s wisdom her own by crafting a work of social criticism. She probably did not consider her work “original” as we understand the term; rather, like any interpreter or preacher, she made the meaning of the original accessible to her audience by indicating the text’s relevance to their lives. When she did, Rohan satisfied Quintilian’s requirement, which Huet quoted twice in De optimo genere interpretandi, that a paraphrase should be “a contest and a rivalry [with the original] over the same meanings.”61 Huet seconded her in that contest, and, in a few years, she would assist Huet in writing his treatise on novels (see below).62

The Salon The contemporary relevance that Rohan gave to Solomon’s wisdom makes it an excellent entrée into the intensely competitive social world of salon culture. In La morale, Rohan expanded upon the distrust of the world that she had previously expressed in her literary self-portrait in Madame de Montpensier’s Divers portraits (1659), which Huet published anonymously at Caen at Montpensier’s request. Louis XIV’s cousin, Montpensier had been exiled to Normandy for her exploits during the Fronde, and Huet became


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connected to her circle through Segrais.63 According to the preface (generally attributed to Segrais), the fashion for literary portraiture began when three French noblewomen discovered the genre in the Netherlands. One of the “portraitists” put it more fancifully: The Muses had all gone to sleep, there was nothing worth reading anywhere, so everyone had taken up the latest fashion of composing character sketches in which “all men are Catos, or Caesars at least, and all women Lucretias or Octavias.”64 Not so, according to Rohan. For her, the world was so full of “wickedness, treachery, and cowardice,” it made fools of even “the most enlightened people.” She had become suspicious of “the most lovely appearances” and many things that would otherwise have pleased her.65 In La morale, Rohan frequently denounced the sin of amour-propre and echoed contemporary moralists in her use of “presomption,” “opiniâtreté,” and “passion.” Compare the King James version of Proverbs 16:25, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death,” with her reworking: Self-love so powerfully preoccupies the human mind that it forces from it the ability to tell right from wrong; thus blind to whatever concerns it, once a path appears agreeable, it can no longer discern whether it is perilous, and it does not perceive the danger until it has already fallen from the precipice where this tenebrous way ultimately led.66

She transformed other verses into vignettes of harsh seventeenth-century life. Proverbs 11:26, “He that withholdeth grain, the people shall curse him; but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it,” became an account of the calamity of crop failure: “He who compelled by a criminal avarice hoards his grain in his storehouses so he can sell to the people at an excessive price during periods of great public need will be cursed by God and man.”67 “The rich and poor meet together; the lord is the maker of them all (Proverbs 22:2)” became an apology for social hierarchy: The order that God has established in the diverse conditions of men is an admirable effect of the Providence to which both the rich and the poor should willingly submit; they also owe each other a mutual assistance that they cannot with justice refuse, the ones by service, the others by generosity; and both must remember that, as they have the same beginning, so they have the same end; and it matters little how they arrive there, be they rich or poor, but it matters enormously to arrive there.68

Rohan depicted a ruthless society fueled by ambition and self-interest, as dark as that evoked in La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. A false friend would immoderately praise you; then, nursing a secret envy, he would spew malicious gossip in your absence. Wealthy hosts cared less about satisfying their guests than their own ambitions; when they strived most to prove their friendship, they


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were “most tormented by their hatred and avarice.”69 Mendacity so dominated human nature that even the law became a tool of deception. Initially, at least, Huet embraced the spirit of salon society. “Nothing, I felt, so brilliantly demonstrated [French] politesse as to please [women],” he wrote in his autobiography. During the 1650s, he made every effort to attract female favor from taking special care with his toilette to “whispering into their ears the sweet nothings that feed passion.”70 Huet’s first experiences with salon culture were probably in Caen in Madame de Tilly’s home. He did not specify who introduced him into the Hôtel de Rambouillet, site of the oldest and most prestigious of Parisian salons, but Ménage and Segrais probably secured his entrée into Scudéry’s and Montpensier’s gatherings, respectively. French salons naturalized an Italian model of courtly sociability that had been widely disseminated through etiquette manuals.71 As a novice, Huet had to master the social skills of honnêteté, a secular code of behavior modeled on Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) and which fused humanist ethics and aristocratic values. Having broken free from the royal court during Henri IV’s reign, Parisian salons possessed some cultural autonomy, though their political power contracted after the Fronde, and their cultural influence decreased after the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign (1661). Salons differed from each other according to the temperament and interests of the (generally) aristocratic women who hosted them. Scudéry’s samedis de Sapho [sic] focused almost exclusively on literary questions, while other salons devoted themselves to more scientific topics (chapter 5). Historians have probably overstated the egalitarianism of these gatherings, which brought together noble and bourgeois. It was always more important for the bourgeois social climber to master honnêteté than the young man whose birth sufficed to secure position.72 In the salons, “members of traditional status groups mingled with those of newly powerful families in an elaborate form of social activity which ensured that those who had acquired economic status could also acquire social status.”73 These were also mixed-sex gatherings, though women who participated violated the proscriptions of traditional moralists: Avoid men, confine yourself to domestic tasks, and do not chatter.74 Although involving a miniscule percentage of the French population, salons had great cultural power.75 The growth of vernacular publication and of the French reading public made this possible. During this period, the entire French printing industry increased two-and-a-half times, while the percentage of learned works declined from 30 to 10 percent of the total.76 The salons became arbiters of language, taste, and literature, and salonnières expressed their deep antipathy to learned, humanist culture in a rhetoric of antipedantry and antierudition. In Les femmes illustres (1642), Scudéry’s fictional persona, “Sapho,” cajoled a young woman to develop her mental gifts; she advised her to compose vernacular poetry and to avoid the studia


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humanitatis, which would make her gloomy and anxious.77 Huet recorded how, in far away Sweden, Queen Christina’s physician warned her that the salonnières in Paris would disapprove of her learned occupations.78 Molière and Cyrano de Bergerac followed Italian comedians by making pedants figures of ridicule in their plays.79 In novels, the pedant became the antithesis of the honnête homme. A stock figure of ridicule, he was derided for everything from his personal hygiene to his provincial origins—and often accused of misogyny.80 Women declared “eternal war against the pedant and the provincial,”81 challenging the claim that intellect could only be expressed in Greek and Latin.82 On what basis did salonnières claim the right and the expertise to judge intellectual and cultural productions? Perspicacity came to them naturally. A lively and penetrating intelligence (esprit) that reasoned well and applied itself sufficiently could accomplish far more than the pedantic twaddle and nonsensical false learning of the schools.83 Igno rance was no impediment to a woman with such a mind. As one novel put it, women excelled in conversation, which was regarded as an art form, precisely because they were ignorant. Undimmed by scholarly maxims, their natural wits freely asserted themselves.84 Such natural abilities combined with the artful artlessness described in Scudéry’s Les femmes illustres (1642). The introduction acknowledged that even the Ancients had conceded that women possessed eloquence naturally “without art, effort, or difficulty,” while men labored to acquire it. Women could ignore the rhetorical rules taught in the schools, because “the most delicate artifice consists in making us believe that there is no artifice at all.”85 “I have known many [women of great learning] who know so well how to discern good things,” Jacques du Bosc wrote in L’honnête femme (1633), “that their conversation serves as a school for the most intelligent people, [and] the most excellent authors consult them as if they were Oracles.”86 The salonnière possessed a natural capacity for creation, too. Just as women only had to be seen to be loved, declared Abbé Charles Cotin in Oeuvres galantes (1662), so “they only have to desire to write in order to write well.”87 The recitation of a poem, the reading of a novel, the delivery of a witticism in conversation combined the social and the aesthetic into an experience that ultimately (and ideally) “civilized” the participants. The salons championed a vernacular literature that responded with suppleness to shifting fashions and that came into being in part through orality and collaborative effort. However, nothing was permitted to appear laborious in this world of effortless creativity; the appropriate attitude toward a literary production was a contrived négligence, a nonchalance resembling Castiglione’s sprezzatura.88 Salon ideology did not reject the notion of gender differences rooted in physiological differences; rather, it transformed into strengths characteristics traditionally considered weaknesses. The physiology that theoretically made


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women less rational also endowed them with more acute imaginations; consequently, they were more capable than men of judging works of the imagination. When Adrien Baillet wrote of their right to judge literature in the 1680s, he offered Malebranche’s updated form of conventional wisdom, not a novel observation. Malebranche attributed women’s superior judgment in “all things that strike the senses” to the “delicacy of the fibers in their brains.” Naturally possessing “more knowledge, ability, and finesse” in these areas, they rightfully “decide style, judge language, [and] discern good conduct and proper manners.”89 Nature, then, was the source of female sovereignty in the Empire of Women. There women avoided the intellectual terrain of erudition, one from which contemporary educational norms excluded them and in which they might figure as exceptions at best, freaks at worst. The standard compliment of female intellectual accomplishment as “beyond her sex” was ambiguous and ambivalent; learned women were “implicitly or explicitly allowed a place which was liminal.”90 It is both telling and typical that a sixteenth-century poet praised Mary, Queen of Scots, for her “virile” understanding of Latin.91 Similarly, when Huet described Dacier’s achievement as “supra muliebris sexus,” extolled the erudition of a learned nun as “supra sexus,” and identified Rohan’s intelligence with that of an Academician, he intended high praise.92 But he also implied that a learned woman was somehow not a woman; she had (or had acquired) a different nature and now thought like a man.

Learned and Polite Speech Conversation developed into a high art in the salons. As a form of oral intellectual exchange, it differed greatly from what Huet already knew in learned academies. Yet how do we analyze “talk” in the past? We cannot be flies on the wall, listening intently to the guests at one of Scudéry’s samedis or to the men gathered in Moisant de Brieux’s mansion. In both cases, we must rely on literary creations. Still, with caution, we can take these printed sources as “an echo and reflection of a lived reality.”93 Comparing dialogues composed by Huet with a sampling of conversations sketched by Scudéry gives an idea of how erudite discussion differed from salon conversation, at least in their ideal forms. “Everything begins and everything returns, of course, to the Platonic dialogue,” wrote Marc Fumaroli, a statement that attests to the enduring power of the form as intellectual activity and literary genre.94 For Cicero, dialogue in a setting removed from the distractions of daily life was an occupation worthy of a free man and a necessary respite from public duties. It combined social and intellectual objectives: friendship, leisure, elite solidarity, and, above all, the pursuit of knowledge. (The intellectual dialogue should


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not be confused with the disputation, which had a bad odor through association with Scholasticism.) The men of the Renaissance learned to speak from a variety of classical sources and from humanist schoolmasters like Erasmus. In “De l’art de conférer,” Montaigne championed a vigorous, even aggressive form of intellectual exchange; as “we are born to quest after truth,” he demanded discussion that “teaches us and exercises us at the same time” in “manly fellowship and familiarity.”95 In seventeenth-century France, learned speech proliferated in more or less formal academies, such as the meetings hosted by the brothers Dupuy, Moisant de Brieux, or Lamoignon; it was institutionalized in state-sponsored organizations such as the Académie Française and the Royal Academy of Sciences. Huet shared his contemporaries’ faith in the capacity of discussion to discover truth and that of the literary dialogue to communicate it. He used the genre in two scholarly works, De optimo genere interpretandi (1661) and Alnetanae quaestiones (1690). I concentrate on the former here, because its composition coincides with Huet’s early participation in the salons. It contains two dialogues. The first introduced the work and was a discussion between Huet and Jacques Graindorge, dedicatee of the treatise. In the second (and much longer) dialogue, three highly regarded learned men developed the treatise’s content: Isaac Casaubon, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, and Fronton du Duc. Both conversations took place in libraries, first Huet’s, where Graindorge found Huet huddled over his Origen (miserably, no doubt), then the king’s. The library setting satisfied a requirement of learned discussion—a place withdrawn from the world, for the Muses “do not enjoy themselves either in tumult or in noisy surroundings.”96 Huet’s choice of a library setting also signaled the seriousness and purposefulness of the exchanges, because they occurred in places where scholars work. Throughout both dialogues, the participants were civil, yet frank; they did not worry about hurting each other’s feelings or giving offense. For example, Graindorge did not conceal his “astonishment at the style [of Huet’s translation]” or fail to criticize it, albeit “in his usual courteous way.” The visitors to the royal library frequently complimented a good point, but their exchange was an intellectual debate. Casaubon set its terms to prevent it from rambling aimlessly. Anyone could take as long as necessary to make a point, and he was free to enhance his argument’s persuasiveness with scholarly allusions. The debate had a prize, the “palm of victory,” which consisted only of the gracious acknowledgment that a participant had presented “truth.” Truth was to be acquired through “contrary argument, not so much because of a zeal of contradicting as for the sake of searching out the truth, which more easily shines forth after a vigorous effort has been made on both sides.”97 In short, Huet’s dialogue satisfied Montaigne’s requirements, though softened somewhat by seventeenth-century politesse.98 Three of Scudéry’s conversations provide an instructive contrast to Huet’s erudite dialogues. After publishing her voluminous novels, Scudéry turned


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to the conversation as a primary mode of literary expression (though conversations had always been prominent in her novels). The ten volumes of conversations she produced between 1680 and 1692 included excerpts from her novels and new compositions.99 Scudéry’s conversations were informed by the tradition of “civil conversation” initiated by Castiglione and subsequently picked up and transmitted by Italian, Spanish, and French imitators.100 Another important model was Honoré d’Urfé’s popular pastoral novel, Astrée (1607–27), where shepherds and shepherdesses discoursed interminably on questions of sentiment in “slow-moving, sinuous, meditative” conversations.101 Finally, she drew on her own experience as an attendee at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, then as mistress of her own salon. Of course, Scudéry’s conversations are not transcriptions, but she did intend to provide models for behavior. Life was expected to imitate art—however strenuously artless the imitation! Her dialogues expressed ideals to which the honnête homme and femme had to conform, however much the rules were violated in practice.102 In “De la conversation,” Sapho presided over a discussion of conversational dos and don’ts in the privacy of her chamber. Each participant contributed an example of offensive conversationalists, from women who chattered about domestic details to people who rambled on about some event “as if the gods changed the face of the universe so they would have something to talk about.” At the end of this recitation of social transgressions, Sapho declared that she did not exclude any topic. Her guests had missed the point. Matter mattered little, for any subject could find a place in a well-governed conversation. As conversation was the “art of pleasing, charming, and entertaining,” what counted was how everyone furthered those ends. Poor conversationalists failed to see that conversation was not a forum for personal concerns, but a series of mutually pleasing social interactions. Put another (and my) way, there was a difference between an individual elbowing his way through a crowd and a group of men and women performing a quadrille. Admittedly, this was not an easy dance to learn. Mastering the steps did not suffice; they had to be performed with seemingly effortless grace (that négligence referred to above).103 Clearly, conversation was intellectually demanding; it required the engagement of an agile, well-informed mind. Nor did Scudéry exclude intellectual topics. Still, the conversation that prefaces Célinte (1661) suggests that a young scholar like Huet might have difficulty balancing the substantive and the pleasing—or even being heard. Scudéry’s model for one of the participants, Philinte, was probably Huet. The conversation began with Philinte and three other friends promenading in the Bois de Boulogne: Lysimene (Catherine de Vertus), Artelice (Duchesse of Arpajon), Meriante (M. de Meriguat), and Clearque (Scudéry’s friend and Fouquet’s secretary, Pellisson).104 The recent entrée of Louis XIV’s queen into Paris, which had drawn curious throngs, prompted a discussion of the merits of “curiosity” itself.


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Then Cleandre (Henri-Charles de Trémoille) joined the group; “seeking only to relax mentally,” he provoked a friendly debate. The conversation was an exchange of worldly views. No one worried about the religious condemnation of curiosity as a form of lust (chapter 4), and the general conclusion was innocuous enough: Curiosity in itself was neither good nor bad, but its application could be. The company generally conceded the value of curiosity as an intellectual quality, but they focused more on its negative social aspects. Seconded by Clearque and Cleandre, Philinte defended intellectual curiosity, but his arguments were nearly swamped by examples of the socially transgressive variety. Philinte repeatedly coaxed his friends to consider the importance of curiosity to scientific inquiry, but the social trumped the intellectual. It was more important (and amusing) to decry the “vain” curiosity that made nosey people gossip about others’ faults without the nobler purpose of attempting to correct them. The conversation in Célinte did serve a worthy end: improving the morals, not just the social skills, of readers. However, the “gallant imperative” inhibited more serious philosophical discussion. At one point, for example, Philinte asserted that, however natural and necessary, curiosity must have a “reasonable” object, such as “penetrating, if possible, the secret of Nature, or those of all the Sciences and Arts.” This form of curiosity was harmless and useful. “But what about women,” Artelice asked, “with whom the secrets you mention would not sit very well, what do you want them to do with their curiosity?” Lysimene then hijacked the conversation: I would have [women] inform themselves very carefully about how it happened that there is this incomparable being whom all the world knows under the name of Artelice; that, though beautiful, abundant in wit, experienced in the great Court and the court of Gallantry, she has never, either through her actions or through her words, provided any basis on which to suspect her of even the slightest thing that could taint her behavior, nor the tiniest irregularity in a most exacting code of behavior.105

Thus, Lysimene obeyed the gallant imperative: expressing fathomless deference to every female present in endlessly charming ways. In effect, he sidelined Philinte’s point, diverting the conversation from a potentially serious subject. Rambling pleasantly better served the conversation’s social objective of mutual amusement. Scudéry’s “De l’incertitude” (1686), a generally well-informed discussion of skepticism, shows that conversation à la mode could similarly limit the intellectual contributions of female participants by dictating a fundamentally unintellectual mode of expression. In it, “three infinitely amiable women”— Amerinte, Amalthée, and Isidore—and a male friend Timandre dithered over whether to go to the Comédie italienne or to take a walk. Their indecision prompted a discussion of uncertainty, which Isidore initiated “with a


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nonchalant, yet nevertheless somewhat audacious air.” Yet it fell to the men to explore the possibilities of the different philosophical positions. Timandre maintained the uncertainty of human knowledge, and Aristene passionately argued the case for certainty, warning against the dangers that skepticism posed to religious belief. The women were intelligent and well informed. Indeed, Amalthée contributed her impressions of the famous Skeptic, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, and introduced the subject of atomism. However, while it was acceptable for women to read philosophical works, they were not supposed to speak like philosophers. Thus, Amalthée recalled with approval a social gathering where “a woman of high quality, with admirable intelligence and unequaled politesse” stopped a male friend from proselytizing for atomism. She “gallantly” guided the conversation in a more agreeable direction: improvising madrigals that wed atomism to love and which suggested the superior pleasures of love to philosophizing. Similarly, Amerinte expressed admiration for Catherine Descartes, niece of the great man himself, who knew everything a woman could know, yet whose prose and verse possessed a “gallant and refined turn.” “It is not for me,” Amerinte asserted when challenging the Epicurean notion that the world came into being through chance, “to speak of Philosophy in the terms of philosophers.” So the men did the hard intellectual work, though they occasionally submitted to the gallant imperative, as when Aristene commented that a beautiful woman was permitted to doubt a man’s protestations of love. When it came time to settle the question, Isidore (typically “en souriant”) advised the men to adjourn to decide terms, while the women amused themselves with reading and listening to her play the harpsichord. “De l’incertitude” demonstrates Scudéry’s requirement that women be “learned without appearing to be.” 106 It is consistent, too, with how she represented herself as Sapho in Le Grand Cyrus: a woman who was very well educated, but not savant, who “devoted so much reflection to remaining within the bounds of female propriety that she hardly ever spoke of anything but that about which women should speak.”107 Similarly, the three female participants in “De l’incertitude” were current on contemporary debates, yet, in the words of Abbé de Pure, they were “learned without pedantry, virtuous without severity, and proud with sweetness.”108 In Artamène, Scudéry depicted their opposite, Damophile. The female version of the much-reviled pedant, she showed off her learning by refusing to speak with uneducated people, pronouncing pompously on trivialities, citing authors that no one knew, and disdaining domestic affairs.109 “De l’incertitude” also demonstrates the supposedly educative function of conversation. As Chevalier de Méré, the “oracle of honnêtes hommes,” put it: “The best means of improving one’s abilities and becoming a savant [in the salon sense] is not to study a lot, but to converse frequently about things that enlarge the mind.”110 But these conversations did


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not and should not proceed in the same manner as an intellectual dialogue. A conversation was like a promenade; it did not matter if you wandered from the stated subject. The participants advanced not as single-minded scholars, but went wherever good sense and good taste led.111 Scudéry’s conversations present a striking contrast to Huet’s dialogues. They suggest how men had to adjust if they wanted to move between homosocial intellectual gatherings and heterosocial salons. How good a chameleon was Huet? The Abbess de Rohan issued something of a report card in her literary portrait of Huet published in Divers portraits. Rohan eschewed flattery to assess judiciously Huet’s deficiencies as well as his strong points. Of course, she praised Huet’s universal learning, which excelled in mathematics. She noted his insatiable curiosity; once aroused, nothing deterred him from satisfying it. But she warned that his intellectual gifts and capacity for work would not necessarily lead to success in le monde. Capable of achieving great things, he lacked the assiduity for “undertaking those small ones that possess precisely the decorum the world requires.” This damaged his prospects, because most people judged by appearances. “If something is not altogether polished, that prevents it from being examined for a true, but not obvious merit.”112 His civility lacked a bit of politesse; his “tenderness,” some delicacy; and his modesty, sweetness. She praised his frankness, yet perhaps he was too impetuous and passionate when defending his opinions. (In a similar vein, Lafayette reportedly said that Huet would be her model if she ever depicted “Candor.”)113 Given Rohan’s assessment, it is not surprising that, after decades of salon experience, Huet eventually condemned conversation as meretricious. In 1689, he expressed this judgment in an exchange of letters with Madame de Montespan, former mistress of Louis XIV, survivor of several court scandals, and no stranger to intrigue. She summarized Huet’s view in a letter where she responded to his assertion that letters were superior to conversation. Yet she had always believed that vivacity and the pleasure of seeing thoughts being born made conversation superior to cold correspondence. She had also believed that conversation was more truthful. Composing at leisure, the writer could conceal her deceptions, but facial expressions and other involuntary signs betrayed a lie in conversation. Huet had now convinced her that conversation was “gross, deceptive, and dangerous” and that letters avoided these dangers. In conversation, people were judged by their stylishness, not the quality of their thought or their sincerity; they were duped by pleasing appearances, rather than engaged by substance.114

The Looking-Glass World Rohan and Montespan were not unique when they complained about the privileging of style over substance, appearance over reality, and illusion over


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truth in their social milieu. Such complaints were the bread and butter of moralists and satirists such as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. Yet noting a problem did not solve it and troubling questions remained: How could one recognize sincerity when the desire to please was rewarded, and the desire to be pleased made agreeable illusion preferable to unpleasant truth? Could truth even be discovered in social settings structured to enhance pleasure? The faithful representation of texts, not human beings, was Huet’s focus in De optimo genere interpretandi (1661).115 Initially inspired by his difficulties with Origen’s Greek, the treatise became a way for Huet to chastise his contemporaries for the unacceptable liberties they took when translating Latin works into French. Here I do not intend to offer a “gendered” reading of the treatise, though the conventional term for the translations he criticized, les belles infidèles, is suggestive enough. I do want to suggest that Huet’s experiences in the Empire of Women, combined with a more general concern about the problem of authenticity in elite society, prompted him to favor particular metaphors when addressing this very specific intellectual problem. Huet attributed poor translation to moral failure: “[T]he innate love for one’s own self . . . usually coupled with an ignorance of the good” caused the “presumption” that led a translator to represent himself, rather than the author’s work. Thus, he falsified, not translated. Huet repeatedly described translation as faithful representation, which made translation an act of selfeffacement. Translation was not an opportunity for the translator to exhibit his eloquence. He should not “fashion a deceit for the ears by the sweetness of his style”; rather, he should “exhibit the author . . . in his own words [Huet’s emphasis].” A translation was a mirror in which “nothing foreign to the original ought to appear.” Huet compared translating with painting, contrasting the veracity of the true artist’s palette with the duplicity of a woman’s cosmetics box. A translation reproduced an author’s features so accurately that “the absent person seems to appear before our eyes.” It enabled the reader to judge the author’s vices and virtues accurately. Only an egotistical and complacent young woman praised a looking glass that offered “comely” illusion, rather than an honest reality. What man would not ridicule a woman who disguised her appearance with cosmetics, a wig, false teeth, and high heels, “let alone die of love for her?” Nature had planted in everyone’s mind a love and desire for truth, “by which we are all drawn and captivated.” Similarly, the best Bible translations possessed an “artless” dignity “stained by no false paint, bespattered by no false verbal panderings and allurements.” Anyone translating Scripture should follow the example of the church fathers, who eschewed pure and perfect diction; he should seek to “reproduce those Books carefully and accurately, as it were in a mirror.”116 Appearance versus reality (or authenticity) was the central theme of a Latin poem, “Mimus, sive Speculum,” that Huet composed for the learned young noblewoman we met at the beginning of this chapter, Marie-Élisabeth


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de Rochechouart.117 In the poem’s introduction, Huet prophesied brilliant accomplishments if she persevered in her studies. For the moment, though, he invited her to relax with a pleasant tale of metamorphosis. The poem’s protagonist, Mimus, was the son of two shape-shifting deities: Proteus, the prophetic sea god who could assume the appearance of living beings and inanimate things at will; and Psamathe, a sea nymph who briefly eluded a mortal suitor by assuming the form of a seal.118 In Thessaly, Proteus tutored his son in metamorphosis. Mimus learned to touch the heavens with leafy boughs, dig into earth with sylvan roots, flow like a frothy wave, and leap like flame. He mimicked everything human, too: the cultivator plowing his field, the shepherd tending his flock, the young maiden gathering fruit. Meanwhile, the gods “who ruled both heaven and earth, and the watery kingdoms” were gathering for a celebration. Chiron the centaur brought the goblets, which Bacchus filled, and the Muses provided music. All were probably tipsy when Proteus, maneuvering his two-horsed chariot across the sparkling sea, arrived with his “most beloved son.” Having never met the gods before, Mimus carefully noted their appearances. Then he delighted them by imitating their mannerisms, such as Mars’s menacing countenance and Bacchus’s drunken gait. He perfectly counterfeited Vulcan’s sooty and repellent face, deformed body, and hobbling progress. Vulcan was not amused: “You dare violate the gods with shameless jests?” Mimus dared to ridicule him, the legitimate offspring of a goddess and smith of Jove’s spears? Vulcan ordered Mimus to change into a mirror, condemned forever after to delude marveling eyes with false images. Any interpretor of “Mimus” must remember that Huet’s primary goal was to amuse a bright pupil. Indeed, “mimus” as a minor poetic genre was defined as a “dramatic representation of the ridiculous.”119 Like the poems that Huet wrote to male erudite friends, it had an important social function: signifying and strengthening the friendship between the old bishop and the young noblewoman. Yet poetry was supposed to instruct too, though, like Thetis, the moral of “Mimus” is difficult to grasp. Huet might have been toying with the many meanings associated with mirrors. During the seventeenth century, a mirror was a multivalent symbol. In a sense, Huet gave Rochechouart a very precious object, albeit metaphorically. Until 1665, glass mirrors were imported from Venice at great expense; even after domestic production began, they were never cheap—hence the dazzling effect of Louis XIV’s profligate use of mirrors in the apartment of his official mistress in 1668, then at Versailles in 1686. A less interesting option is that Huet was exploiting the mirror as a time-honored (and clichéd) symbol of vanity, a traditional female sin. Perhaps he intended the conventional association of the word “mirror” with moral instruction.120 He might even have been giving a lesson in how knowledge could be acquired even through appearances. When Cesare Ripa personified scientia (knowledge) as a woman in Iconologia


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(1593), a widely translated guide to emblem book symbolism, the mirror she held symbolized “the study of appearances leading to the knowledge of essences.” Certainly, Mimus had to study his subjects well in order to imitate them so skillfully.121 Yet the poem’s evocation of an elite gathering that delighted in falsehood might also have been Huet’s playful way of addressing the issues of appearance versus reality and surface over substance in French society. The adjective “protean” appropriately modified the courtier’s character and activities—and especially well in Philibert de Vienne’s satiric Le philosophe de cour (1647): This facility of the Spirit is not therefore to be blamed which makes men according to the pleasure of others, to change and transform himself. For in so doing he shall be accounted wise, win honor, and be free of reprehension everywhere: which Proteus knew very well, to whom his diverse Metamorphosis and oft transfiguration was very commodious.122

Thus, Huet could have been warning Rochechouart against assuming the colors of the society she frequented, thereby betraying her gifts for learning. Alternatively, he might have been suggesting that she would have to dissemble her intellectual aspirations in order to protect and nurture them. She would need to present the image that others wished to see, concealing her true self—just as she had tried to hide her volume of Plato from him.

Social Genres Huet and his female friends could not escape, much less change their social world, but they could find refuge from worldly illusion and treachery in friendship. In La morale, Rohan frequently noted friendship’s delights and consolations. The judicious advice of a faithful friend was a perfume that fortified and rejoiced the heart. The greatest of all treasures, it had to be preserved with the utmost care. Bonds of affection were stronger than those of blood or obligation. Anyone who truly merited the title “friend” would never be daunted by ill fortune, for adversity separated true friends from false. Friendship even transformed conversation: “Like an iron sharpened and polished by another, conversation between two virtuous friends mutually corrects their faults, and their minds are perfected and purified by the reciprocal communication of just and reasonable ideas.”123 In the Empire of Women as in the Republic of Letters, friendship “happened” in letters, and letters expressed the ideals and protocols of friendship. Huet’s female friends were diligent and avid correspondents just like their male counterparts. The language and content of their letters signaled different emotional and intellectual realities, however, as did the poems


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they frequently enclosed. Whether letter writing became a distinctly feminine genre in the seventeenth century is an open question,124 but contemporaries extolled women’s special gifts as correspondents, which theoretically had the same “natural” basis as their facility in conversation. Thus, Cotin included one hundred letters by women in Oeuvres galantes (1662), claiming that women wrote “better and more naturally . . . than all our modern orators.” He attributed that superiority to natural gifts and the advantages of the genre itself, “which they have learned effortlessly by frequenting society.”125 Like conversation, letters became an important vernacular literary genre; they were published in anthologies of actual or fictitious letters (or a combination of the two), inserted into novels, and used as a form of essay writing. With origins deep in antiquity, letter writing in elite society had the same developmental arc as polite conversation. All of Huet’s contemporaries considered correspondence less an autonomous literary activity than a continuation of conversation. Following Cicero, letters were conversations with absent friends.126 Nevertheless, seventeenth-century correspondance mondaine diverged from the learned tradition. It was shaped instead by sixteenth-century Italian and Spanish influences transmitted through etiquette manuals.127 L’art d’écrire en français (1662) succinctly connected letter writing with the ideals of conversation: “One must write as one speaks, speak as one thinks, and think in the order that [notions] present themselves to our minds [esprit]. Nature is the source of this order, which is why it is said, in order to speak well, one must speak naturally.”128 Scudéry’s rules for letter writing, as laid out in one of her conversations, will sound familiar. Once again, Sapho emphasized judgment, asserting that no subject was forbidden to the adroit writer. Once again, the abyss between learned and worldly culture yawned as she distinguished between “gallant” vernacular letters and “serious” epistles, which erudite men encumbered with allusions. In contrast, the gallant letter was playful. The correspondent gave free rein to wit and imagination; he (or she) did not worry about combining “agreeable follies” with more serious subjects. He could joke, praise, flatter, tell innocent lies, leap from one subject to another, chat about friendship as one speaks of love, and seek out novelty. Just as he should not talk like a book when conversing, letters should never savor of the study, but possess an easy, natural, and noble style. Finally, sharing a beautiful letter with friends honored it, though broadcasting love letters was shameful.129 The differences between the erudite and gallant forms of correspondence become especially clear when the two styles appear in the same letter. For example, Huet abruptly switched from epistolary gallantry to scholarly shoptalk in a 1659 letter to Ménage. First, he claimed that Ménage had insulted him by suggesting that Huet had become indifferent to Lafayette. No one, Huet claimed, had greater esteem for her nor a greater passion to serve her— “now of the Scholiast of Hephastion,” at which point Huet launched into a


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scholarly discussion festooned with learned allusions in a variety of learned languages.130 Similarly, in July 1661, he detailed his progress on the Origen, and then abruptly asked why Ménage did not write to his sister, who would respond “most scrupulously and perhaps very prettily.” Huet added that Lafayette had warned him against falling in love unless he wanted a completely miserable life.131 In October 1662, Ménage changed course as quickly. He requested Huet’s help with his treatise on Greek dialects, then abruptly changed subjects: “I believe you once told me that I loved Madame de Lafayette in verse and Madame de Sevigné in prose. Madame de Lafayette ordered me to put this thought into verse, though it’s not to her advantage.”132 In 1660, Ménage wrote of a cruel epigram alleging that “the nymph” Scudéry had grown quite deaf because of her noisy flatterers. Huet responded chivalrously: “If I dared, I would offer her my pen to sustain her interests and to serve you as a second, and I would spill most willingly for such a just and worthy cause, the last drop of my ink and blood.”133 In the Empire of Women, the social dimension dominated in letter writing as it did in salon conversation. Again, style mattered more than content, and what mattered most was behaving socially and social connection. In this respect, writing had certain advantages over conversation—or so Montespan claimed in her 1689 letter to Huet. Conversation consisted of “words which the wind carries off and the air dissipates,” but letters “make thoughts visible and as enduring as the paper to which they are confided.” A letter carried an emotional charge, too. The recipient rejoiced, “recognizing the hand of the correspondent, following the lines it has inscribed,” seeking “even in the way the characters are formed what even the most vivid terms cannot make us feel.” Similarly, Father Hercule wrote to Conrart, “The heart speaks through the hand,”134 and Rohan asserted that the best letters were “works of the heart as well as wit.”135 Consistent with the hierarchical relationship inherent in gallantry, women were supposed to have the upper hand in friendship. A letter of 1666 from Rohan to “Zénocrate” (Samuel Ysarn), Huet’s rival for her affections, stressed the hierarchical nature of friendship in politicized language. It was friendship’s sovereign right to inspire and extinguish worry in a friend’s heart, she wrote, though she would not exercise her right tyrannically. A friend had to ignore many aggravating things, she advised in another letter, and a true friend generally did less than what was asked, because she saw into the recesses of a friend’s heart. The terms she used to contrast the pleasures of romantic love to those of friendship emphasized how one friend acquired dominance over another. No satisfaction was as sweet as the “innocent tenderness of a heart that we have rightly acquired.” Once possessed, it became an inexhaustible source of pleasures, which “over time increases friendship, whereas time usually diminishes love and, finally, one finds a thousand bitter things in its unruliness.”136


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A true friend, Scudéry wrote Huet in 1661, took to heart a friend’s sorrows, just as Huet felt deeply the disaster that had befallen her friend Pellisson.137 In an undated note, though, she suggested that Huet was too secretive. Friendship was not supposed to be as mysterious as love, she told him.138 In another letter, she speculated whether his friendship was true. If not, she begged him not to tell her—too many things were causing her pain as it was. Nevertheless, when her affairs were settled, she promised to “establish a court of friendship to inquire after all my friends, male and female, who have ill used the affection that I have for them; and, finally, that court will examine all those fraudulent friendships with a fairness so marvelous, it will shame many judges.”139 Failure to respond to letters violated the duties of friendship—except when it set the terms of a friendship, as in Lafayette’s subtly flirtatious and supremely négligente correspondence. Her letters indirectly attested to the reciprocal obligations of friendship while reinforcing the social distance between herself and Huet. “It’s been, I believe, 2,400 years since I last wrote you, if I count the intentions that I had and the faults that I committed in having done nothing.”140 “What, Monsieur! You have written me a letter, and you sulk because you haven’t received a response? Don’t you know that you must write three letters from Caen to get one from Paris? And you stop at the first!”141 “You must be determined to complain about me if you whine that I write you far too infrequently. I responded May 25 to a letter you wrote March 12.”142 To be successful—that is, to please the recipient—a letter did not necessarily have to be about anything, as an exchange in August and September 1689 between Montespan, her friends, and Huet proves. An august (and bored?) company of eleven women and one man, which included Montespan’s sister (the Abbess of Fontevrault) and Marie-Élisabeth de Rochechouart (Montespan’s niece), decided to write a joint letter to Huet. Each composed a paragraph expressing regret at his absence.143 Huet composed a response, which the abbess declared a “masterpiece”—really, he would not believe “how much we read and admired it.”144 But what could be so masterful in a trivial exchange whose essentials were “Wish you were here” and “So do I”? In fact, Huet struck just the right tone as he addressed each correspondent one by one. He calibrated his responses to the rank and degree of intimacy of each relationship, skillfully varying a light but considered style to avoid monotony. For example, he was unfailingly, if somewhat ironically, deferential to Rochechouart, addressing her in convoluted terms: As to you, beautiful princess, you have honored me with so many indications of your goodness that, since you would not have been carried along by the example and the multitude to do me the honor of saying that you regretted my absence, I would dare believe that my departure was not a


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matter of indifference to you, and that, as you have perceived my respectful attachment for you, you would not have lost [my presence] without some sadness that was truly your own.

One correspondent had frankly admitted that she wrote only at her friends’ insistence. Huet praised her very differently: “If I can ever discover from whom I received such an honest confession, I would make her change her language, and compel her to regret my absence sincerely.” He reminded another in mock-heroic tones of their hike through the countryside: She saw me following her, clambering up the boulders of Fesardière, leaping across the precipices of Chavigny, crossing the torrents of Lirneé, and traversing the torrid zone of Malardière. [Huet was nearly 60 at this point.] And me, when the hour of my departure neared, I saw her collapse, swooning at my feet, telling me that she was dying. I was not unmoved by this spectacle, nor, remembering it, am I unmoved now. I myself expire far more than she when I think of it, and I do not wish to be revived until I find myself at her feet in the same state as I saw her at mine.145

In short, Huet flawlessly, gallantly, and playfully fulfilled the social rule of bienséance, or propriety, while demonstrating the social shape-shifting that aimed to please. He satisfied the rules and advice of etiquette manuals: that a correspondent had to use “the same expressions of friendship, honnêteté, [and] respect in writing that we are obliged to use when speaking,”146 while the truly skilled correspondent “uses [his] pen as Proteus used his body, transforming it into all possible forms, diversifying it according to the requirements of the subject and the quality of the recipient.”147 Huet and his friends exchanged poems as well as letters. Composed in French, they responded to current events or more intimate, shared experiences. In letters to Huet, Scudéry included poems celebrating the king’s recovery from an illness, praising an accomplished sermon by a friend, and noting the annual return of a songbird to her garden.148 Rohan wrote of the murder of one of Scudéry’s pigeons by a little dog.149 Montespan composed a poem in which the springs at Bourbon welcomed Huet and promised to heal his infirmities.150 Huet expressed the required attitude of négligence diligente toward his poetry. In his autobiography, he boasted that he could compose a ballade in fifteen minutes or toss off poetry in French while promenading through Paris or riding in his carriage—and he cared not a whit about preserving these efforts.151 When he explained to his nephew years later that he had written such poetry only for women and always as banter, he reinforced the gendered distinction between his French and Latin productions.152 Defined as play, French verse could never be as worthwhile as Latin poetry. Thus, Huet did not include a single sample of vernacular poetry in his autobiography. (Perhaps he wisely


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staked his poetic reputation on his Latin verse? Having read some of his French poetry, Lafayette archly remarked that he should perhaps cleave to his Latin Muse.)153 Nevertheless, Huet pined as well as the next lonely lover in his vernacular poems. In one poem, he was impervious to the charms of a nightingale’s song and a brook’s gurgling, because he sighs after “the [absent] shepherdess who loves and adores me.” In others, he claimed that the brilliance of an ambassador’s wife outshone spring’s blooms; complained that another woman scorned his love and mocked his pain; warned against loving “prudes,” a term often applied to précieuses; and exclaimed that the poetry of one female acquaintance proved how the Muses favored her. At sixty-two, Huet played the game of love less seriously, but just as smoothly. In one poem, he declined a dinner invitation from Montespan because of the unhealthiness of her drafty palace. Her eyes burned like the stars and adorned the age, he averred, but furs did a better job of warming. She responded with a poem of her own, promising to wrap him in furs and hand feed him fruit, peas, artichokes, and salad—in short, everything the doctors had forbidden him.154 Huet’s expressions of love and fealty were more de rigueur than du coeur. After all, love was the favorite subject of salon society, and love talk gallantly expressed the homage due to the women of one’s social circle, even if—or especially if?—those relationships were platonic. As gifts, the poems performed the same social functions as Latin poems did among Huet’s erudite friends—yet only the social functions. Meant to please, they did not engage the recipients intellectually. In Huet’s correspondence at least, craft was not the issue. No criticism was solicited; none was offered. In August 1661, when Ménage enclosed “a little madrigal I wrote the day before yesterday to respond to [Lafayette], who attacked me in verse,” he did not ask Huet how to improve it.155 Nor did Ménage offer Lafayette any guidance for improving her poem. The poem required a social gesture (a gallant expression of obeisance), but it was inert from a literary perspective. It was a social sign, but an intellectual nullity; it signaled hierarchy, not equality. Huet’s feelings toward Rohan transcended playful flirtation, however. I have already quoted his praise of her intelligence in Divers portraits, but his portrait seems to express much more. Huet began it with “a little story” from antiquity. Alexander the Great commanded Apelles, the greatest painter of the classical world, to depict Pancaste, a beautiful young woman. Apelles could not accomplish the task without seeing her; once having seen her, he could not fail to love her. “While this great painter sketched the features of her face on the canvas, Love, a better painter, marked them so vividly in his heart, they could never be effaced.”156 Erroneously or intentionally, Huet conflated two stories associated with Apelles: that the courtesan Pancaste was his model for “Venus rising from the Sea”; that Alexander solicited Apelles to paint a portrait of the courtesan Campaspe, whom he then gave to the love-struck artist. In either case, the choice of such a story for a nun’s


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portrait is striking, even given the wide latitude for love talk in the social circles they both frequented. Interpreting Huet’s representation of Rohan poses some of the same problems as love talk among érudits. Can we know Huet’s true feelings when confronted by conventions, expectations, and a rhetoric of affection so foreign to us? Yet other sources confirm that Huet was smitten. Apparently, Huet turned to Scudéry for advice on managing his emotional state, though he initially refused to name his love. Scudéry’s response reveals much about how Huet had adjusted to the courtly standards of the Empire of Women and the epistolary conventions he had to obey even in the transports of love. She praised his note as “ingenious, full of spirit, and gallantry”—yet it lacked sincerity. She insisted on knowing his beloved’s name. She could probably guess from his beautiful description, but “half-confidences are disagreeable.” For her to help, he had to be more candid. She had nothing further to say until she had received this proof of his confidence in her. Nevertheless, she was sure he could become as good a lover as a friend. He had to disabuse himself of some erroneous notions, however, “for it would not be good to be one of the most learned men in the world in all other things, and to be ignorant of how one must love in order to love perfectly.” Huet finally revealed the identity of Rohan, whom Scudéry had represented as “the great Vestal” Octavia in Clélie. Despite her previous promises of assistance, Scudéry now declined to advise him: “When you love Octavia, it’s hardly possible to love anything else.”157 Thus, she left Huet to his distress, which was obvious enough for others to remark. “When you go [to visit Rohan],” Lafayette once wrote him, “you forget everything.”158 Huet’s choice of love object may appear strange. Like good Jansenists, we might prefer that nuns neither dally in salons nor chat with visitors in their chambers. Rohan had a social as well as religious identity, though, and she did not have to renounce the former (the ascetic vocation of the ladies of Port Royal was not universally admired). Scudéry’s characterization of Rohan as “the great Vestal” in her work might appear discouraging, but a love object was supposed to be unattainable. The lover who followed Scudéry’s Carte du Tendre secured “tender friendship,” never love. Moreover, romantic love required the absolute subjection of the male to the female and absolute scorn on the female’s part. As Scudéry wrote in Clélie, “whoever will be the best slave will be the happiest lover.”159 Rohan had clearly mastered love’s defensive maneuvers—resistance, rebuke, and, as a last resort, the threat of withdrawing her affection. Thus, in a letter of 1666, she responded sharply to Huet’s jealousy of Ysarn. They were both her friends, but she never desired either of them as lovers. If Huet had pushed things further than he should have, that was his fault, not hers, and she would only forgive him if he settled down. If he did not, “you will have nothing but my esteem, and you will most assuredly lose something in losing as tender a friendship as I have for you.”160


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Even if Rohan had not been a nun, a woman from such a powerful lineage would not have had much choice in the matter of marriage. Her family would never have regarded a man of letters with a tincture of nobility as an appropriate match. Consequently, the enlightened woman often viewed marriage with chagrin, if not outright horror—indeed, the rejection of marriage is a signal feature of seventeenth-century feminism.161 Huet knew the problem that marriage posed to his female friends. He even wrote once to Madame de Tilly that it was one of the three great mistakes a woman could make.162 He himself rejected marriage, because he considered it incompatible with a life devoted to letters. His choice was voluntary, however. He knew that his friends often had little choice, and he dwelled on the unhappy consequences of that fact in Diane de Castro, the novel he shared with the Marquise de Lambert. His heroine found herself in a marriage as miserable as her mother’s. When Diane’s husband complained to her father about her aversion, her father advised him to treat her like a child. If time did not change her attitude, he should treat her like a servant. Her father even proposed his own marriage as a model. He knew that his wife had never loved him, but he had scorned her hatred. “Unable to make her love me, I made her fear me, and finally her aversion ceased”—but only at the cost of her life, because “the violence my mother did to herself to dissimulate her feelings killed her.”163 Yet unlike Montpensier or the précieuses, Huet in his novel rejected only those marriages that women were forced to make regardless of their affections; he did not seek to replace romantic love with an exalted, purified Platonic version. Thus, after much gallant chatter and many appropriately exotic adventures, Diane finds her happily-ever-after with the marriage partner of her choice.

Defending the Empire of Women? In Diane de Castro, Huet manipulated the conventions of the romance as Scudéry defined them in her sprawling works; he also incorporated elements of the ancient Greek novel, which greatly influenced seventeenthcentury developments.164 Yet Huet better served the women he loved through the gift of friendship. He more truly honored them by supporting the endeavors they chose—learning Latin or Greek, editing a classical text, preparing a biblical paraphrase, composing a novel—and by publicly acclaiming them. He did this by lending his support to Rohan’s La morale and again when he authored Traité de l’origine des romans (1670) to escort Lafayette’s Zaïde into print. As part of a collaborative, vernacular publishing endeavor, the treatise on novels was Huet’s most eloquent and public defense of female intellectual work. Yet it also registered the deep divide between learned and female intellectual culture, for in it Huet confronted


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the hostility of the salons for the learned culture he had long ago embraced as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. Huet wrote the treatise while Lafayette was composing Zaïde. Early in 1669, she sent Huet parts of the draft, which, she warned, were neither corrected nor revised. He had a lot of work to do, she told him, but he should not spend too much time on the writing yet. Rather, he should attend to the content, “for, when we [she and probably Segrais] have corrected it, you will have another look.” Use red ink, she ordered; black was too difficult to make out. In a subsequent letter, she warned him against laziness. It would be too shameful if he did not finish the treatise, which she intended as an “embellishment” of her novel.165 Initially, it seems incongruous that Huet wrote his defense of a vernacular genre, whose plots were driven by profane love, during visits to Rohan at her convent at Malnoue. But where better to write about a genre that explored the vicissitudes of love than the home of the woman he loved? There is a pleasing symmetry in these circumstances, too. Just as Lafayette sent drafts of her novel to Huet for comment, so Huet submitted drafts of his treatise to “the learned abbess”—and Rohan’s advice repaid the favor of Huet’s assistance with La morale.166 Lafayette was so pleased with the published results of their collaboration that she likened their efforts to a marriage between their children.167 Besides its association with two close friends, the treatise offered Huet other satisfactions. Even before writing it, Huet had been interested in the novel through his reading of ancient Greek and Latin stories.168 He was also sensible to the genre’s affecting power, as his encounter with d’Urfé’s Astrée shows. According to his autobiography, he read it with his sisters, and “the emotion caused our tears to flow and rendered us speechless.”169 On a less exalted note, Huet could use the treatise to avenge public insults to Scudéry. Her novels had found so many avid readers that the publishers of Artamène sold a single volume at more than three times the usual price.170 But she had critics, too. While Huet praised “the extent and inexhaustible vigor of her imagination” in his autobiography, other contemporaries considered her long-winded.171 During the 1660s, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux penned the cruel couplet: “Happy Scudéry, whose fertile plume / each month delivers another volume!” He ridiculed her novels as artless, listless, and nonsensical—though there never lacked merchants to sell them and idiots to read them. Huet carefully noted these insults in his own copies of Boileau’s works.172 Huet’s treatise is also deeply equivocal, though.173 This becomes clear if we consider it in the context of the intellectual ethos of the Republic of Letters, which shaped the treatise in two ways: First, Huet gave the novel the same qualities—ethical purpose and antiquity—that made erudite intellectual endeavors worthwhile. Second, Huet sharply criticized the social milieu that produced the novel, rejecting the literary prerogatives claimed by the society that produced, supported, and consumed novelistic production.


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We have seen that learning in itself had a transcendent moral purpose in the world of erudition. All intellectual endeavors had to be morally edifying, not just delightful. Huet claimed that the novel did both, thus refuting the criticism of many contemporaries that novels had pernicious effects. Among the novel’s distinguishing features, he identified “the instruction of readers, who must be made to see virtue crowned and vice punished.” The human spirit naturally resisted such lessons, and amour-propre caused most readers to reject such instruction. So the novel tricked the reader by appealing to his desire for pleasure, “by sweetening the severity of its precepts through the charm of its examples, and correcting [the reader’s faults] by condemning them in another.” Huet did not deny that people read novels for pleasure, but he stressed that pleasure was not and could not be the novel’s chief justification; it had to serve the goal of edification and moral correction. Huet returned to this moral purpose in the concluding pages of his treatise. While he admitted that some novels, even Astrée, were somewhat licentious, the “good ones” from his contemporaries were essentially blameless; “you will not find a word, an expression which could injure chaste ears; nor an action which could offend modesty.” He also answered the charge that novelistic treatments of love sowed the seeds of a dangerous passion in young hearts. The novel was a safe school of passion, he countered, even a prophylactic against the “criminal variety” of love. The youthful reader learned to recognize it, extricated himself from its snares, and sought instead an honorable and sacred love. Experience proved that ignorant people were the greatest dupes, he concluded, thus nothing “so exercises the intelligence, or serves so well to shape it and render it fit for the world, as the reading of good novels.” “Mute preceptors,” novels taught more effectively and persuasively than the teachers of the collège whom they succeeded. Huet cited Horace, who had said of Homer’s Iliad that it taught morality better and more powerfully than the most able philosophers—and Huet asserted the same of the novel.174 Huet’s second line of defense against critics was to give the novel a history reaching back to antiquity and during which moral purpose emerged through the encounter of East and West. Huet identified the novel’s origins in the story telling of the ancient Egyptians, Arabs, Persians, and Syrians, none of whom, according to him, worried too much about ethics or truth. The earliest practitioners in Greece and Rome did not refrain from writing mendacious and morally suspect works, either. Yet, in the Holy Land, Jewish divines found a way to express the deepest religious truths through fiction; Christ and his followers similarly produced allegories and parables that concealed deep meanings. Heliodorus, who had even been a bishop (ca. 400), figured prominently in Huet’s catalogue of ancient novelists. Nothing was more accomplished than his Aethiopica, according to Huet, and nothing more chaste than the loves depicted there.175


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It is impossible to summarize all the twists and turns of the elaborate chronology through which Huet traced these earliest origins up to the seventeenth century. The details matter less than what Huet accomplished by giving the novel such an extensive historical tradition: He made it respectable in an era when novelty remained suspect. His peroration made Scudéry the culmination of that honorable history. Having been cultivated by philosophers, Roman praetors, consuls, pretenders to the imperial mantle, priests, bishops, popes—even saints—how much more splendid had the novel become when “a wise and virtuous woman” cultivated it!176 In short, the task that fell to his female literary friends was not to invent the novel, but to perfect it. Yet Huet also consciously divorced the novel from the literary environment that produced it. He denied the right to judge literary works appropriated by salon society. He rejected the négligence that the salonnières claimed attended cultural production. His criticisms echoed Rapin’s critique of contemporary poetry in Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote (chapter 2). The novel was the product of craft, Huet asserted; it required work. It had “to be written with art and according to certain rules; otherwise it is only a confused heap, without order or beauty.” The Greeks first subjected the novel to the rules of the epic, transforming it from “the raw and uncultivated form it had among the Orientals . . . joining together in one perfect body the disordered and disconnected parts that had constituted novels before them.” As a novel was the disciplined product of literary craft, so judging its quality required knowledge of the rules. Praise from even a majority of readers did not make a bad book good. The quality, not the quantity, of positive judgments was what mattered. “Nowadays everyone appropriates the right to judge poetry and novels . . . every salon sets itself up as a tribunal which decides supremely the merits of great works.” These “critics” used trivial criteria to assess literary works: a verse a tad rough, a slightly forced expression, an archaism. “But those who compose [these works] do not subject themselves to these judgments . . . they content themselves with pleasing the most refined connoisseur, who judge them by other rules.”177 In short, Huet dismissed the salonnières as literary critics. He rejected the propositions that a mondaine education sufficed for literary criticism and that women innately possessed the critical skills necessary to judge literature. Literary judgment was not a matter of gender, but a question of expertise. Huet attributed French preeminence in writing novels to the fact that French men and women socialized together more than in Spain or Italy. Although generally a positive development, this had unfortunate consequences. Because French women could not rely on isolation to protect their honor, they developed psychological means, “ramparts of their well-protected hearts.” Men responded by developing subtler siege engines, creating an art of love “nearly unknown among other peoples.” A society experienced in such sophisticated


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strategies of seduction (my words, not Huet’s) made French novels so much more “delicious,” but it also caused their readers to neglect more useful readings. Women were the first to be won over by the novel’s charms. Making them “the sum of their studies,” they scorned knowledge of mythology and history. Unabashed by their ignorance, they rejected what they did not know, because that was easier than learning it. Men wanted to please women, so they echoed women’s condemnations of “pedantry.” As a result, the artists who submitted to their judgments now regarded knowledge of antiquity as useless and ceased to study it altogether. “Thus a good cause has produced a very evil effect, and the beauty of our novels has brought about scorn for belles-lettres, and, finally, ignorance.”178 Huet had entered the salons a bedazzled youth. Yet as enchanting as he found them, as much as he admired women like Lafayette, Scudéry, and Rohan, he finally felt compelled to resist the threat that the Empire of Women posed to his own realm of erudite learning. He had to take sides. His treatise on novels shows that, by 1670, he had already reached conclusions that he would deploy in the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in the 1680s. There is a straight line between the ideas expressed in the treatise on novels and his rejection of Perrault’s defense of modern poetry in Parallèles des anciens et modernes (1692–94) (chapter 5). In the final analysis, though, Huet’s attempt to wrap the novel in the honorable robes of erudition and his encouragement of Lafayette to learn Hebrew had the same motivation: He was trying to absorb those aspects of the Empire of Women he admired into the world of learning that commanded his first loyalty. Both attempts at cultural imperialism failed. The two worlds were too different and too explicitly opposed. Before we leave the Empire of Women, we should assess what Huet gained there. Some of the benefits are difficult to track, if significant. When Huet entered the empire, he was still establishing himself as an intellectual, a process that simultaneously advanced his social position. The emergence of the modern author, as Viala has shown, depended on the development of autonomous cultural spaces, such as the salon, and the growth of a reading public to provide an audience. The women Huet befriended were not social nullities—indeed, it is striking how quickly and how well he managed to secure the affections and support of very prominent women. By virtue of blood, intellect, and creativity, they wielded influence, though its workings are harder to detect than in Huet’s relationships with Chapelain, Montausier, or Rapin. Like a deck of cards at a gaming table, those who participated in the various sites of intellectual sociability that Paris offered were constantly being shuffled. As Huet participated in a greater variety of these gatherings, he put himself more and more in a position to be noticed; his card came up more often, as it were. No one connection, no one factor made a successful


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career. The aspiring intellectual had to diversify—as Huet did with great success. Huet sincerely identified the pursuit of learning with virtue, but that never meant starving in a garret, much less hiding his light beneath a bushel. The 1,048 livres, 19 sous, and 6 deniers he spent on a carriage in 1674 was money well spent to confirm his social achievement publicly. It is a measure of his continuing success that, in 1682, he gave a wedding present to his niece of 3,000 livres, more than three-quarters of his entire income nearly two decades before.179 Emotional and intellectual satisfactions are more easily assessed through Huet’s correspondence; being intangible, though, they resist all efforts to assign value. Huet clearly found his relationships with women satisfying on both counts. Even if they did not provide the same opportunities for intellectual collaboration as his friendships with men in the Republic of Letters, he still worked with women on projects that he acknowledged proudly in his autobiography. He also valued the emotional support and encouragement female friends offered to his own endeavors, and he enjoyed the recreations, sometimes trivial, they shared. Taken together, Huet’s female friends make a strikingly intelligent group. Their ideals of heterosocial relationships and the conventions of gallantry gave a peculiar form (to us, at least) to their expressions of affection and ideas. But they were anything but stupid, and Huet was never condescending. More generally, this chapter has demonstrated the ability of some women—often assisted by men like Huet—to participate in meaningful intellectual and creative endeavors despite limited educational possibilities and social opprobrium. It has taken us into the salons, where women created a distinctive intellectual ethos and form of sociability, forged emotionally rich connections, and claimed an emerging literary genre as their own. Because of the social prominence of women like Lafayette, salons became centers of cultural power. Like men in their literary and scientific academies, women also possessed the power to exclude. Finally, as the Quarrel of the Inscriptions in the last chapter anticipated a cultural showdown, so the hostility of the salonnières for erudition helped pave the way for the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. Thus, women played a critical role in transforming the Republic of Letters—and not by knocking politely at the gates and respectfully requesting admission.


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Chapter 4

THE GATE OF IVORY, 1646–90 Happy the man, who, studying nature’s laws, Through known effects can trace the secret cause— His mind possessing in a quiet state, Fearless of Fortune, and resigned to Fate! —Virgil, Georgics II, translated by John Dryden

Worldly Knowledge Pierre-Daniel Huet reminded readers of the Demonstratio evangelica (1679) that there were two ways of acquiring knowledge: The human means of reason and the senses and the divine way of faith. He compared them to the gates Aeneas confronted when leaving the underworld: the Gate of Horn, through which “true shades” passed, and the Gate of Ivory, reserved for the exit of “false dreams.”1 “Obscure, doubtful and deceptive,” the human way of knowing was like the ivory gate. “The infinite questions and tricks of philosophers” made it impassable, and it yielded only uncertain truth. But the divine way of horn—that of revelation—was clear and constant, because a “celestial light” illuminated the soul’s way.2 In this chapter, we follow Huet through the Gate of Ivory. He had stepped through it long before he published the Demonstratio as his defense of curiosity in the last chapter proves. That defense also reflects how much curiosity had shed its Augustinian characterization as a form of lust to become a spur to pursuit of knowledge of the natural world.3 Huet’s Jesuit instructors prepared him well for this endeavor. The year 1646 begins this chapter, because in that year he honored his teachers by publicly defending a roster of theses, many of which focused on natural philosophy. Thereafter, he cultivated an intellectual network that valorized and furthered collaborative efforts in science just as he had to further his projects in letters. Conflicts arose in this intellectual arena too. In the late seventeenth century, three philosophies of science competed for supremacy: neo-Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, and Gassendist-Epicureanism. Huet chose the third, as did his chief collaborator in natural philosophy, André Graindorge. Their letters show the evolution of 114


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Huet’s anti-Cartesianism and, as French science turned increasingly Cartesian, how English developments provided him and his friends with an alternative model. Huet’s endeavors in natural philosophy, his involvement with the groups that coalesced around such projects, and the positions he took on contested issues continued to define his ideals of learning and appropriate behavior—ideals which he gave a powerful literary embodiment by 1692.

Ancients and Moderns in Jesuit Science An older literature that depicted Jesuit scientists as “ultraconservative” or “dull plodders unworthy of serious inquiry” is largely discredited. Scholars now demonstrate the compatibility of Jesuit spirituality with scientific research and how “[their] scholarly activities and aspirations . . . were indistinguishable from those of other contemporary savants, secular or ordained, irrespective of denomination.”4 These observations would not have surprised the well-informed natural philosopher of the seventeenth century. Jesuit expertise compelled admiration even from those hostile for religious reasons. Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, could not deny that “some [ Jesuits] are also ingenious and curious in the matters of a philosophical nature.” Members presented translations of Jesuit textbooks to the society, and Robert Boyle acknowledged the excellence of Jesuit research into mathematics, optics, and astronomy. “The Church of Rome . . . will now condemn no man for asserting the Antipodes,” Thomas Sprat wryly remarked in the History of the Royal Society (1667). The Jesuits had gained “great advantages by their Travails,” he further commented.5 When Bacon was urging collaboration, the Jesuits were already practicing it, and their global presence gave them an enviable ability to collect information. 6 The superiority of Jesuit pedagogy was also widely acknowledged. No schools were better, according to Bacon, “if only they were ours.” In 1671, an Oxford instructor groused that his students would have proven equally ingenious if they had the tools “which adorn the colleges of the Jesuits abroad.”7 In the 1680s, the astronomer royal of England pinched lecture material from the Jesuit pedagogue and astronomer Giambattista Riccioli.8 The Jesuit scientific curriculum presented the external world as knowable, validated the desire to know it, and reconciled the pursuit of knowledge with Christian orthodoxy. It inculcated the intellectual values of caution, confidence, and curiosity. An active apostolate that required members “to seek God in all things” conduced to scientific investigation, while scientific instruction, under the rubric “Philosophy,” became another means to lead students “to a knowledge of their Creator.”9 Nor was the Jesuits’ continued adherence to Aristotelianism mere stubbornness. Aristotelianism survived well into the seventeenth century because of its power, flexibility, and


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comprehensiveness.10 For the Jesuits, it was a context for innovation, not an intellectual straight jacket, and their neo-Aristotelianism was frequently more adventurous and capacious than contemporary critics ever allowed.11 What did the Jesuits teach Huet? Unfortunately, in his autobiography, Huet did not detail his studies much beyond geometry.12 But one of his teachers, Pierre Gautruche (1602–81), wrote a textbook, Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius clara, brevis, et accurate institutio (1653; The Clear, Brief and Precise Instruction of All Philosophy and Mathematics). We can get an idea of Caen’s curriculum by combining the general conclusions of scholars writing on Jesuit pedagogy with insights gleaned from Gautruche’s textbook and Huet’s theses.13 Huet studied philosophy mostly with Mambrun, but he knew Gautruche when he taught at Caen in the early 1640s. He praised his methods as gentle, but challenging, and he recalled that he “loved him as an equal . . . honored him as a master.”14 In his textbook, Gautruche went beyond presenting information; he also furthered the already familiar moral goals of a Jesuit education. His discussion of logic demonstrates quite well the first virtue of the aforementioned trinity: caution. In it, Gautruche introduced students to the basic intellectual tool for acquiring knowledge, and he used examples of Ancients and Moderns to warn against misusing one’s intellectual gifts. Everything in Gautruche’s Aristotelian world was composed of “substance” and “form,” but human beings perceived only “accidents,” the qualities such as heat and light that stimulated the senses. Through logic, the student could reason from such accidents to acquire knowledge about the things themselves.15 To learn such techniques properly, the student needed a teacher, for “often those who trust excessively in [their own intellectual abilities] and who spurn the well-trodden paths of the Ancients [end] with shameful hallucinations.” Such waywardness was the source of Descartes’ errors, according to Gautruche.16 Ideally, logic in its most powerful form, the syllogism, yielded knowledge of the nature and causes of things.17 Those who failed to achieve good results lacked cleverness, assiduousness, or proper instruction—or perhaps they willfully maintained erroneous ideas out of pride. Such wayward thinking was dangerous, because it could end in impiety or heresy when people refused to accept persuasive proofs of religious truths.18 The opposite of pigheadedness—the denial of any certain knowledge—was equally dangerous. Thus, Gautruche argued strenuously against the Skeptics, pointing out everything from their logical inconsistencies to how denying the possibility of certainty threatened religion and morality.19 For Gautruche, then, human beings possessed the capacity to pursue knowledge, but they would only acquire certain knowledge after they had received adequate instruction and if they employed their intellectual faculties cautiously. Throughout the textbook, Gautruche’s language evoked the disputation, a central tool of Jesuit pedagogy.20 Loyola had advocated it “so that


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the intellectual powers may be more fully exercised,”21 and the Ratio studiorum carefully specified every detail of organizing a disputation.22 In 1712, Father Joffrey reiterated its importance: “There is nothing more useful in the search for truth, and nothing more practiced in the schools.”23 Employing its conventions, Gautruche engaged the student in a continuing debate with ancient authorities and contemporary investigators: “I say . . . You will note . . . You will understand . . . I assert . . . I submit . . .” Thus, he embedded the search for knowledge in a social context. Oppositional and competitive, the intellectual sociability of Jesuit pedagogy differed greatly from those forms developing in salons and scientific academies, and its aggressive, dialectical approach opposed the social ideals of politesse and honnêteté promoted in those new venues.24 Yet, however different, intellectual sociability for the Jesuits was no less central to the pursuit of knowledge and as essential a source of intellectual authority. No one could establish truth on his own, and truth emerged from the contest of ideas. Finally, while debate no doubt terrified some, in others it cultivated confidence—a useful quality, indeed, in the contentious intellectual world outside the collège. Students like Huet learned that no one was immune from challenge, but also that they had the intellectual wherewithal to defend themselves. Jesuit pedagogy encouraged curiosity because, as Gautruche presented it, natural philosophy was a lively process, not a settled body of knowledge. When discussing the organization of the universe, for example, Gautruche presented three competing theories, the Ptolemaic-Magini, Copernican, and Tychonic.25 He drew not on ancient wisdom, but on developments in astronomy during the past century. For example, the Ptolemaic system he presented was not an ancient version, but an elaboration developed by Christoph Clavius (1537–1612) and others. In astronomy, Gautruche’s ultimate authority was Tycho Brahe. Gautruche accepted other phenomena undreamt of in Aristotle’s philosophy, too, such as magnetism, Harvey’s circulation of the blood, and Galileo’s sunspots and the moons of Jupiter.26 It is noteworthy too how Gautruche felt compelled to present even those alternatives he rejected. Although some Jesuits discreetly favored Copernicanism, for example, the order was officially committed to geocentrism, as was Gautruche.27 Yet Gautruche did not merely dismiss Copernicanism—he argued against it seriously. There were two consequences of this mode of presentation, one unintended, one happy. On the one hand, by relaying the latest news “from the world of the virtuosi and the scientific academies,” Gautruche and other Jesuit instructors undermined “the fundamental [Aristotelian] principles of the physical doctrine they espoused.”28 They even risked having their students defect to unacceptable alternatives.29 On the other hand, Jesuit natural philosophy was exciting. So much had been recently discovered; so much more remained. Who would make the next important discovery in optics, anatomy, or astronomy? Whose achievements might be celebrated by instructors like Gautruche in the future?


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Huet’s formal education in natural philosophy ended when he defended a long list of theses before a public assembly in January 1646. No student could avoid examination by disputation, but only “outstanding” students “more than average in ability and capable of upholding the dignity of the occasion” disputed publicly.30 If Antoine Halley’s rapturous account is credible, Caen’s collège had chosen wisely, for “Minerva’s servant” astonished everyone by deftly deflecting all objections.31 Many of Huet’s theses appear to be little more than brain teasers and opportunities for displays of virtuosity, such as determining the number of grains of sand the universe could contain.32 We cannot know precisely what Huet said, of course, but the published theses generally attest to a solid and up-to-date education in science and feature two subjects of enduring interest for Huet: astronomy and the anatomy and physics of sight.33 The astronomical theses are evidence, too, of the importance of geometrical instruction and use of scientific instruments in the Jesuit curriculum. While geometry had a relatively lowly place in the medieval university,34 it played an important part in the Jesuit curriculum thanks to Clavius.35 Throughout the seventeenth century, French Jesuit collèges expanded their instruction of mathematics and related fields.36 What scientific instruments did Huet’s collège possess? Gautruche’s descriptions of the quadrant, armillary and celestial spheres, and the astrolabe suggest that these might have been found anywhere. Other theses indicate Huet’s familiarity with the problems and technologies of visual perception and with experiments with mirrors similar to those mentioned by Gautruche.37 Huet did not merely parrot what he had learned, however. He applied his knowledge to develop an original proof that the universe was not eternal, thus putting his knowledge to work for a highly orthodox end: “If the universe remains in precisely the same state as we know it, after a long time, the earth will naturally revert to a perfect orb without the protuberances of mountains and hills, and, the water having been expelled from it, the earth will everywhere be covered with water, from which we may conclude that the universe has not existed eternally.”38 Alas, the proof of this remarkable thesis has been lost.

The Making of a Natural Philosopher The Jesuits were not the only source of Huet’s scientific enthusiasm. Huet also learned about astronomy in the home of his uncle, Gilles Macé, who owned scientific instruments and a good library. Indeed, he told Huet so much about Tycho Brahe’s work at Uranienburg that Huet “vehemently desired to see these things also with my own eyes.”39 He did just that during his peregrinatio academica, though the pilgrimage to Brahe’s observatory taught a sad lesson: the indifference of the world to the devotion to


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learning, and the futility of the desire for earthly glory.40 After his return to Caen, Huet probably spent whatever time he could spare from the Origen on mathematics, corresponding with the Fermats of Toulouse and making his way through an impressive pile of mathematical literature.41 He was also developing an embryonic network of scientific contacts and intellectually “trying on” natural philosophies other than Aristotle’s. The legacy of Macé’s instruments and papers played an important role in developing Huet’s scientific contacts. During his early visits to Paris, Huet met Ismael Boulliau (1605–94), the noted mathematician and astronomer.42 Flattered by the older man’s invitation to attend learned gatherings at his home,43 Huet respectfully corresponded with him in Latin. Letters from 1654 to 1655 indicate Boulliau’s willingness to help Huet with the Origen (chapter 1). Quid pro quo, Huet shared Macé’s research on longitude and observations of the comet of 1618, apologizing for his uncle’s interest in astrology.44 Boulliau nevertheless found Macé’s work praiseworthy.45 Huet impressed him too, so much so that Boulliau brought him to the attention of Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch geometer and astronomer who was visiting Paris at the time.46 Boulliau’s good opinion was at least partially based on a quarrel between Isaac Vossius and Huet that transpired in that semipublic space created by letters circulating through learned circles. In 1659, the two men disagreed about how the refraction of light through the atmosphere caused the remarkable appearance of the sunrise at Mt. Ida, a phenomenon reported in Pomponius Mela’s De situ orbis and commented on in Vossius’s Observationes (1658).47 Huet would have received rudimentary training in the causes and effects of refraction in his school lessons on optics,48 but Huet’s dispute with Vossius required more sophisticated knowledge of refraction, which he drew from Johannes Kepler’s Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (1604). Huygens told Boulliau in a letter of August 1659 that he had already heard that Huet was “a very learned and curious person.” Huygens was also aware of his dispute with Vossius, “whom . . . Huet censured very appropriately, because certainly our Vossius is in this totus alienus . . . et absurdus and, what is worse, incapable of receiving the best instruction.”49 Huygens even honored Huet with a copy of his Systema Saturnium (1659), thus initiating a long acquaintance.50 Once again, people who mattered were taking Huet seriously. During the 1650s, Huet broke with the neo-Aristotelianism of his Jesuit instructors, first by embracing Cartesianism. In fact, Huet caught an intellectual contagion afflicting many intelligent young men of his generation, the “Cartesian syndrome.”51 Huygens caught it, too; he described his early enthusiasm for Cartesianism and his reasons for rejecting Aristotle in terms similar to Huet’s.52 Huet dedicated just one paragraph of his autobiography to his enthusiasm for the new philosophy and his subsequent disenchantment, though the description is significant for how he described this intellectual process. Initially, he reports, he was captivated by Cartesianism, relentlessly perusing all of Descartes’ works. He found it marvelous that a few simple


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principles served as the basis of an entire, unified philosophy of nature. The reputation of Descartes among “learned and serious men” of Germany and the Netherlands also impressed his “immature” and ignorant mind.53 Significantly, he then characterizes his defection from Cartesianism as a return to the Ancients—indeed, he even adapts a stanza from one of Horace’s odes to describe it. Like Horace’s “expert in insane wisdom,” Fortune compelled him to return to abandoned paths, and he “set sail and return[ed] to the way I had abandoned.” 54 Dazzled in his youth, Huet discovered as he matured the new philosophy’s flaws and its failure to deliver certain knowledge. Yet Huet did not have to return to Aristotle. Visiting the Dupuys or the Montmor Academy in Paris in the early 1650s, Huet could still chat with Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who had dismissed Aristotle’s forms as “mere verbiage” and christianized Epicureanism.55 Huet encountered him when he was a houseguest of Montmor, though Huet wrote somewhat darkly that Montmor “instituted the meeting of philosophers in his home to accustom their spirits to Descartes’ dogmas and tempt them gradually into that sect.”56 During the 1650s, Huet could chat about Gassendist-Epicureanism with Michel Neuré, a close associate of Gassendi whom Mambrun characterized as an Achilles for the philosophy.57 Huet tramped through the Norman countryside with Louis Cormis, a Provençal nobleman exiled to Caen, discussing “the ancient philosophical sects, since he was not only exceptionally learned in all of them, but especially so in [Skepticism].”58 In November 1660, Huet was ready to announce his new philosophical allegiances in a letter to Mambrun. Rejecting Aristotle’s “substantial forms,” he now found the atoms of Democritus and Epicurus a more satisfying physical principle. “All things certainly have their origins in atoms, and thus are [destroyed] when resolved into them.”59 Nevertheless, Huet embraced this new physics cautiously, he told Mambrun, tempering his Epicurean enthusiasm with a Skeptic’s coolness. He would not adhere to this doctrine as to a sacrament; it was only “most probable, not certain.”60 By the early 1660s, Huet’s intellectual apple had fallen far from the Jesuit neo-Aristotelian tree.61 Yet significant continuities with his formation endured that shaped his own work and his responses to Cartesianism for the rest of his life: He never abandoned the Jesuits’ moralized view of learning, one that demanded caution and a social context for the pursuit of knowledge to avoid the dangers of intellectual egotism. Moreover, by stressing the antiquity of his philosophical views, he implicitly cast his own work as a natural philosopher not as novel, but as innovating within tradition, as did the Jesuit neo-Aristotelians. Yet Huet never publicly declared his intellectual allegiances—and with good reason. For one, contemporaries frequently associated Epicureanism and Skepticism with atheism. A 1685 letter to Graevius makes clear that Huet was well aware that a mechanistic philosophy such as Epicureanism


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risked thinking God out of nature.62 In it, he delivered his opinion of the anti-Cartesian Disputationes de Deo et divina providentia (1678). He praised the author, Samuel Parker, for his religious zeal, erudition, and his vigorous argument against those who believed that a mechanistic nature functioned without divine providence. Nevertheless, Parker had gone too far, for nature itself possessed a powerful organizing principle. True, the watch required a watchmaker, but, once in motion, it kept time on its own.63 Although such statements were unremarkable in the context of contemporary debates, Huet asked Graevius to keep his opinion to himself. Huet had even better reason to be reticent about his Skepticism. When he floated the idea of publishing a treatise on it in the early 1690s, both a Jesuit friend and a Sorbonne censor declared the work scandalous and strongly discouraged him (see below). Huet was probably a Copernican, too, but he was no more forthcoming about it. He had ample opportunities to express his views during the passage of the comet of 1664–65. Indeed, his contemporaries debated nearly every aspect of the celestial phenomenon, but the burning question was whether comets confirmed or refuted Copernican theory.64 (Nearly every celestial phenomenon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was absorbed into the larger debate about Copernicanism.65) Huet could not observe the comet much in Caen because of his work on the Origen, a recurring eye ailment, and poor weather.66 Nevertheless, at Chapelain’s request, he entered the intellectual fray in Paris with Dissertation de la nature des comètes, which circulated in manuscript.67 In it, Huet systematically examined alternative theories from the Ancients to the Moderns (though he disdained to discuss Descartes’), and he developed an ingenious chemical explanation to account for many puzzling features of comets generally.68 However, he never addressed the question agitating his contemporaries: Did comets prove or disprove Copernican theory? A diagram in his manuscript notes, though, suggests that he not only entertained the possibility that the Earth revolved around the sun, but also speculated about what caused its movement.69 Titled “De motu terrae annuo et diurno,” it probably dates from the 1660s, as it appears among notes on subjects discussed in Huet’s correspondence with Graindorge. Moreover, Huet did not apparently challenge Graindorge when, in a letter, he dismissed an author’s denial of the movement of the Earth as “most weak, most impertinent, and most fanatical.”70 Still, while Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Copernicanism were controversial, Huet’s Paris in the 1660s was not Galileo’s Rome in 1633. True, instructors who taught the new philosophies in the collèges and the universities could be punished, sometimes quite harshly (chapter 5). However, Huygens and the astronomer Adrien Auzout advocated heliocentrism quite publicly, salonnières celebrated Cartesianism, and the academies debated the merits of Cartesianism against Epicureanism. Moreover, France’s foremost Skeptic and the bearer of Montaigne’s flame, François de La Mothe Le Vayer still


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lived, having enjoyed a distinguished career that included tutoring the king’s brother and membership in the Académie Française. So why was Huet so reticent? There is no one answer. Rather, a variety of factors probably came into play to various degrees at different moments: Huet’s assessment of public perceptions, his religious convictions, formation, personal loyalties, private ambitions, intellectual opportunism, and intellectual caution. Consider Copernicanism first. During the passage of the comet, Huet confronted a diversity of opinions, none of which could be proven definitively. Choosing to suspend judgment was reasonable then; it also accorded with Skepticism as Huet understood it and satisfied the Jesuit demand for confining intellectual endeavor within a pious modesty. It was also prudent. He could not publicly embrace a theory under ban if he had any ambition in 1665 of pursuing a career in the church (which he did a decade later). His reluctance could also attest to an internal struggle between formation and avocation. His inability to reconcile the demands of faith and astronomical investigation might, in turn, have prompted the redirection of his efforts to anatomy. Peering into a chest cavity simply did not pose the same theological problems as peering into the heavens did; it was easier to take on Galen than God.71 Surely, Huet’s friends were aware of his intellectual choices. After all, he announced his Epicureanism and Skepticism to Mambrun, who was friends with Montmor, too, and who showed in a letter to Neuré that he was quite capable of rejecting a natural philosophy while befriending those who studied it.72 Nevertheless, there was a great difference between privately discussing and publicly proclaiming his views. Finally, Huet respected authority—indeed, instilling respect for authority was a major purpose of a Jesuit education, and one he fully appreciated it. Aristotelianism, however neo-, remained the officially sanctioned curriculum in university and collège alike. Huet could be an intellectual opportunist, too, misrepresenting his views when it served his purpose. Thus, he wrapped himself in Aristotle’s mantle in the Demonstratio when he presented a sensationalist epistemology against the Cartesians; in the Latin treatise where he attacked Cartesianism, he condemned Descartes’ heliocentrism and concluded with a “praise of Aristotle” (chapter 5). Nevertheless, I suspect that Huet had yet another reason, one that emerges from an examination of the substance, methods, and social contexts of his scientific endeavors and his collaboration with Graindorge during the 1660s.

A New Community of Learning “I greatly admire those Monsieurs who read the heavens as easily as we read our prayer books,” André Graindorge wrote to Huet in December 1665 as the comet streaked across the night sky. “And I cannot sufficiently praise the design of those who seek out true and real things, just as I cannot fault


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enough those who cling to purely imaginary ideas and pile up difficulties over useless things. As if it weren’t difficult enough to penetrate the works and forces of Nature without presenting even more obstacles to us, hindering us from advancing further.”73 A caënnais trained in medicine at Montpellier, Graindorge (1616–76) was a man in a hurry. Possessing limitless curiosity, he disdained “metaphysics,” fumed over the obfuscatory “learning of the schools” (a.k.a., Aristotelianism), and liberally criticized his contemporaries’ efforts. He chafed against human limitation: “Must every question compel us to exclaim against the weakness of our intelligence, which we find so limited.”74 When he and Huet became friends in the early 1660s, they already had much in common. They were connected through Graindorge’s brother Jacques (chapter 1), and they both embraced Epicurean physics and spurned Cartesianism.75 They shared a Huguenot past, too, though Graindorge had converted by the time they collaborated. Honored as they were by membership in Moisant de Brieux’s academy, they were also frustrated by its relative indifference to natural philosophy and thus sought to create a caënnais scientific society. David Lux has very effectively used Graindorge’s letters in a superb reconstruction of the academy’s history; here they serve to reconstruct an intense, respectful, playful, and challenging intellectual friendship.76 Lux emphasized Huet’s higher social status relative to Graindorge, arguing the dolorous consequences for their academy when Graindorge was in charge. Still, while Graindorge needed Huet’s support to advance his vision of experimental science, they regarded each other as citizens of the Republic of Letters should—as equals. How they wrote to each other confirms this, especially when compared to the rhetoric and tone of Huet’s interactions with other correspondents. Huet wrote to Mambrun and Boulliau in Latin, thus indicating his respect for their learning and seniority. His vernacular correspondence with Chapelain was mutually respectful, while signaling the asymmetrical power relationship of client and patron. Letters to women contained charming and convoluted expressions of submission, reinforcing social distance in the language of gallantry. Though formal, Huet and Graevius’s Latin correspondence assumed the equality of Ciceronic amity. Rapin and Ménage dispensed with the formalities and got to the point quickly, sometimes rudely in Ménage’s case. Graindorge’s letters resemble those of the latter two the most. Highly spontaneous, his letters are like buckets dipped into a briskly flowing stream, catching whatever flotsam or hapless minnows are passing by. He omits an opening salutation, leaps from one subject to the next, and ends with a terse “tout votre” when he bothers with a closing at all. Like his letters to érudits, Huet’s correspondence with Graindorge created a space for collaborative endeavor. “It is certain that we naturally get excited about the search for truth,” Graindorge wrote in November 1665, “and it is very difficult for one person alone to succeed at it.”77 For them, the


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“experiment” or the geometrical problem was analogous to a Latin poem—it was presented, discussed, fussed over, corrected, and sometimes repeated. If anything, this aspect of their correspondence was even more important, because the protocols and methods of the community of natural philosophy were still evolving. It might appear that Graindorge’s medical interests dominated their investigations. Yet Huet had reasons enough of his own to take up anatomy. Like astronomy, it was a lively subject, as contemporaries argued Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood and the Cartesian conception of the body as a machine. In addition, Huet’s particular interest in sight, which was perhaps particularly acute because of his myopia and recurring eye problems, launched the academy on a comparative study of the anatomy of the eyeballs of many species. Even before Huet and Graindorge began collaborating, Huet had written on a biological subject in a brief treatise on salamanders, responding to a question raised at Moisant de Brieux’s academy in 1658.78 Huet’s fellow academicians and published naturalists had identified the Norman mouron with the Ancients’ salamander. However, Huet argued against the identity of the two based on his own observations and “experiments,” which included tossing unlucky mourons into fires and crushing the bodies of pregnant females. He discovered none of the properties of the salamander as described by Dioscorides and Pliny. The mouron was not wrinkled, poisonous, asexual, or (most important) fire resistant. Now Huet’s investigation might strike us as distinctly unmodern, but his project was typical in an age when naturalists “campaigned for a strict review of the natural history transmitted by ancient authorities, especially Pliny” and whose efforts “did not exclude wonders.”79 Indeed, his treatise is exemplary of “that inextricable combination of credulity and incredulity that characterized the whole century” and which inspired collectors to amass allegedly marvelous objects in their cabinets de curiosités —only to have their value plummet when naturalists debunked them.80 Though Huet dismissed the opinions of contemporary naturalists and demanded that learned men never subject themselves to common prejudices and hearsay, he never questioned the Ancients’ assertion of the salamander’s fire-defying capabilities.81 Huet’s skepticism of received opinion and his confidence that careful observation led to truth were probably the qualities that made him attractive to Graindorge as a collaborator. Graindorge expressed nearly identical views some years later when he undertook a similar task: investigating the marvelous qualities of the macreuse or scoter, which had long been an acceptable Lenten meal because it allegedly hatched from shellfish. In his introduction, Graindorge announced his intention to examine conventional views in the same spirit that motivated Huet’s experiments on mourons. He would not accept any assertion without examination however long it had been accepted as true by the vulgar or the learned. The seventeenth century proceeded differently,


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he boasted. It regarded incredible things as dubious, subjected the dubious to rigorous examination, and consequently discovered much falsehood. The prudent man suspended judgment on matters long regarded as established truths, and he ascertained the facts before theorizing. That was the surest way to arrive at a “perfect knowledge of things as they are in themselves.”82 Animated by the same spirit, the anatomical investigations that Huet and Graindorge undertook were far more structured and systematic than Huet’s experiments with mourons. Use of the word “experiment” to describe their work risks anachronism and misrepresentation, of course. “Scientific method” was not established in the seventeenth century, and the investigation of nature raised a host of epistemological and procedural questions.83 The relevant question, though, is what did Huet and Graindorge think they were doing when they observed salamanders or sliced open dogs to tie off their ureters to investigate the passage of urine?84 Although they rarely explicitly stated their views, my discussion below suggests that they were confident that the particulars resulting from experiment and experience would eventually lead to explanations—though they themselves were wary of asserting any definitively. Leiden University had pioneered the design of anatomical experiments for testing specific hypotheses,85 and the visit to Paris of the Leiden-trained Danish anatomist, Niels Stensen (1638–86), provided a singular opportunity for Huet and Graindorge to learn about it. In Paris from May 1665 through April 1666, Graindorge observed Stensen’s dissections at Thevenot’s academy and then sent descriptions to Huet.86 “To tell you the truth, we are nothing but apprentices next to [Stensen],” he effused. “No butterfly or fly escapes his industry. He counts all the bones of a flea, if bones there are.”87 Huet was proud of the dissections he performed in Caen under Graindorge’s critical (if distant) eye. In his autobiography, he noted the diligent scrutiny of “the parts not only of men, but also of other animals, quadrupeds, birds, serpents and insects, some live, some dead.”88 One project was investigating the circulatory system by vivisecting dogs. In January 1666, Graindorge wrote that introducing a small amount of vitriolic spirits into a dog’s bloodstream curdled the blood so quickly that death followed promptly.89 Within two weeks, Huet performed the experiment—but the poor beast lived! Graindorge communicated Huet’s results to his source, who confirmed his dog’s death and questioned the quality of Huet’s spirits. Clearly, Graindorge opined, a general proposition could not be based on a single experiment.90 In May, Graindorge proclaimed Huet “a great master in the area of [blood] transfusions.” He suggested that Huet transfuse the blood from a healthy into an unhealthy animal to find out whether the “corrupt” constitution of the latter ruined the healthy blood or the healthy blood improved the corrupt. His findings might help develop treatments for sick people.91 Their work on transfusion was part of a rapid increase in such experiments until


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the transfusion of the blood of a calf into a man to make him more docile resulted in the man’s death in 1667.92 Another subject Huet and Graindorge investigated was vision, an area where questions of physiology (the anatomy of the eye), mathematics (the geometricization of visual space), and the physics of light (refraction through different media) intersected. Huet reported that he extracted “more than three hundred eyes from the heads of all species of animals . . . with my own hands,” carefully comparing “humors with humors, membranes with membranes, nerves with nerves” to determine why one species was short-sighted, while another was visually acute.93 In the Jesuit curriculum, vision was studied as part of mathematics.94 Gautruche had provided a detailed description of the eye and consistently related the nature, problems, and characteristics of sight to that anatomy, relying particularly on the work of Aguilonius, a Jesuit scientist.95 Here again Huet and Graindorge’s interest was unexceptional. Gassendi had called vision a “pleasant and beautiful action,” if one that remained poorly understood,96 and the Royal Academy of Sciences devoted considerable effort to researching it.97 There was a fundamental epistemological reason for investigating sight, too.98 The Gassendist-Epicureanism that Huet and Graindorge adopted “was based on sense perception; all definitions, all principles . . . would be arrived at through experience”—yet everyone knew that sight could be deceptive.99 Having spurned the logic of the schools and Descartes’ innate ideas, they had to know how and how well the eye relayed information about the sensible world. Graindorge’s letters of 1665–66 and a few pages of Huet’s notes attest to their absorption in the subject. Graindorge commented on dissections performed in Caen or witnessed in Paris. He commented on every aspect of Huet’s comparative anatomy of the eyeball, sometimes quite critically.100 He argued about how fluids in the eye refracted light. He advised Huet on observing a mole’s eyes, praised his investigations into the carp’s eye, and remarked the “drollness” of the lens of a rat’s eye. A cat’s iris dilated for the same reason a human iris did, he asserted, though why they differed in shape stymied him. After all this work, Huet apparently objected to Graindorge’s continued characterization of their efforts as amateurish. “If I’d seen you dissect a cow’s eye,” Graindorge assured him in January 1666, “I would never have treated you as a novice.” They supplemented information gleaned from dissections with reports about how injury or cataracts affected vision. They analogized from another sense of sound, hearing. They adorned their letters with geometrical diagrams. Finally, they honed their arguments through an extended epistolary conversation.101 Just as wider intellectual trends defined the questions Huet and Graindorge deemed worth asking, so existing forums for institutionalizing and communicating research shaped the academy they created. We may consider these forums as lying on a spectrum ranging from “open participation/popularization” to


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“exclusiveness/sophistication.” The didactic spectacle and the Royal Academy of Science represent the extremes.102 “Openness” related to both the gender and the status of the participants. Women were generally excluded from academies, but they could attend the public lectures of Jacques Rohault, who combined Cartesianism with showmanship, Jean de Soudier de Richesource, whose academy even debated the question of gender equality, and Louis de Lesclache, author of La philosophie expliquée en tables, in Paris.103 They could also learn about science in the more socially exclusive salons, which generally favored Cartesianism (chapter 5). The assemblies that Henri Justel hosted, while exclusively male, were apparently less discriminating socially. According to a visiting Englishman, “anybody that looks not like a Beggar or a rogue enters and has ye liberty of discoursing, objecting, &c.: a course extremely commendable and to be wisht in our Universities.”104 The Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666, had a limited membership of men only and included important international figures such as Huygens and Cassini. Restricting membership by social status was not just a matter of snobbery. As the meeting place of “two regimes of civility”—those of the Republic of Letters and of aristocratic society—social status guaranteed the intellectual integrity of both the participants and their proceedings.105 Scientific academies were communities of learning that functioned as subgroups of Huet’s Republic of Letters just as Moisant de Brieux’s literary academy did. However, scientific interests did not exclude literary concerns. Natural philosophers were neo-Latin poets, too. People like Graindorge were indifferent, but others, such as Huet’s intellectual hero Tycho Brahe, were avid poets.106 Remember, too, that Huet dedicated his memorial poem for Mambrun to Montmor, who himself authored Latin poetry. Huet participated in several academies, though how he did differed depending on the academy and whether he was in Caen or Paris at the time. Figure 7 depicts these interactions, though not all these academies existed at the same time. The Montmor academy, for example, dissolved in disputes in 1664, while the Royal Academy of Sciences was not founded until 1666. We have already seen how Graindorge mediated Huet’s contact with Thevenot’s academy, which had been established as something of a protest against Montmor’s; Graindorge did the same with the Caen Académie de physique when Huet was in Paris. When in Paris, Huet could attend Montmor’s academy in person; when he was in Caen, Chapelain provided him with news of the gatherings.107 Huet’s treatise on glass tears—pear-shaped baubles that disintegrated into powder at the lightest tap—followed up on a demonstration of their properties there in March 1661. Similarly Huet might attend Justel’s gatherings himself or, when in Caen, rely on Justel’s letters, which read like newssheets. In contrast, Huet had only indirect knowledge of the inner workings of the Royal Academy of Science; still, his intelligence was quite good because of his friendships with Huygens and its secretary Jean-Baptiste Duhamel and because of the Caen academy’s attempted collaborations.108


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Figure 7. Huet’s Connections with Scientific Academies

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An academy did not always devote itself exclusively to natural philosophy or engage in experimenting, as Huet and Graindorge’s did, and experiments were more often means of demonstrating, rather than investigating truth. Presenting memoirs or letters for discussion was a more common practice. In 1658, for example, Chapelain scored a coup by presenting to the Montmor Academy a letter from Huygens detailing his hypotheses about Saturn.109 The meetings of Caen’s academy included oral presentation of members’ research and résumés of important works. Exclusively male and devoted to natural philosophy, it launched an ambitious program of experimenting, mostly in anatomy, and its ambitions included creating spaces for particular endeavors, such as a botanical garden and a chemical laboratory, and assembling a library and state-of-theart instruments. At least initially, some projects at Caen supplemented work at the Royal Academy of Paris (dissecting fish was more practical closer to the ocean), and some were intended for the public benefit (projects for regularizing the rivers around Caen and desalinating seawater). The academy had a modest public dimension too. In May 1666, Graindorge described an anatomy session attended by caënnaises prepared to witness a dissection “à la mode de M. Stensen.” He considered those sessions a waste of time, “for although one might be perfectly satisfied seeing things, it’s entirely different to know, rather than see them.”110 In the beginning, the academy’s membership appears to have been largely self-selected; after becoming a chartered institution (a development with dolorous consequences, according to Huet), perhaps it would have become more exclusive like the Royal Academy of Sciences. Lux rightly stresses the nearly catastrophic effects of the creation in 1666 of the Royal Academy on the intellectual environment of scientific investigation. Its carefully selected membership (Colbert’s recruiting practices resemble our academic star system), the anonymity of its publications, and the exclusion of the public from its meetings helped shut down the open atmosphere in which individuals like Huet and Graindorge thrived. While there had been much agitation for creating a royal institution (which became more urgent after the foundation of the Royal Society in London in 1665), the reality was probably not what most “curious gentlemen” like Huet had wanted.

Exemplars and Competitors The exclusivity of the Royal Academy probably made the contacts that Caen’s academy cultivated with England’s Royal Society even more precious. Moreover, evidence from Graindorge, Justel, and Huet strongly suggests that the society and its most public figure, Robert Boyle, became an important counterpoint to French efforts especially as French science turned increasingly Cartesian. Their appetite for news about the society’s activities was no doubt whetted, but hardly sated by brief excerpts from the Philosophical Transactions published


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in the Journal des sçavans—sixteen in 1666 alone, three of which explicitly mentioned Boyle. The Royal Society and Boyle quickly became standards against which Graindorge and Huet measured their own efforts. Already in June 1665, Graindorge exclaimed over news of Boyle’s New Experiments Touching Cold (1665): “These English are beating us badly at the game, advancing with giant steps.” In January 1667, he wished that the English would write in Latin and fervently hoped that peace with England would bring many translated works into France. In November 1667, he informed Huet that their new academy had decided to obtain copies of the Philosophical Transactions so that members could present extracts to each other. A week later, he admitted that it was difficult for him to report on Boyle’s work without having adequate mathematical skills. He also entreated Huet to find a way of getting the Transactions, because they now had a translator in Caen. By year’s end, he communicated his delight with Boyle’s treatise on saltpeter, terming it “the prettiest in the world.” When Huet returned to Caen, they would replicate some of Boyle’s experiments, which supported the existence of atoms “most prettily.”111 In July 1669, he wanted two new English books, respectively on the fetus and on blood. However, he was skeptical about a book that allegedly revealed the secrets of charlatans, though wished for one containing Boyle’s and Digby’s chemical secrets.112 In May 1670, he enthused about English research into respiration; in March 1671, when discussing experiments with a vacuum, he remarked Boyle’s intellectual fecundity.113 Writing from Paris, Justel also passed on news of the Royal Society and Boyle in letters containing tidbits on nearly everything that excited the curiosity of seventeenth-century savants, from news of a crystal that could produce interesting optical effects to a new telescope built by Newton. In May 1667, though, Justel was preoccupied with translation problems, because the translator of several articles from the Philosophical Transactions had done a bad job. He mentioned that Latin editions of two of Boyle’s works were for sale in Holland and that Boyle reportedly possessed “a magnetic stone the color of gold and transparent.” In June, he alerted Huet to the imminent publication of a history of the Royal Society. A year later, he confirmed that Boyle had authored On the Style of Sacred Scripture (1661); “he isn’t just a natural philosopher, but a theologian. He understands Hebrew and Greek perfectly. There are good ethical books by him, and the English make much of him.” Justel asked Segrais to inform Huet about the publication of some of Boyle’s book on “experimental philosophy, which will explain the advantage one can derive from chemistry for understanding nature.” In February 1671, he informed Huet that more of Boyle’s book on experimental philosophy had become available. In July, Justel was encouraging a publisher in Paris to publish all of Boyle’s works that had not been translated into Latin.114 Justel’s greatest service to Huet was recommending him to Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society’s secretary. Justel wrote to Oldenburg in February 1668 that Huet would contact him soon: “He is a clever man and a meritorious one


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and will assuredly please you.”115 In turn, Justel recommended Oldenburg to Huet as “the most honorable man in the world, who has an extreme passion for the advancement of science and the perfection of the arts.”116 Soon Oldenburg, who already knew about Huet’s research on vision from Justel’s letters,117 graciously welcomed Huet and his colleagues into the English fellowship with a statement redolent of the rhetoric of early modern science: We are very confident that the variety of mighty Nature is inexhaustible, and so its investigation is not a task for any one nation. Thus it is necessary to unite the brains, hands, and powers of all peoples and that this cooperation should endure for many ages. Accordingly our only endeavor is to urge both wise men and whole peoples, wheresoever we can, to perfect this enterprise and to induce them into this noble concern for study.118

Thus, the Caen academy joined an international network of scientific endeavor, and its members gained another source of information. Oldenburg in turn passed on information about the academy to his other correspondents. A letter of March 30, 1668, to Boyle reported news of its experiments with desalinating seawater; another in April discussed its dissections.119 The frequent inquiries, the impatience to secure translations, the eagerness to replicate experiments—all prove how relevant Graindorge, Justel, and Huet considered the work of Boyle and the Royal Society to their own efforts. Several times in 1670, Huet entreated Oldenburg for more information about an instrument for measuring the eyeball that he had read about in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667); he complained at length about the difficulties of obtaining accurate measurements of eyeballs after death.120 In February 1671, he asked Oldenburg to send the works by Boyle mentioned in Oldenburg’s last letter. In May 1673, Oldenburg wrote that two more works of “the noble Boyle” were in press, which he would send to Huet. In December, Oldenburg charged a mutual friend with delivering a copy of “a new book by M. Boyle.” Alas, Huet could not read it; “never did my ignorance of the English language so irritate me as on this occasion, that I see myself deprived of the enjoyment of so many beautiful things.”121 A noble commitment to the search for truth was not the only motivation of Huet, Justel, and Graindorge. They regarded the English as competitors, too. “It really makes the mouth water,” Graindorge wrote of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) before the founding of the Royal Academy in Paris. “Those devils there are sharp; they are assiduous and spend money. One would very much like to find some support here, but the Court’s in no hurry.” Justel was particularly disgusted with his countrymen’s efforts. “With time,” he wrote in 1667, “we will perfect all things, but in France we do nothing new, we only imitate.” Three years later, he wrote optimistically to Oldenburg of the Caen Academy, “it’s a long time since anyone did anything remarkable in all Europe. The French ought to surpass all the other nations because they


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are assisted and encouraged; perhaps with time they’ll do something great.” Justel reported to Huet that Oldenburg attributed the lack of French progress to character defects; the French were “too greedy for glory,” too anxious to produce something novel, and too eager to rip each other apart.122 Justel complained to Oldenburg in 1668, “our French don’t work as hard and are not as precise as the English.” In another letter, he attributed the problems of the Caen Academy to the fact that “leisure and freedom from other business are necessary for a philosopher and these are rare in France, where life is turbulent and full of encumbrances.” In March 1668, Justel reported bluntly to Huet that the Royal Academy in Paris was doing nothing. In contrast, the English “don’t miss a month in giving us some novelty,” he wrote a few months later. In this context, it should not surprise us that Huet blamed the failure of the Caen Academy on the moral deficiencies of its members. Royal support had caused its natural philosophers to dream of material rewards, he wrote in Origines de la ville de Caen (1706); individual interests crowded out serious study, “and it happened that a society, which promised so much fruit, declined, and finally entirely dispersed.”123 As French science turned increasingly Cartesian, Huet was probably drawn to the epistemological and moral underpinnings of English science, too, at least as he understood them through Oldenburg, self-presentations such as Sprat’s history, and the writings and public persona of Boyle. As with most of his endeavors as a natural philosopher, the evidence is indirect, but we can begin with important insights from Graindorge’s letters. Graindorge’s tirades against the learning of the “schools,” especially the fabrication of “terms” that became confused with “things,” resonate with the Baconian distinction between res and verba.124 He praised Huet’s “firm and constant resolution in continuing this [experimentation], which shows us things as they are in themselves and not as we imagine them.”125 He also explicitly linked Huet’s approach with Boyle’s. Some said that Boyle was better at doubting than resolving questions, but Graindorge suspected anyone who set about “creating systems [like Descartes?], which they want to apply to all manner of things.” A natural philosopher “must know things very well before erecting a system, as you do. And natural history must always precede the philosophy that wants to explain all.”126 Huet’s annotations to the French translation of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1670) also provide clues to his thinking. Granted, Huet’s squiggles are not easy to interpret, yet many are not so mysterious when combined with our knowledge of Huet’s education and his experience as a natural philosopher. It is no coincidence, for example, that he marked those passages where Sprat called for crediting “Things” over “Words” and for plain speaking.127 He signaled the pleasure of a Jesuit pupil and of an avid experimenter when he singled out Sprat’s opinion of disputation. For Sprat, “Experimenting” was nourishment, “Disputation” was exercise, and both were necessary


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to the body’s health. Sprat’s gendering of disputation must have resonated with Huet, too, given his disapproval of the “feminization” of French intellectual life. For Sprat, disputation not only explained obscure points and strengthened weak arguments, but it “gave a good, sound, masculine colour, to the whole masse of knowledge.”128 Huet inscribed a Latin quotation into the book’s back cover that is keyed to Sprat’s discussion of Arab achievements in science and whose sense is that experience is key to increasing knowledge, while belief alone increases error.129 Like Huet, Sprat attributed the errors of even well-intentioned philosophers to weariness or presumption.130 Sprat criticized the intellectual tyranny of dogmatists, of researchers who speculated before having sufficiently experimented, and of Descartes. He praised some Moderns for sweeping away the rubbish of the past, but deplored how they too had become dogmatists in turn—precisely the accusation Huet would hurl at Descartes in his treatise on Skepticism two decades later.131 Even the disagreement between Huet and Sprat over the revived Hellenistic philosophy is minor when considered in the context of “doing” science. Huet highlighted no fewer than three passages in the paragraph where Sprat distanced the Royal Society from the Skeptics;132 he noted that the society was “Eclectic, not Skeptical” on the inside of the back cover. Yet Sprat’s assertion that the society “sometimes after a full inspection . . . have ventur’d to give the advantage of probability to one Opinion, or Cause, above another” recalls the qualified embrace of Epicurean physics Huet expressed to Mambrun. In his treatise, he would write that “we cultivate the study of science in the hope of finding that which is most probable and most plausible.”133 When it comes to Boyle, we know which of his works Huet owned,134 but not what he thought of them. Yet there are compelling parallels between the two men’s choice of epistemology, physics, and ethics. Robert Boyle (1627– 91) also rejected Aristotle’s forms as a “puzzling doctrine” for a corpuscular philosophy that resembled Epicurean atomism—though shorn of its atheism.135 Boyle similarly characterized God’s role in a mechanized world.136 In Sceptical Chymist (1661; whose Latin translation Huet owned), Boyle stressed the necessity of doubt to any scientific investigation, a lesson Huet would hammer home in his skeptical treatise.137 He cautioned natural philosophers to regard all theories as temporary, regardless of how much experiment supported them.138 For Boyle, as for Huet, amour-propre and intellectual disaster were inevitably connected—and potentially led to atheism.139 Boyle seriously considered religious questions too; he defended the Bible against “those diverse witty men, who freely acknowledge the authority of Scripture, take exception at its style, and by those and their own reputation divert many from studying or so much as perusing, those sacred writings.”140 Like Huet on Samuel Parker, he sought to define the limits of reason and faith and to preserve God’s activity in his Creation.141 When Huet’s English friend, the scholar Thomas Gale, eulogized Boyle in 1692 as a “noble man


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who promoted philosophy with his learned books and religion by his most holy life,” Huet no doubt vigorously assented.142 Huet’s esteem for Boyle probably increased with the French enthusiasm for Descartes, which both he and Graindorge deplored. As early as 1666, Huet wrote to Rapin that he had recently “determined to battle Cartesianism,” though he would take his time fulfilling that promise.143 However much Graindorge railed against the learning of the schools, the Cartesians were their real intellectual competition. Thus, Graindorge and Huet mulled over troublesome points in the new philosophy, trying out objections to it in their letters—and Huet attended closely to what his friend wrote, bracketing sections of particular interest and jotting a letter’s subjects at its head for ready reference. Many of Graindorge’s objections to Cartesianism clustered around its conception of mind. In May 1666, for example, he found it hard to believe, as the Cartesians would have it, that the heart functioned without direction, that it possessed a principal of movement in itself. In other words, he challenged Cartesian dualism, the complete separation of mind from body and the corollary belief that bodies were machines. Graindorge could accept the relaxation of the muscle as the cause of the return of the blood to the heart. However, did expelling the blood not require a force that pushed? Was it not like a cherry pinched between our fingers to force out the pit? Did not the fingers act only when the mind directed? Surely the soul or mind did more than think or desire; “Me, I would add that it is that which moves, and I would say of the body that it is that which is moved.”144 Graindorge found ridiculous the corollary Cartesian belief that animals, because lacking thinking substance, were mere machines. In November 1665, he fumed over a publication that asserted that animals lacked feelings. “A thought like that will serve well to moderate our compassion when we see a dog being beaten and crying for mercy.” How could Cartesians distinguish between the grimaces of human beings in pain and those of animals that appeared similarly afflicted? Indeed, why not believe that human beings were automata as well?145 Years later in 1672, he agreed with Huet that establishing the meaning of “to feel” would go a long way toward settling the debate.146 Graindorge’s criticism of La logique, ou l’art de penser (1662) in 1673 is particularly precious, because he explicitly mentioned Huet’s agreement with him. Here Graindorge handled a question of supreme importance—“How do we know?”—from two perspectives: sensationalist and idealist epistemologies, or Gassendist-Epicurean and Cartesian, respectively. For many reasons, including the duplicity of the senses, Descartes had denied the possibility that any certain knowledge could have its source in perception; certainty could only result by arguing deductively from innate ideas that the mind spontaneously apprehended as true. Of course, the most famous of these was the cogito, which was the foundation of Cartesian epistemology. Graindorge took issue with the comments Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole made in their boiled-down version of the cogito.147 In a letter written after 1670, Graindorge


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referred to the Port Royal logicians’ claim that human beings had many ideas that could not possibly have come through the senses—ideas about God, the soul, thinking itself, friendship, virtue, mathematical abstractions—because they differed utterly from anything having material existence. Such ideas lacked any sensible quality, and they were immutable and perfect. With his customary level-headedness, Graindorge asserted that understanding how the soul functioned rather than arguing through logic might be a more fruitful approach to the question. He argued, too, that even when we had ideas about immaterial things, we could not conceive of anything entirely immaterial. A blind person knew that colors existed, for example, but he could not conceive of color itself. He might think of colors as sounds or tastes, but he knew that he still did not have a true idea of color. Similarly, Graindorge knew from his actions that there was something more to him than matter, some active principle unlike his elemental body. But he could only represent this immaterial thing to himself in the same way that a blind man conceived of colors—that is, as something with an entirely different nature, such as a subtle flame, a breath, or light. He knew that his soul did not truly resemble any of these things. Nor did it do any good to try to conceive of it through a series of negations. What would a blind man make of color defined as not-sound, not-flavor, not-odor? In other words, people arrived at abstract principles through their perceptions of sensible phenomena, yet they continued to represent those abstractions to themselves by casting them in the images of utterly different, sensible things. Please note: Graindorge had not tumbled from a sensationalist epistemology into materialism; he accepted the existence of an immaterial soul. However, he asserted that we knew all things, including the existence of the soul, through the body and the sensible things encountered in the world.148 Occasionally, Graindorge acknowledged the superiority of a Cartesian idea. For example, he admitted that he found no satisfactory explanation for why objects fell in Gassendist philosophy. Descartes’ hypothesis was most acceptable and reasonable; still, as it remained problematic, he would suspend judgment on the question. Also, however distasteful, wrong-headed, and even silly he found Cartesianism, he believed that the best way to refute it was to experiment and argue in good faith. He opposed any official suppression. In a letter probably written during the anti-Cartesian tumult in the capital of the early 1670s (chapter 5), he asserted that an official prohibition was sure to turn every Frenchman attracted to the forbidden into a Cartesian. Bad books naturally slid into oblivion; banning them gave people a mistaken idea of their worth.149 Establishing direct connections between what Graindorge wrote against Cartesianism and what Huet later wrote in Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689) or in Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723) is impossible. Huet’s thinking was never limited to what he and Graindorge discussed, and he published the Censura years after Graindorge’s death in


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1676.150 Nevertheless, passages in both works echo Huet and Graindorge’s epistolary conversations. The best example comes from the Censura, where Huet created an Epicurean to demolish Descartes’ mind-body distinction, one whose dogged and down-to-earth attack powerfully recalls Graindorge. This Epicurean began by arguing, “what thinks is a man,” and that whenever and however man, as an animated and sentient body, employs reason, the body is present as well. Indeed, the man lived only as long as the body did. Because a man used his body to accomplish all the functions of living— standing, sitting, walking, weeping, laughing, wakefulness, sleep, dreaming, imagining—the Epicurean concluded that man also used the body to think. Descartes had arrived at the essence of man as a “thinking being” because he had confused what was logically possible with what really existed (at least in human experience). Descartes was free to think away the connection between mind and body, but that did not mean the connection did not exist. Descartes could theorize away the body and assert that, whenever he did, he continued to think. “He thinks,” says the Epicurean, “because, even if he feigns that the body does not exist, a body nonetheless does exist, for without the body he cannot think.”151 The Censura was the closest Huet came to a public acknowledgment of his physics, and he took care to begin this debate between the Epicurean and the Cartesian with the conventional characterization of Epicureanism and other ancient materialist philosophies as “swinish.” At least one reader was not fooled. Furious, Arnauld wrote to a friend in Italy in October 1691 that he was not at all surprised that young people had become atheists and Epicureans. By banning Descartes’ works, the inquisitors deprived the world of one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, while leaving everyone free to study Gassendi. “Which is why,” he continued, “they haven’t [condemned Huet’s Censura], where he desires, on the one hand, that the cogito not be clear and evidently true; and, on the other, he gives as much merit as he can to all the wicked reasonings of the Epicureans.”152

Between Friends Huet and Graindorge discussed much more than Cartesianism, and they perhaps inevitably wandered into dangerous territory, such as speculating about the miracle of transubstantiation. Transubstantiation was a particularly bitter bone of contention between Protestants and Catholics, but it also posed problems for anyone who abandoned Aristotelian physics. Aquinas had appropriated Aristotle’s categories to provide a “reasonable” account of transubstantiation. In it, the “accidents” of the bread remained (that is, all of its sensible qualities), while its “substance” changed into the body of Christ. So


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Descartes was already in trouble when he denied the existence of accidents and substance, and he only made matters worse when he attempted to reconcile his physics with transubstantiation.153 Huet and Graindorge had the same problem, because they, too, had rejected these Aristotelian fundamentals. The two men pondered the matter during July 1667.154 Graindorge began by dismissing Aristotelian terms as pure gibberish. He regretted that the “chicanery of the schools” had gotten so mixed up with “our mysteries.” Theology should not be made to accommodate metaphysics, and scholastic terms were unnecessary for explaining a matter that was not subject to the rules of philosophy anyway. He agreed with Huet that semantics was a problem. You could say that the bread was destroyed, but that was impossible, because in nature matter was never destroyed. You could say that the bread was changed, but this misused “change” because transubstantiation was so extraordinary. “Mutation” or “transmutation” usually indicated a process similar to digestion where food was changed, but its matter persisted. Therefore, “annihilation” or “destruction” were the best choices, because they signaled something extraordinary by connoting something impossible. In a second letter, Graindorge gently ridiculed Aquinas for being “so afraid of causing God any trouble that he desired only one miracle and one action in the miracle—as if there weren’t other ways of acting that he couldn’t imagine.” Just as light was light whether it illuminated, warmed, or dried something, so we conceived of God as having many attributes. But our ideas had no effect at all on the nature of divinity; God was one. We could find a hundred miracles in the Eucharist, but that would reflect how we thought, not what transubstantiation really was. He reiterated how extraordinary the destruction of the bread was. Indeed, whatever language was used to describe it could not conceal the magnitude of the miracle—and all to give us spiritual grace! “The Huguenots are greatly mistaken to raise difficulties and impossibilities against our belief as if God measured himself against our standard.” Huet and Graindorge’s discussion of transubstantiation remained reasonably orthodox and was pious in its way. Ultimately, they strictly distinguished between the natural and the religious realms. In the former, much, if not everything, was potentially knowable, for why else set to work with compasses, microscopes, telescopes, and scalpels? In the latter, nothing was commensurate with the human powers of understanding; what was had to be accepted on faith. Yet, by adopting this position, they tacitly renounced a project long dear to the church (and to Huet’s argumentative Jesuit schoolmasters): that reasonable explanations supported Christian doctrine, even if they were inherently inadequate because they were tailored to our limited intelligence, and even if they were superfluous to anyone who possessed faith. In short, Graindorge and Huet approached fideism, which the church had never accepted, so they kept their opinions to themselves.


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They kept a collaborative project to themselves too. In the spring of 1672, Huet wanted Graindorge to prepare Lucretius’s De rerum natura for the Ad usum Delphini. Graindorge had reasons enough not to undertake such a project. Although he permitted himself the occasional philosophical digression, he focused on doing. Therefore, he responded to Huet that his talents lay elsewhere and that he had not leafed through the poets in a very long time.155 In his next letter, he objected that the project required an expert in letters, not someone like him. Still, the project attracted him; “this philosophy has always pleased me, and I will maintain it as much as much as reason permits.”156 So, assured of Huet’s help, Graindorge agreed to try. Huet did help. He recommended other editions of Lucretius to consult. He put Graindorge in touch with Guillaume Pyron, professor of Greek at Caen’s university; by the end of 1672, Pyron and Graindorge were reviewing their progress weekly.157 Also, Huet commented on the many drafts of Graindorge’s interpretatio. Appearing on the same page as the text, the interpretatio was meant to assist students of limited abilities. As Huet defined it for Graevius in 1673, it neither explained the meaning of the text nor summarized it. Instead, it took a middle way by communicating the sense of the text in a simple and natural composition of synonyms that preserved the original’s style and sound.158 In October 1672, Graindorge was finding it very difficult to write in this “middling style.”159 He appreciated Huet’s comments, but complained in another letter that he needed more than “Do this, but don’t do this and that. Change here, cut, make this alteration, clarify.”160 In yet another, he requested that Huet send a passage he found completely satisfactory to serve as an example.161 Ultimately, though, Graindorge bridled at a pedagogical technique that he believed might obscure, rather than clarify the text, if applied too rigidly. “Authors often use expressions so clear and so straightforward and turn a phrase so naturally that using other terms would not be enlightening,” he wrote in November 1673.162 In September 1674, he took issue with the word-for-word literalness that Huet required (consistent with what Huet demanded of the translator in De optimo genere interpretandi?). If adding or repeating words clarified the meaning, what was the problem? On the other hand, why not trim poetic padding? Where Lucretius referred to water as “the liquidy liquid of water (liquidus umor aquae)” to fill out the line, why did Graindorge have to break his head to find an equivalent that matched up word for word, such as the “fluid fluidity of water (fluidus liquor aquae)”? Why not just write “water” and be done with it?163 Nevertheless, in two years, Graindorge completed three of the work’s six books. He continued to send drafts, “so that you might do me the favor of giving me your frank opinion of them. Lucretius has some truly admirable passages, but there are also many that are very boring.”164 It is no surprise that Graindorge found poetics nearly as pointless as scholastic terminology. He deeply cared about the subject, however, which is probably why Huet wanted him to prepare the edition. Graindorge knew


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that much in Lucretius was objectionable, for example, his denial of the immortality of the soul or his graphic descriptions of unpleasant things that were incompatible with “our usage, which banishes any idea that might shock honnêteté or decorum.”165 Many passages were hard enough for Graindorge to comprehend, much less present intelligibly to a young reader. In other words, Graindorge’s Latin would never be more than workmanlike, but Huet knew that he could count on Graindorge to get the science right. Years of working together had proven his passion, tenacity, intelligence, and integrity. He would struggle to penetrate the author’s meaning; he would endeavor to present Lucretius’s ideas clearly and honestly. Huet perhaps hoped that this new edition of Lucretius would help generations of schoolboys do precisely what he did when he was stymied in his search for truth and disillusioned with Cartesianism: return to the Ancients to engage with their ideas in order to establish a foundation for future endeavors. Graindorge died before finishing the Lucretius, and the project disappeared from view. The editor who published Graindorge’s treatise on scoters reported finding the unfinished manuscript among his papers. He remarked on a loss “generally regretted by savants and by all honnête hommes,” and he assumed that Montausier, with Huet, had authorized the project.166 Yet there is no mention of Graindorge’s Lucretius in the letters where Montausier and Huet routinely assigned editors and sorted out publication details. What accounted for Huet’s reticence with Montausier? Did Huet worry that his choice of editor would be questioned? As Graindorge himself admitted, he was no specialist in ancient literature, much less poetry. Was Huet concerned that the Cartesians would regard his unusual choice—a man of science, and one who had thrown his intellectual lot in with Epicurean physics—as a provocation? Was he waiting until he had a finished manuscript before approaching Montausier?

The Curious Gentleman Huet’s correspondence with Graindorge on transubstantiation and the lost Lucretius lead back to my earlier question of why Huet never publicly acknowledged either his Skepticism or his Epicureanism, much less his likely adherence to Copernicanism. I offered several plausible answers, but now another goes to the heart of the intellectual values that Huet shared with citizens in the Republic of Letters and which he and Graindorge lived: discretion. The community of learning that Huet joined when he committed himself to natural philosophy and the community that he helped create with Graindorge were not as closed as the Republic of Letters that Huet entered in 1650. A tradition of vernacular publication took hold too quickly. Not everyone was allowed in (nor, ideally, should have been), however, and those who were could be expected to conduct themselves well. The intellectual space the participants shared was one where


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serious, competent, and trustworthy men discoursed seriously about serious subjects. The more recondite, daring aspects of their endeavors were no one’s business but their own. These values inform the dialogue that frames Huet’s Traité de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain—indeed, one of its participants personifies them. Originally, Huet intended the treatise as the fourth part of Alnetanae quaestiones (1690). The purpose of that work was to reconcile faith and reason. Thus, the Quaestiones responded to threats to religious beliefs that Huet and his contemporaries saw emanating from two sources: the erosion of the status of scripture as the revealed word of God, hence, an unshakable source of certain truth; and science as an alternative explanation for natural phenomena that potentially contradicted Scripture or Christian dogma. Huet’s comparison of the gates of ivory and horn in the Demonstratio anticipates his position in the Quaestiones: Faith was superior to reason, because it alone offered certain truth. Nevertheless, though subordinate to faith, reason remained useful, because Christian truths could be and had been discovered through it alone. For Huet, the strongest argument for the agreement of faith and reason was that no Christian dogma or moral precept had not been anticipated by reason. He devoted four-fifths of Quaestiones to proving this by systematically comparing Christian doctrine and pagan sources, from the attributes of God, the origin and end of the world, the creation of man, Christ’s birth from a virgin, the condemnation of idolatry and vanity, to pious practices such as humility and the examination of conscience. Huet intended the concluding fourth book to establish the limits and rights of faith and reason, respectively.167 It was eventually published posthumously and independently as Traité de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723). Well known to scholars of Skepticism, it bears the traces of Huet’s earlier scientific interests and investigations and echoes topics discussed with Graindorge. Much in its tone is familiar to students of seventeenth-century Skeptical literature, especially the work of François de La Mothe Le Vayer, whom Huet cribbed at one point.168 Nevertheless, its Skepticism shocked Huet’s Jesuit friend, Charles de La Rue, the editor of Virgil’s works for the Ad usum Delphini (1675). In an undated letter, La Rue warned Huet that it would cause a scandal. He advised Huet to soften his opinions—better yet, to suppress them entirely. Huet should concentrate on religious study, not philosophy. The satisfaction of telling the truth would not compensate Huet for the unhappiness the work would bring him. “You will see the greater part of your friends either declaring against you or, at least, not daring to defend you.” What harm would there be in setting the work aside to mature for a few years? “You will say that I am afraid, and that one ought not fear for the truth! I will confess to you, I am afraid. But I will respond that this truth is not so important that you, in its defense, must take on the whole world.”169 La Rue was right. It was not that Huet would anger the Cartesians; he had already done that, and he did not much care. But he would alienate his


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friends, the Jesuits. Let us recall Gautruche’s vigorous rejection of Skepticism in his textbook. Yet the Jesuits were not the only religious group with stakes in this controversy. Skepticism concerned the entire church, where the hyperrationalist tradition of Thomistic theology prevailed. The shocked response in May 1692 of the Sorbonne censor Edme Pirot makes this quite clear.170 Huet and Pirot had crossed swords in 1678 over Pirot’s delay in granting the Demonstratio an approbation, without which Huet could not publish the book legally.171 When Huet sent Pirot the treatise in the early 1690s, he was still a censor, specializing in works on religion and Cartesianism.172 Pirot’s reaction confirmed La Rue’s fears. He declared the treatise scandalous. He adamantly rejected Huet’s assertion that Skepticism was the best preparation for Christian faith. He accused Huet of depriving Christian apologists of an essential tool by denying the capacity of human reason to attain certain knowledge. In addition, he rejected Huet’s notion that fideism put faith on a firmer footing—quite the contrary, it totally undercut it. The published version of the treatise lacks the context of the Quaestiones: philosophical discussion. Huet cast the Quaestiones as a series of conversations between himself and Jean-Baptiste Duhamel (1624–1706). At the beginning of the fourth book, Huet’s old teacher Gautruche joined them—an interesting choice, as Gautruche would hear the Aristotelian science he had worked so hard to inculcate in young minds demolished, though Huet handled Cartesianism as roughly. (Gautruche’s arrival is related in the introduction to the fourth book, which was never incorporated into La Foiblesse.)173 Significantly, all three participants combined a commitment to science and religion in their lives and studies. A Norman like Huet, Duhamel was an Oratorian whose De consensu veteris et novae philosophiae (1663) argued that all natural philosophies—Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Cartesian—contained some measure of truth (though Descartes’ principles seemed more obscure to him). In 1666, he became perpetual secretary to the Royal Academy of Sciences; in the late 1660s, he visited England, where he met savants such as Robert Boyle. Huet and Duhamel thus shared an enthusiasm for English endeavors, eclecticism, and a belief in the continuing importance and relevance of the ancient philosophical systems—and Duhamel no doubt kept Huet informed of activities at the Royal Academy of Sciences. In the “Antecessio” that prefaces the Quaestiones, Duhamel and Huet come upon a place in the forest shielded from sight by dense foliage during a promenade through the countryside near Huet’s abbey at Aulnay. Huet reminded Duhamel that the place where they rested resembled those where the most ancient philosophers had withdrawn to reflect. Hence, the setting was an invitation to philosophize. It was also more isolated from the world, even more discreet than the libraries where Huet situated his dialogues in De optimo genere interpretandi, thus more appropriate for the philosophical daring of the projected fourth book. Even more than De optimo genere interpretandi, the Quaestiones and the treatise are more a series of monologues than a true


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dialogue, but even the suggestion of exchange is important. It indicates the values of intellectual sociability and collaborative endeavor already familiar to us. In addition, once Gautruche joined Huet and Duhamel, it distanced the skeptical ideas to be explored from the three participants, because none of them actually articulated them. Instead, Duhamel presents them as those of a certain Provençal—and with a proviso: “Truly you will hear from me things I fear you might not approve: dangerous, insolent, odious, neither popular nor accommodated to vulgar ears. We will oppose reason with reason, we will pit them in battle against each other; and, indeed, the Cadmean victory will be either the victor’s or the vanquished’s.”174 Huet’s model for the Provençal was Louis Cormis, who had recalled him to the ancient philosophies, especially Skepticism, after his flirtation with Cartesianism. With Duhamel’s introduction of this “excellent man, well instructed in all ancient and modern philosophical sects,” La foiblesse begins.175 The Provençal prefaced his ideas with an intellectual autobiography that mimicked the beginning of Descartes’ Discourse on Method and that probably conflated elements of both Cormis’ and Huet’s lives. Like Descartes, the Provençal had applied himself to philosophical studies since his youth; like him, he found shocking the lack of philosophical consensus on every topic. Rather than finding truth and spiritual repose, he had been plunged into “the deep shadows of an invincible ignorance.” A diversity of opinions—Greek, Arab, Latin, Ancient, Modern—bedeviled the Aristotelian philosophy in which he had been educated.176 Clearly, Aristotle had erred in believing that philosophy would soon be perfected, for every day saw the birth of new disagreements. “Time, which moderates all things, in contrast embittered the minds of philosophers, so much so that their science was not a search for the Truth, as they boasted, but a way of adroitly quibbling and subtly disputing.”177 Like Huet, the Provençal initially turned to Cartesianism, impressed that, “based on a small number of very simple principles, it penetrated to first causes by a clear and easy way.” However, the contemporary intellectual world was one of continual contention between Cartesians, Aristotelians, and Epicureans. So he took refuge in Platonism, convinced that in Plato, whom the church fathers had so highly esteemed, he would find the best teacher. Yet there he found no “solid foundations for the truth . . . nothing to anchor the spirit; no certain and determinate principles, no system nor sinew of doctrine; nothing connected; nothing completed.”178 Disappointed, but not discouraged, the Provençal perused all the ancient philosophies, hoping to discover one less subject to contradiction and one capable of giving him spiritual peace. He finally found what he needed in the ancient Skeptics, yet “I made myself author of my own system” by rejecting some of their points. Study and meditation brought greater self-awareness and the conviction that “neither in myself, nor in any other human being, could a natural faculty be found by which we might discover the Truth with a complete and entire confidence.”179


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It was no coincidence, of course, that the Provençal’s intellectual odyssey resembled Descartes’ and that it reached diametrically opposed conclusions. Unlike Descartes, for the Provençal Skepticism was not a tool leading to absolutely certain first principles that could then function as a foundation for the pursuit of certain knowledge. Rather, Skepticism was an intellectual modus operandi that human beings always needed because they would always err. Skepticism did not invalidate the enterprise of pursuing knowledge, but it counseled investigators to be satisfied with securing “probable,” not certain, knowledge. The Provençal also advised an eclectic approach, seeking out whatever was most probable in various philosophies and counseling against “attaching one’s self inseparably to any.”180 Finally, he appropriated the liberty to think for himself: “Should anyone ask me now what we are, since we do not desire to be either of the Academic, or of the Skeptic, or of the Eclectic, or of any other Sect; I will respond that we are ourselves, which is to say, free, desiring not to submit our Intelligence to any authority, and approving only what comes closest to Truth.”181 Considered in its social context, La foiblesse implicitly validated the ideals and objectives of scholarly discussion as Huet understood them. Characterized by Duhamel as an individual of striking intelligence, expansive knowledge, frankness, and honesty, the Provençal revealed his bold opinions only in the intimacy of intellectual friendship—and Duhamel recorded them only “for fear of forgetting them, and for my use alone, without thinking they should ever leave my hands.”182 In other words, expressing daring ideas was appropriate in a private discussion, and the discussion between Duhamel and the Provençal in turn nestled in the equally private conversation between Huet, Duhamel, and Gautruche. The treatise also recalls the ideal scholarly discussion as Huet represented it in De optimo genere interpretandi many years before—an arena where participants contested with each other to discover “truth.” None of them were rude or uncivilized, as the salonnières and Cartesians would have it, but they were direct, frank, and fearless. The ideas presented might shock some, but they pressed on, because they were discreet and because they had earned the right to free expression. Like Huet, the Provençal remained grounded in the wisdom of the Ancients—indeed, he found spiritual peace in one of their philosophies. He did not slavishly adhere to any, however. By relentlessly demonstrating the limits of human understanding, the Provençal counseled intellectual humility, as had Huet’s Jesuit teachers. Like them, he did not conclude that the intellectual limitations of human beings made it futile to try to acquire knowledge. Quite the contrary, he, like Huet, was free to seek knowledge through the astronomer’s telescope, on the anatomist’s dissecting table, or anywhere else, and to use what he learned to test his beliefs. He was a curious gentleman committed to the pursuit of knowledge—more, he personified Huet’s intellectual ideals.


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Chapter 5

DEFENDING PARNASSUS, 1666–92 Mais aussi est-il vrai que j’ai entièrement perdu le dessein de réfuter [la philosophie des jésuites]; car je vois qu’elle est si absolument et si clairement détruite, par la seule établissement de la mienne, qu’il n’est besoin d’autre réfutation. —René Descartes to Marin Mersenne

The Bishop Defiant In 1700, Pierre-Daniel Huet, the Bishop of Avranches, attained a dubious distinction: French authorities seized a copy of his Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme in a cache of nearly forty contraband books in Paris.1 While the short satire stood out in a collection composed mostly of theological polemics, the seizure itself was typical. During the final decades of the seventeenth century, ancien régime censorship was at its most rigorous.2 But why would Huet publish (or permit to be published) any work illegally, especially one as anomalous among his works as a vernacular satire? Because Edme Pirot, the Sorbonne censor we met earlier (chapter 4), refused to approve the book in April 1692. Pirot claimed that writing satires was beneath a bishop’s dignity. Huet countered that he had satisfied the demands of propriety by arranging to have it published under someone else’s name (or, rather, initials). Pirot would not budge. Huet in turn refused to relinquish this novel way (for him, at least) of answering the critics of the Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689) and eviscerating Adrien Baillet’s La vie de M. Descartes (1691).3 The Nouveaux mémoires did more than respond to specific intellectual enemies, however. In it, Huet defended his entire world of learning, shifting from learned (generally Latin) arguments to vernacular social criticism. Intended to warn literate, if not erudite readers about the dangers of fraudulent learning, the satire was a late, rear guard action in Huet’s lifelong defense of the Republic of Letters as he knew (and loved) it. In order to fully understand both the satire and Huet’s overall defensive strategy, we need to examine his earlier responses to intellectual opposition and criticism. As 144


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we will see, these were always shaped and informed by the ethos of learning and appropriate behavior into which he had been socialized. An examination of Huet’s responses to intellectual opposition and criticism also illuminates the connections between the intellectual and cultural conflicts that ultimately redefined the Republic of Letters in the final decades of the seventeenth century. Although I have emphasized comity in Huet’s republic until now, conflict has always been present, too: in the Quarrel of the Inscriptions, Rapin’s attack on contemporary poetry, Huet’s critique of the contemporary novel, the salonnières’ rhetoric of antierudition, and the growing popularity of Cartesian science. For Huet, these conflicts posed challenges to fundamental aspects of the “old” Republic of Letters—its intellectual methods and projects, its exclusivity and expertise, its forms of sociability, its prestige. He devoted increasing effort to responding to such challenges from the Demonstratio evangelica (1679) onward. His counterattacks took many forms to address a variety of threats. Before beginning this final chapter, let me recall where this book began. I have argued that the Republic of Letters Huet entered in the 1650s was a community of learning. At its core was a (sometimes tacit) consensus about the proper responses to several questions: How do you acquire and produce knowledge? Who has the right to criticize the resulting intellectual product? How inclusive or exclusive should (or can) the community be? How should members interact with each other? Or interact with other communities of learning? Previous chapters have detailed the answers of the old Republic, and together they define the intellectual “ethos” that became Huet’s context for assessing and addressing his opponents. We can surmise Huet’s response to nearly any particular opponent by imagining his answers to a series of related, sometimes inversely paired questions: Was the opponent truly learned, thus merely in error? Was he, by definition, an outsider due to ignorance? Or an outsider because he (or she) disagreed with Huet about what constituted legitimate intellectual method and questions? How public should the dispute be? Should it be confined to correspondence between the two parties or conducted in that quasi-public space created by circulating letters and manuscripts? If published, should it appear in Latin, thus (in principle) restricted to the learned? Or in the vernacular, thus implicitly pleading the case to a wider public? By anatomizing several of Huet’s disputes with these new questions in mind, I will show the often invisible connections between participants in discrete contemporary debates, any one of which could create ad hoc cultural alliances. Huet was quite aware of these alliances, and, as the years passed, paranoid enough to damn his foes by association. He had some justification for this, because Jansenists, salonnières, Moderns, and Cartesians could line up on the same side of an issue—indeed, a single individual could figure in all four communities. It is no surprise, for example, that


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Anne Dacier, the female érudit we met earlier, became an Ancient. Yet the stand an individual took on one intellectual issue did not necessarily determine his or her stand on another. For example, being a Jesuit did not automatically make an Ancient. While Huet’s friend Rapin steered a via media in literary matters, Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702), whose oeuvre included anti-Jansenist polemics, literary criticism, and pious works such as the biography of Madame de Bellefont discussed earlier (chapter 3), took the side of the Moderns. Some Jesuit natural philosophers adopted Cartesianism before it became generally acceptable. Madame Deshoulières, one of the few épicuriennes of her day, was a Modern in literary matters. In other words, there were elective affinities in this conflictual world, but no intellectual predestination. To begin, let’s return to Huet’s edition of Origen’s biblical commentaries, the work that secured him a respected position in the Republic of Letters after many years as a promising young scholar. The dispute I discuss here represents the ideal case of how Huet believed intellectual debates should be conducted. Here, too, Huet’s concern with Jansenism first surfaces, albeit discreetly. Examining how Huet later responded to his opponents within the pages of the Demonstratio and to critics after its publication, we begin to move outward from the inner circle of the learned to those opponents whom Huet dismissed as ignorant for various and instructive reasons. Jansenist Cartesians also emerge more clearly as intellectual enemies in the Demonstratio. The penultimate section of this chapter sketches the rise of Cartesianism and the convergence of its brand of antierudition with that of the salonnières and the Moderns, groups that fundamentally rejected the legitimacy of the old republic. Finally, I will show how Huet’s anti-Cartesian satire brought together his concerns by creating an intellectual dystopia headed by a fictional Descartes, inverting the learned ideal represented by the Provençal curious gentleman at the end of chapter 4.

Origen and the Jansenists In a letter composed around 1670, André Graindorge remarked that Huet’s Origen had irritated both the Huguenots and the Jansenists.4 Huguenot dissatisfaction has been explored elsewhere,5 but Huet’s Origen has never been examined for traces of the Jansenist controversy. Yet dramatic events made Jansenism impossible to ignore as Huet was composing the work. In August 1664, for example, the archbishop of Paris ordered a hundred armed men to surround the convent of Port Royal, dispatched to force the nuns to sign a document condemning Cornelius Jansen’s views on the theology of grace.6


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The deep and enduring impacts of Jansenism on French culture, politics, and society before the French Revolution are impossible to summarize briefly. While Jansenism takes its name and theological foundations from Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), the Bishop of Ypres and author of the Augustinus (1640; see below), it spread in France through the efforts of Jansen’s friend, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643). When the reforming nun Angélique Arnauld accepted Saint-Cyran as the spiritual director of her convent and her own confessor, she gave Jansenism an important psychological and physical center at Port Royal. Her brother Robert, who was prominent at court, did much to maintain the interest of elite society in Jansenism, and the retreat of the solitaires to Port Royal to live (in their view, at least) a more thorough-going Christian life excited the admiration of many. The incident in 1664 shows how willing the Jansenists were to stand their ground against the established Church, whether in Paris or in Rome; their independence bedeviled Louis XIV, whose efforts to bring them to heel ultimately failed. It is not necessary to review the complex religious policies of king and pope vis-à-vis the Jansenists, however. What makes Jansenism relevant to this story of intellectual transformation is the receptiveness of many of its followers to innovation, evident in the establishment of a distinctive (if shortlived) pedagogical program in the “Little Schools” at Port Royal; a marked interest in Cartesianism (see below); the intellectual quality of advocates like Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Pierre Nicole (1625–95); and last, but hardly least, Jansenist antipathy to the Jesuits. Huet might have objected to the violent means the archbishop deployed against the nuns of Port Royal, but he no doubt approved of the end. Like many French Catholics, Huet would resent the Jansenist challenge to the Council of Trent’s pronouncements on grace, free will, and predestination. Trent acknowledged the impossibility of salvation without divine grace, yet asserted that “man cooperates with God primarily through the channels provided by the church, namely, the sacraments.” (As Loyola pragmatically wrote, “We should act as if everything depended on us, but pray as if everything depended on God.”)7 Indirect evidence suggests that Huet shared the hostility to Jansenism of his Jesuit friends. In 1651, Mambrun warned Huet to avoid anti-Jansenist activity in Caen,8 where the rector of the collège published an anti-Jansenist work in 1653. Many of the Jesuits Huet met in Paris in the early 1650s composed anti-Jansenist polemics. Huet probably knew about the response to Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1660) that Rapin published in 1656; he definitely knew about Rapin’s project to write a history of Jansenism, because he contributed to it.9 Finally, the pious but hardly ascetic Huet was not likely to find Jansenist severity attractive. Huet’s engagement with Jansenism through Origen reveals much about how, at an early stage in his career, he believed intellectuals should conduct themselves. It displays the skills, tools, and framework that he believed


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were appropriate for settling differences. It raises the question of whether to publish and, if so, what audiences to address through which genre and language. Finally, it suggests that Huet had already adopted ground rules of his own devising that went beyond the Republic of Letters’s requirements to embrace civility and eschew ad hominem argument. In chapter 1, I alluded to the problems that preparing an edition of a church father’s work raised in a confessionally divided world. It was no less problematic in the narrower context of the French Church agitated by debates over grace. Few scholars heeded the advice of the Huguenot scholar Jean Daillé that the fathers were useless in adjudicating conflicts between Protestants and Catholics “because it is, if not impossible, at least very difficult to know clearly and precisely what their opinions were.”10 I noted, too, Origen’s problematic reputation. Dubbed the “hydra of heresies,” he had been attacked since the third century for everything from his self-mutilation to his allegorical method of biblical interpretation.11 Erasmus admired him; Luther loathed him.12 Scholarly opinion remained divided during the seventeenth century; Jesuit views were equally polarized.13 Yet perhaps no father better deserved Huet’s attentions, as Origen’s writings had suffered corruption to an exceptional degree. Huet went beyond publishing a richly annotated edition, however: He also composed the Origeniana, where he subjected Origen’s teachings to a “free, unprejudiced and independent examination.”14 He intended to strip away centuries’ worth of misconceptions, distortions, even falsifications to give the (learned) reader Origen’s actual opinions on fourteen theological questions—or at least as close as Huet could determine them. The section covering Origen’s opinions on grace, free will, and predestination ran to twenty-two pages, second in length only to those on punishments and angels. More significant, Huet organized no other treatment of Origen’s doctrines around the views of a recent contemporary. Here he devoted nearly the entire section to answering Jansen’s charge in the Augustinus that “among all who preceded Pelagius, we can find no more skillful architect of the entire Pelagian heresy than Origen.” The Pelagians had asserted that, despite Adam and Eve’s lapse, human beings remained capable of and responsible for perfecting themselves. Augustine’s view, which was based on Paul’s letters, was that people in their fallen state could do nothing but evil and required divine grace to accomplish any good. His view prevailed over Pelagius and his disciples in the early fifth century. Luther wanted to return Christianity to this Augustinian vision; he sought to sweep away scholastic subtleties that he believed compromised God’s power by giving human beings some role, albeit minuscule, in effecting their salvation. Jansen also aspired to restore Augustine’s theology of grace in all its rigor.15 Origen’s theology of grace presented an obvious opportunity to challenge the Jansenists. Huet’s argument was long and complex, as befits the long


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and complex history of the doctrine. An essential element was to demonstrate that, because Jansen had misunderstood the context of Origen’s statements, he had misunderstood Origen’s conception of necessity, which, in turn, invalidated Jansen’s identification of Origen’s views with those of Pelagius.16 Huet did this by trying to detail precisely what Origen had written, while often considering the father’s opinions in a wider context. Origen’s On First Principles (220–31) made clear his belief that God gave human beings free will and thus the ability to choose virtue. But Origen made these assertions, Huet cautioned, in the context of religious debates occurring during his lifetime. Origen’s enemy had not been fifth-century Pelagians, but his contemporaries, that is, third-century pagan astrologers and Gnostics who were arguing for necessity. Perhaps that polemical context had prompted Origen to make claims for human freedom stronger than was prudent, but perhaps polemical circumstances had similarly affected Augustine’s views, which were not always consistent. Huet never denied the unorthodox elements of Origen’s views, but, by drawing from a wider (and, presumably, more trustworthy) selection of Origen’s writings, he sought to show that those views were more complex than Jansen allowed—or that they were impossible to pin down, given the uncertain textual authenticity of Origen’s works. He also produced evidence that other fathers, particularly Augustine, had written some opinions that accorded with some aspects of Origen’s views. Huet was hardly a disinterested scholar; indeed, he quoted Trent’s decrees to remind the reader that he had Catholic orthodoxy on his side.17 In declaring that Origen had been a semi-Pelagian, Huet perhaps achieved a limited goal, but also an important one. He argued persuasively that Jansen’s reading of Origen had been incautious, based on an overly narrow textual basis, and insensitive to the contexts of Origen’s and Augustine’s ideas. Even if Huet could never have assumed a historical view of his own religion (which would have been remarkable), he could present Origen as a historical figure with views shaped by the debates of his era, not Augustine’s, much less Jansen’s or Huet’s. Equally important from our perspective, Huet’s debate with Jansen demonstrates his belief that settling such questions required careful scholarship, not polemical passion.18 Let us recall how, in his work on translation, Huet represented intellectual dialogue between Isaac Casaubon, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, and Fronton du Duc: energetic, civil, erudite, and reasonable. Huet preferred to engage with adversaries by taking this intellectual high road: arguing in learned terms in a learned language with other learned and (ideally) civil men (even if, in this contest, I suspect Huet had little respect for Jansen as a scholar). Moreover, Huet would strive to do so even when a fundamental, if vexed doctrinal point was at stake. Only a fraction of the French reading public had the skills, not to mention the intellectual training even to read, much less evaluate, Huet’s Origen. That was precisely the point. In this work, the intellectual elitism and


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mistrust of the vulgar fostered by Huet’s education and typical in the Republic of Letters converged with a belief among intellectual and social elites that the cause of religious strife lay in popular enthusiasm.19 As Jean Le Clerc put it in 1684, érudits studied “mysteries to which the people ought not be admitted, because, having neither the leisure nor the capacity to delve into and penetrate them, they do not know how to absorb them well nor how to put them to good use.”20 Thus, Huet limited his audience. It was a conscious choice, as suggested by the fact that he also composed, but declined to publish a brief, vernacular treatise on precisely the same subject. Internal similarities suggest that Huet composed “De la grace de Dieu” while working on the Origen. Equally important to us is the style of presentation: While many learned citations appear at the end of his treatise, the text itself contains few allusions and generally avoids theological fine points conveyed in arcane scholastic vocabulary. Huet preferred, for example, a comforting and conventional metaphor that expressed the (diminished) capacity that people still possessed for striving toward the good: a human being so devastated by illness that he could barely signal what he desired—yet he still could signal, however feebly.21 Why didn’t Huet publish his vernacular treatise? In the contentious climate prevailing then, Huet’s tract would certainly have attracted Jansenist counterattacks, and the Jansenists were capable controversialists. How bruising might such a contest be? How great a distraction from his studies—and to what purpose? Would it enhance the piety of the ordinary believer? Should the ordinary believer even be concerned with such theologically intricate and potentially dangerous doctrines? For Huet, the answer was apparently, “No.” Another aspect of Huet’s treatment of Jansen in the Origen demands explanation: Huet confined his critique to the late Jansen’s Augustinus, never mentioning the very much alive (and lively) Jansenists, especially their leader, Arnauld. Instead, Huet used Jansen as a proxy for his contemporary opponents, much as he used ancient philosophers as proxies for himself and his adversaries in the Demonstratio years later. Huet generally adhered to a self-imposed rule not to mention living opponents in his works, a rule that far exceeded what other prominent citizens of the Republic of Letters required to balance the need of facilitating communication against the danger of provoking conflict. In 1661, for example, Robert Boyle of England’s Royal Society proposed his Sceptical Chymist as a model for “how to manage even disputes with civility.” Boyle advised intellectuals to discriminate “between bluntness of speech and strength of reason” and to remember that “a man may be a champion of truth without being an enemy of civility.” If a scholar disagreed with an opinion, he should refute it, but he should also refrain from railing against “them that hold it.” His aim was to convince, not provoke. Severity was appropriate when addressing an opponent’s ideas; graciousness was required


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when addressing the opponent.22 Pierre Bayle authorized a more uninhibited approach. He described the Republic of Letters as “an extremely free state . . . an imperium of truth and reason . . . [where] one wages war innocently against anyone else.” It was a “state of nature” in which every citizen possessed the “right of the sword” and required no one’s permission to wield it. Nonetheless, he forbade satire because it stripped “a man of his honor” and thus was “a sort of civil homicide.” In contrast, criticism of a book only “[showed] that an author has neither this nor that degree of insight”; it left his “rights and all the privileges of society” unimpaired and “his reputation as an honorable man and good subject of the Republic” untouched.23 With different emphases, both Boyle and Bayle demanded that intellectuals distinguish between a man and his work, treating the former honorably and the latter rigorously. Huet made his personal rule for responding to living opponents explicit in angry letters that he wrote to the Jesuit Pierre Poussines (1609–86) and the Huguenot scholar Jacques Basnage (1653–1723) after publishing the Demonstratio. Both had published criticisms of the book, though neither believed that he violated any rule of the Republic of Letters by identifying Huet as author of the points they disputed. In a letter of May 1682, Poussines defended his “republican” rights to take whatever side he judged best in debate as long as he “confine[d] himself within the bounds of a modest liberty.”24 Huet responded that Poussines had missed the point. He should have been content with “refuting [Huet’s opinion] without revealing to the public that it was mine.” He should have followed Quintilian, who, “after having taken issue with a learned man, did not believe that he could name him without being inhumane,” or Plutarch, “who did not approve of attacking a man who was not there to defend himself.” It would have been acceptable to use Huet’s opinion as a convenient target to establish his own. Poussines had done more and worse, however, when he argued that Huet had misunderstood his sources and reasoned badly, making known to “all posterity my alleged error.”25 Huet then challenged Poussines to find in any of his works a living author mentioned for any reason other than to praise and honor him. Huet’s comments to Basnage reiterated the same themes. Basnage could have opposed Huet’s opinion without injuring “the name and honor of the Author.” While agreeing with Basnage that their intellectual community was a republic, not an empire, Huet added, “in a republic, as in an empire, it is disagreeable to see one’s faults taken up publicly and exposed to the view of all nations and to eternity.”26 It is easy to interpret Huet’s position as merely self-serving and chimerically chivalrous. After all, it is reasonable to assume that well-informed scholars would know very well who was being criticized whether the target’s name appeared or not.27 Was this even a workable way to regulate criticism within the Republic of Letters? Still, Huet generally abided by the letter of


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his own rule, if not always its spirit. When he transgressed it, as in his quarrel with Boileau, that spoke volumes about his opinion of his adversary. Moreover, his dictum had a serious, if implicit point: Print fundamentally altered the relationship between scholars and the relationship between scholars and their readers. Modern conceptions of private and public prevent us from fully appreciating Huet’s concerns. We have seen that, in Huet’s era, letters were frequently not “private” as we understand the concept today. But the private or public status of a communication was perhaps less an issue for Huet and his friends than the “boundedness” of a potential audience. A correspondent could assume that his letter would circulate among people he considered appropriate. The same calculation probably informed an author’s decision to circulate his work in manuscript, rather than publishing it (which also avoided censorship). One of the points of networks, whether in the Republic of Letters or the Empire of Women, was to create a “bounded” public for one’s intellectual products, one composed of compatible, equally capable, and loyal individuals. In contrast, print explodes boundaries. While Latin publication obviously restricted the size of a reading public, it nevertheless expanded that public to include anonymous individuals with whom the author had no connection. Huet obviously did not want to shut down scholarly publishing, but there had to be standards of good behavior in print just as there were standards in learned academies and in correspondence. Ultimately, for Huet, it came down to appropriate subject matter treated by appropriate authors for appropriate audiences. Intellectuals had to be discreet, on the one hand, because many ideas were no business of “the vulgar” and thus should never find their way into vernacular publications. For example, when Pirot objected to a passage in the Demonstratio that he believed might offend contemporary moral sensibilities, Huet insisted that his audience was learned men.28 He no doubt agreed with the criticism in Baillet’s Jugemens of Richard Simon, a supremely capable scholar, that his vernacular work of biblical criticism made potentially dangerous ideas accessible to everyone, even women.29 His friend the Abbess of Fontevrault put the problem well in 1690: Dutch publications found their way even into the convents, spreading “doubts and half-knowledge”; the small minds exposed to such materials came to “believe they were capable of judging all things, and regarded submission to the laws an effect of the weakness and the ignorance they had lived in before these lovely discoveries.”30 Huet also objected to Huguenot exiles in the Netherlands who began publishing vernacular journals like Bibliothèque universelle or Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; these “journalists” had no right to set themselves up as a tribunal to judge matters they knew nothing about, seasoning their critiques with “gall and vinegar.”31 Thus, though censorship occasionally inconvenienced him, Huet firmly believed that a state should control publication. Indeed, he felt victimized by the lack of censorship, as when he complained to a friend


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in the Netherlands in 1709 that such a scurrilous author as John Toland exploited Dutch tolerance to publish his ignorant and atheistic attacks on the Demonstratio.32 When he complained to Claude Niçaise (1623–1701) in 1699 that censorship kept good as well as bad foreign books out of Paris, he blamed the choice of censors, not the system.33

Interlopers, Insiders, and the Demonstratio evangelica (1679) A long gestation period practically guaranteed that the Demonstratio would register many contemporary disputes. Once published, its scholarly scope ensured that scholars would find much matter in it for quibbling. The Demonstratio originated in Huet’s debates with Menasseh Ben Israel at the temple in Amsterdam in the early 1650s.34 There Huet rashly promised the Jewish scholar that he would prove that the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies in the New Testament was as certain a demonstration of Christian truth as a Euclidean geometric proof. Huet only began to write the Demonstratio in the 1670s, though. By then, he had acquired new interests, which he desired to incorporate into the project. In a 1666 letter to Rapin, for example, Huet announced that he would prove that Moses was the source of nearly all of the Greek deities and that the Old Testament was the source of nearly all of the Greek myths. (Thus, Huet followed Bochart’s example, making the Demonstratio a continuation of the Renaissance tradition of religious syncretism.) In the same letter, he also told Rapin that he had decided to rigorously examine the first principles of Cartesianism to demonstrate the philosophy’s absurdity, thus making the Demonstratio Huet’s first anti-Cartesian sally.35 After 1670, the Demonstratio acquired yet another objective: refuting Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The longest (and arguably the least productive) debate that Huet engaged in in the Demonstratio was prompted by the publication of Boileau’s translation of Longinus in 1674. Huet’s rough handling of Spinoza and Boileau are excellent examples of how he reacted to intellectual interlopers, that is, people who he believed had no business engaging in learned debate. Arguments Huet advanced in the Demonstratio prompted criticisms, too, from scholars such as Christophe Sandius and Edward Bernard whom Huet considered “insiders.” His disagreements with them demonstrate his relative tolerance of disagreement if he considered an opponent intellectually competent and if his adversary confined debate within an appropriate community of learning. Paradoxically, Huet’s friends and subsequent scholars have considered the Demonstratio more a response to Spinoza than Huet did.36 Spinoza himself thought the Demonstratio singled him out, wrote Huet to a friend in 1706, “but he was deceived. I have never composed a work directly against him; I only had occasion to refute him in my Demonstratio evangelica, and when I


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found him in my path, I did not spare him.”37 Make no mistake: Huet considered the Tractatus an appalling evil, it undercut his entire project in the Demonstratio, and he knew that he had to respond to it. The demonstrability of Christian truth was not a new idea, of course. In the Demonstratio, Huet set out to write an orthodox work that featured an ancient apologetic argument with an impeccable pedigree, though Huet gave it a novel “geometrical” presentation.38 For centuries, Christian apologists found the prophecies-fulfillment argument uniquely persuasive because it presupposed what the Jews had long believed: that God had repeatedly promised a Messiah through the Old Testament prophecies. Thus, Huet filled almost the entire second half of the Demonstratio, “Proposition 9: Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah,” with Old Testament prophecies and New Testament fulfillments, tabulated in parallel columns.39 He began with a proof of Jesus’s lineage, continued with details of his biography, and included events after the Resurrection. He aspired to an unprecedented thoroughness, because he believed that the argument’s persuasive force rested in part on the comprehensiveness and sheer number of the prophecies, for which neither chance nor coincidence could account.40 Put simply, Spinoza argued that the text of the Bible was so hopelessly corrupt and biblical Hebrew such a tangle that one could only speculate about the true meaning of many passages. He denied Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and made Holy Writ a tool for asserting control over an unruly, ignorant people. In short, he considered the Bible an imperfect record of the history of the Hebrews, not the divine plan for all believers. If Spinoza was right (which was unthinkable to most people at the time, whatever their religious persuasion), the foundation of the prophecies-fulfillment argument simply vanished. If the Old Testament was a tissue of fables, what did it matter if its prophecies had been fulfilled in the New Testament? Thus, Huet had to strenuously maintain the Mosaic authorship of the Old Testament, because it guaranteed the truth of the text;41 likewise, he had to devote chapter after chapter to defending the authenticity of the books in the Old Testament.42 Nevertheless, as his 1706 letter suggests, Huet was in no hurry to respond to Spinoza. He directed the elaborate epistemological and methodological argument that prefaced the Demonstratio not against Spinoza, but against the Cartesian-inspired logicians of Port Royal, Arnauld and Nicole. Huet was nearly a quarter of the way through the Demonstratio when he first mentioned Spinoza—though only as the “Author of the Theologo-Politicus,” not by name, for Spinoza still breathed when Huet composed the work. By this expedient, he honored the letter, if not the spirit, of his own rule of intellectual engagement. Huet characterized Spinoza’s work as overthrowing the foundations of the Christian religion, sound politics, and right-reasoning philosophy in order to promote the fatal, pestilential, and contagious sect


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of Deists. He also condemned Spinoza’s ignorance, impiety, and unoriginality: His arguments derived largely from Hobbes and La Peyrère (both highly suspect), while he filched his Hebrew scholarship from the works of Ibn Ezra. Then Huet spent ten pages refuting Spinoza’s argument against Mosaic authorship.43 When compelled to address Spinoza’s opinions later in the Demonstratio, Huet responded with incredulity and ridicule, giving his arguments no special prominence.44 Huet’s treatment implied that in order to refute Spinoza, he had only to display superior knowledge. This might seem a miscalculation to us, but Spinoza looked different to Huet than he does to us and to many of Huet’s contemporaries. In the Tractatus, Spinoza often battled on the intellectual terrain of biblical exegesis. However much he claimed to apply a new method to scriptural interpretation, one based on the “light of reason” and inspired by Cartesian precepts,45 Spinoza often advanced arguments that either resembled or relied upon traditional biblical exegesis. But Huet had no respect for Spinoza’s exegetical expertise. For him, Spinoza simply had no business asserting that Moses had not written the Pentateuch based on philological evidence that he neither understood nor could assess. The learned members of the Republic of Letters would never accept such views once superior erudition had proved Spinoza’s error—and no one could do anything about the vulgar anyway. In his letters, Huet was even more dismissive of Spinoza. He had heard, Huet wrote Graevius in May 1679, that Spinoza had wanted to refute him, but Huet had not worried.46 In September, after receiving Spinoza’s posthumous works, he remarked sarcastically, “Yes, indeed, Death has snatched away a great and formidable adversary.”47 In a letter of September 1679, Christophe Sandius’s qualified praise of Spinoza’s Ethics unleashed a torrent of scholarly abuse from Huet.48 Sandius had simply observed that even some of Spinoza’s opponents considered him “a most acute philosopher”; comparing him to pagan philosophers like Democritus and Epicurus, Sandius also remarked that Spinoza, “like many other philosophers of our age [including Descartes], lacked erudition.” Huet thundered back in October that, while he could not comment extensively on the Ethics, he knew that it had “more boldness than soundness and acumen.” He had learned from the Tractatus what to expect in the Ethics: impious and unbridled license; ineptitude, stupidity, and absurdity; no erudition, much less sense, genius, or judgment. Spinoza’s study of Scripture only profaned Holy Writ. His lack of learning exiled him from “the company of Democritus, [who, like] Plato, Aristotle, and many others, was most erudite, and much more skilled in physics and the mathematical arts.” Spinoza’s audacity enthralled the ignorant, who adored novelty and impudence, but how could Spinoza be considered anything but “insane, illiterate, and stupid”?49 We can attribute the violence of Huet’s reaction to Spinoza to the fact that the Tractatus effectively nullified the Demonstratio, but the basis of his reaction


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was Huet’s assessment of Spinoza’s erudition. An instructive contrast is Huet’s response to Richard Simon (1638–1712), who also challenged the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in L’histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678).50 Huet could never simply dismiss Simon; he knew that the Oratorian was a first-rate scholar. Indeed, Huet might have considered Simon more dangerous than Spinoza precisely because of his erudition. Huet acknowledged Simon’s expertise in a paragraph he inscribed in his copy of L’histoire critique (1678), but he also specified the reasons for Simon’s error. While Simon possessed the knowledge, “intelligence, penetration, and discernment” needed for biblical criticism, he lacked judgment. “His self-love [amour-propre] and presumption make him treat with scorn the authors he called to judgment, the greater part of whom are worth more than he.”51 In other words, Huet explained Simon’s error in terms that reflected the collective vision of learning taught him by his Jesuit instructors and (ideally) enacted in the Republic of Letters. This explanation also anticipates his critique of Descartes and the Moderns. Socinianism, the anti-Trinitarian and rationalist sect that began in Poland in the sixteenth century, may not have been as bad as Deism in Huet’s eyes, but it was certainly bad enough to make Christophe Sandius (1644–80) an unlikely choice of editor for the Dutch edition of the Demonstratio. Fearing the consequences of his own and his family’s heterodoxy, Sandius had fled his native Brandenburg to the Netherlands. Even in Amsterdam, where he worked as a printer’s corrector, he was widely disliked for his heterodox views.52 Huet had been aware of Sandius’s existence at least since January 1672, when Justel sent news about “an ecclesiastical history by the man Sandius, who is Socinian”—and Huet probably did not mind the fact that Sandius’s book had angered the Jansenists.53 When Sandius made friendly overtures to Huet in 1676, Huet asked for his friends’ opinions. Graevius thoroughly disapproved of Sandius, charging him with reviving the old Arian challenges to Christ’s divinity. He had to admit his great intelligence, however,54 as did Etienne Le Moyne, another friend of Huet who had refuted one of Sandius’s works. Huet agreed with his friends that it was a shame “that a man of such erudition and diligence could be carried headlong into such absurd and damnable opinions.” Nevertheless, he decided to respond to Sandius’s overture, sending his letter via Graevius in June 1677.55 Why did Huet respond to Sandius? Perhaps Sandius’s praise of the Origen in his initial letters flattered Huet. Perhaps Huet thought that he could convince Sandius of his errors. At the very least, Sandius would be another connection to Dutch intellectual life. In this respect, he proved his worth almost immediately by transmitting the first substantive information Huet received about Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) and its reception in the Netherlands.56 What struck Huet most about Sandius was probably his seriousness and erudition. He found indications of these qualities in the observations that Sandius offered on Origen’s earlier translators. These would prove useful, Huet wrote Sandius


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in June 1677, should Huet ever prepare a second edition.57 In short, erudition overrode heterodoxy, and Huet immediately accepted Sandius’s offer to supervise the Dutch edition of the Demonstratio in August 1679.58 Sandius’s expertise also made him an acute critic. He soon began pressing a question that Huet had attempted to settle (apparently without success) in the Demonstratio: the authenticity of the Testimonium flavianum. In order for the prophecies-fulfillment argument to work, both the Old and New Testaments had to be authentic and historically accurate. To prove that they were, Huet and apologists before him had cited texts outside the Christian tradition, such as Roman histories, to confirm the trustworthiness of the Gospel accounts. In fact, corroborating accounts of Jesus’s life and mission were few and lacked specificity; none compared to the Testimonium, a paragraph in The Antiquities of the Jews by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. It recounted Jesus’s religious vocation, miracles, and condemnation by Pilate, referred to him as “the Christ,” and alluded to the Resurrection.59 By the time Huet wrote, however, some scholars had begun to question the Testimonium’s authenticity.60 (Today, the Testimonium flavianum is generally considered a later Christian interpolation.61) Huet wanted to use the Testimonium, so in the Demonstratio he had to defend its authenticity, especially against the most recent attacks by the Huguenot scholar (and fellow caënnais), Tanneguy Le Fèvre.62 Sandius’s doubts about the Testimonium, first broached in a letter of August 1679, prompted a six-month-long skirmish between editor and author.63 Throughout the debate, Huet repeatedly stated his gratitude for Sandius’s efforts; Sandius always reiterated his respect for Huet’s erudition. Yet each of Sandius’s letters raised new objections to the Testimonium’s authenticity—and each of Huet’s contained new refutations.64 (Indeed, Sandius might have been less persuaded than weary when he wrote early in 1680 that Huet had banished all his doubts.65) However exasperating Huet found Sandius’s objections, he always took them seriously. He did not dismiss them; indeed, he transcribed some of them onto the blank pages he bound into a copy of the Demonstratio, which served as a notebook.66 Huet never permitted their disagreement to interfere with their work; to the contrary, he constantly praised Sandius’s diligence. He was so thrilled with the Dutch edition, in fact, that he suggested they collaborate on publishing his other works, “and I hope that you will permit no one but yourself, a man most learned, diligent, and friendly to me, to be given the care of editing them.”67 Sandius’s death in 1680 abruptly ended a fruitful, if challenging, relationship. Huet accepted the criticisms of an English friend, Edward Bernard (1638–97), with even more equanimity. An alumnus of the University at Leiden, member of the Royal Society, and occupant of the Savilian chair at Oxford, Bernard had impressive linguistic skills in Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic.68 Unlike many foreign érudits, Huet actually met Bernard


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when he was in Paris in 1676, and they quickly established the sort of intellectual friendship explored in earlier chapters. For example, Huet helped Bernard get into Paris libraries and acquire transcriptions, though this was not always easy. In February 1677, Huet wrote that the Jesuit librarian at Clermont was obstinately watching over a manuscript Bernard wanted “as a griffin over its treasure.”69 In 1679, after Bernard left Paris, Huet enthusiastically praised his decision to prepare an edition of Josephus’s works (two decades later, he was still encouraging him).70 Bernard returned Huet’s favors, providing transcripts of Oxford manuscripts and sending him books, though Huet regretfully returned Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae (1662) because he could not read English.71 In January 1680, Huet acknowledged Bernard’s objections to three points in the Demonstratio. First, like other scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, Bernard challenged Huet’s identifications of Moses with ancient pagan deities like Mercury, Osiris, and Bacchus.72 In response, Huet presented no additional proofs, only indicating that other reputable scholars had expressed similar opinions. Second, Bernard disagreed with Huet’s remarks on the antiquity of Hebrew, which was potentially explosive because Protestant scholars generally believed that Hebrew was the language God taught to Adam, while Catholic scholars tended to disagree.73 Again, Huet did not attempt to reinforce his opinion, though he gently cautioned his friend against valuing error, however commonly believed, over truths revealed by thorough investigation. Finally, as a specialist in ancient mathematical literature, Bernard took Huet’s criticism of geometry in the opening pages of the Demonstratio as an attack on its importance. Huet, whose youthful love of geometry persisted into adulthood, responded that no one could praise geometry more and that he had never intended to challenge the discipline’s intellectual prestige. He concluded his letter to Bernard by reiterating his esteem for the Englishman’s judgment and by expressing his hope that they would reconcile their views on these questions.74 A letter of July 1682 indicates that Bernard continued to press Huet on all three. By then, however, Huet had decided that nothing could be gained by further discussion. If he could not change Bernard’s mind, Huet wrote, then they should agree to disagree while preserving the “perfect agreement of their souls.”75 Bernard and Sandius are proof that even substantive disagreements and divergent religious beliefs did not preclude respectful discussion and productive collaboration with Huet. It is important to note, too, that Bernard and Sandius criticized Huet in letters, not in print. Huet’s relationship to Spinoza was very different; he intended to eject an interloper, not engage a colleague. In some respects, Huet’s decades-long dispute with Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), sparked by a scholarly aside in the Demonstratio, resembled his reaction to Spinoza. Their “Fiat lux” dispute also shows how religious, literary, and scholarly differences converged in the French


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environment to make debates more poisonous, and how disagreements over technical points became proxies in the larger intellectual battles between hostile groups. Finally, the use (and misuse) of publication also came into play in this dispute. Huet had probably disliked Boileau from the 1660s. He no doubt found his satiric poems on the contemporary literary scene, circulated in manuscript, offensive.76 Boileau criticized Fouquet and Pellisson, patron and friend, respectively, of Huet’s friends. He derided Chapelain’s La Pucelle (few did not). His burlesques of Chapelain and Colbert, coauthored with his brother Gilles, Molière, and others, circulated after the award of royal gratifications (Boileau had not received one). He singled out Scudéry’s heroes for ridicule in “Dialogues des héros de romans” (1666) and later lectured her in “L’art poétique” (1673): Guard against giving, as you did in Clélie, A French wit and air to ancient Italy. In the guise of Romans, you portray us, A gallant Cato and a dandy Brutus.77

In short, he alienated those literati and patrons who were also Huet’s friends, including Montausier, Huet’s patron, who was the dedicatee of an anonymous attack on Boileau’s satires in 1666. During the 1670s, Boileau endeavored to improve his reputation; he repudiated satire, emulating Horace in vernacular epistolary poems. Huet probably dismissed Boileau’s advice in “L’art poétique” (1674), his claim to fame as founder of French Neoclassicism; he was no doubt chagrined when the poem earned Boileau the title “legislator of Parnassus.”78 Worse yet, Boileau succeeded in attracting patronage at the highest levels. Huet registered his disapproval of the poet in his annotations to a 1674 edition of Boileau’s works. On a separate sheet of paper, Huet jotted down Boileau’s sins against literature, noting verses that illustrated each: barbaric and base language, muddled nonsense, coldness, repetition, “bourgeois” notions, ignorance, ambiguities, crimes against poetics, faults of judgment and translation, poor rhymes, and maliciousness (which included barbs against some of Huet’s best friends). Perhaps Huet would never have taken public notice of Boileau in the Demonstratio if Boileau had not published a French translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime in 1674. Longinus’s views, composed during the first century, became extremely influential during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England.79 Of the “five sources of the great” in literature, Longinus placed sublimity, “a certain elevation of the spirit,” and “pathos . . . that enthusiasm, that natural vehemence that touches and moves,” among the first two. He distinguished these two from the other three—“figures [of speech] turned in a certain manner,” “nobility of expression,” and “the


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composition and arrangement of words in all their magnificence and dignity”—because they could not be taught.80 As they came naturally, it logically followed that no base or servile spirit could “produce anything either marvelous or worthy of posterity.” Extraordinary men, in contrast, wrote extraordinary things.81 For Longinus, Moses was just such a great man. Having grasped “the grandeur and power of God,” he could express it “in all its dignity”: “Let there be light, and there was light. Let there be earth, and there was earth.” Indeed, Longinus judged Moses’s depiction of the deity superior even to Homer’s, because the Hebrew portrayed “for us a god as he is in all his majesty and his grandeur, and without mixing in terrestrial things.”82 Boileau elaborated on Longinus’s ideas in his preface: “The Sovereign Arbiter of Nature created Light with one word.” Voilà— here we find something written in the sublime style, but it is nevertheless not sublime . . . “Let there be light, and there was light.” This extraordinary turn of phrase, which indicates so well the creature’s obedience to the Creator, is truly Sublime and has something of divinity.83

For Boileau, then, exalted vocabulary or rhetorical techniques did not characterize the sublime style, but, in the words of a modern literary critic, “stylistic simplicity and restraint.”84 This voided the classical distinction of three oratorical styles—high, middling, and low—“in favor of a sublime which united at once the humility of style with the enthusiasm of the great orator.”85 These brief comments signaled Boileau’s trespass into the realm of erudition, and Huet had no more respect for Boileau as a literary critic than he had for Spinoza as an exegete. Nevertheless, Huet confined his criticism to one brief paragraph in the Demonstratio without naming Boileau.86 The sublimity of Moses’s rhetoric was irrelevant to Huet’s argument in the Demonstratio. Huet merely alluded to Longinus (among sixty other authors) as proof that the Old Testament books alleged to have been written by Moses were really authored by him; thus, Longinus figured as a small part of his overall proof of the authenticity of the Old Testament. Huet did not have to tarry, even briefly, over Longinus, but he did—with baleful consequences. Huet asserted that Longinus (and, by extension, Boileau) erred by interpreting “Fiat lux” as sublime, because the Greek had not known Hebrew or its rhetorical conventions. If he had, Longinus would have seen that Moses’s style throughout the Pentateuch was very simple, though he was quite capable of writing in a sublime style, as he had in Job and the Canticles.87 However, Moses had wisely eschewed a sublime style in Genesis, because the grandeur of the subject (Creation) required no rhetorical ornamentation. If Huet’s remarks in the Demonstratio were gratuitous, the ensuing dispute with Boileau was a dialogue of the deaf. Huet never engaged seriously with the theory of the sublime proposed by either Longinus or Boileau; he remained fixated on narrow questions of scholarly expertise and erudition.88


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Boileau essentially evaded Huet’s challenge to his expertise in a 1683 edition of Longinus by introducing an irrelevant element: religious faction. Boileau stressed how Longinus, though sunk in pagan ignorance, “did not neglect to acknowledge the divinity in these words of Scripture.” One of the century’s most learned men (Huet) believed that Longinus erred when he judged these words sublime. Yet Longinus’s ideas (and Boileau’s) had been warmly received by people whose piety matched their erudition (i.e., the writers of Port Royal). Indeed, in their translation of Genesis, the Jansenists presented Longinus’s comments as proof that the Holy Spirit had dictated scripture. If Longinus, a pagan who could only have apprehended such divine truth by the light of reason, had grasped the divinity of Moses’s words, why should a Christian (Huet) find fault with him?89 Boileau provocatively published his remarks, but Huet still refrained from publishing a critique of Boileau. Perhaps Boileau’s friendship with Rapin inhibited him. Huet did write an essay that he dedicated to the Duc de Montausier and which was read to his patron and a small group in 1683. Presumably, those interested in the dispute could have obtained a copy of Huet’s essay. Nevertheless, by circulating it in manuscript, Huet kept his own rule of not criticizing living opponents in print. Huet began with the kind of sarcasm prominent in his opinions on Spinoza, which also sought to distinguish Huet’s endeavors from the poet’s. Boileau’s comments had surprised Huet, “because we have taken such different routes in the world of letters . . . and I thought myself out of reach of his redoubtable and dangerous criticism.” Nor had he realized that Longinus’s opinion of Moses had become an article of faith and that to challenge it was to doubt that Moses wrote at the Holy Spirit’s behest. He had not expected “to see Longinus canonized and myself nearly excommunicated.” Huet then expanded upon his initial objections, alluding to authorities that he believed supported his position. Moses was in fact an excellent rhetorician, but in the terms set by his language (Hebrew), not Longinus’s (Greek), much less Boileau’s (French). Huet reiterated that the sublimity of “Fiat lux” had nothing to do with the expression, which was common throughout the Old Testament, and everything to do with the subject. Only ignorance of the rhetorical principles of Hebrew led Longinus and Boileau to foolishly isolate one or two verses as somehow more sublime than the others.90 There were no new developments in the “Fiat lux” dispute for two decades. There was, however, a famous exchange between Huet and Boileau at the Académie Française in 1687, one that has overshadowed the “Fiat lux” dispute, but which can only be fully understood in that context. (This meeting also marked the official beginning of the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns.) Both were in the audience at a reading of Claude Perrault’s “Le siècle de Louis le Grand,” which asserted the cultural superiority of seventeenth-century France over the Ancients. An agitated Boileau rose


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to object “that it was a shame for such a thing to be read.” Huet silenced him: “Monsieur Despréaux, it seems to me this concerns us more than you.” Though well known, Huet’s retort remains unexplained and, at first blush, puzzling.91 Why would Huet reject an alliance with a poet who criticized the same people whom Huet condemned for debasing French literature and whom Rapin sought to instruct in the poetical maxims of antiquity? Yet Huet’s remark is consistent with his assessment of Boileau in the “Fiat lux” dispute, that is, a man incompetent to comment on the Ancients. The only difference was the public setting of the rebuke. For years after, Huet appears to have dropped the “Fiat lux” dispute. Then, in 1706, he authorized publication of the essay he had written for Montausier in the Bibliothèque universelle of Jean Le Clerc. Le Clerc’s claim that the essay had just “fallen into my hands” is hardly credible. Huet no doubt wanted it published precisely then because of a new literary controversy engulfing Boileau in France. This one began with some widely reported anti-Jesuit comments that Boileau made at Lamoignon’s Academy in 1690. Boileau had long attended the academy, which inclined more toward Cartesianism and Jansenism after its founder’s death in 1677. Boileau always had Jesuit friends, but he had also been long associated with the Jansenists. At the learned gathering, he defended Pascal’s view that a Christian was required to love God against the Jesuit “casuists” who argued that this was imposing “an insupportable burden on the Christian.”92 Boileau followed this up with “Letter on the Love of God” (1698), which he dedicated to the Jansenistleaning abbé Eusèbe Renaudot. The full force of the Jesuit response struck only after Boileau’s good friend, the Jesuit Bouhours, died in 1702. When the storm came, Boileau’s opponents focused not on theology, but on Boileau’s literary legacy. In September 1703, the Jesuit periodical, Mémoires de Trevoux, noted a new edition of Boileau’s works that insinuated his liberal borrowings from antiquity by printing his sources at the bottom of each page. (Boileau had been accused of “plagiarism” before.)93 This was a rare instance of published literary sniping during the controversy, however, which generally took the form of satirical verse circulated privately. Bullied more than bellicose, Boileau attempted to answer his critics with the poem “Équivoque,” but his attempts to publish it were blocked. As Jesuit rhymesters challenged Boileau’s originality, Huet’s essay assailed his reputation as a literary critic. His essay did not go unchallenged, however. Boileau responded to Huet in a final critical reflection on Longinus directed at Le Clerc. Published posthumously in 1713 (Boileau died in 1711), nothing in it would have surprised Huet, though he huffed in an annotation to his copy of Boileau’s reflection that the poet “manifestly confounds the word of God with the word of Moses and the thought of God with the thought of Moses.”94 What angered him more was Renaudot’s posthumous defense of Boileau, which prefaced the reflection. First,


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Renaudot accused Huet of behavior unbecoming a scholar by permitting republication of the essay in the Dissertations (1718) after Huet had agreed to let the matter drop. Second, he asserted that many learned and pious people, including Montausier, had found Huet’s arguments against Boileau weak. Huet exploded in an anonymous response published in Bibliothèque choisie in 1713. He reviewed the quarrel, asserting that he had as many (and more worthy) supporters, including Montausier, as Boileau’s “cabale satirique.” Boileau had tried to obscure his incompetence by casting their dispute in religious terms, but it had always been a matter of philology, not piety. Boileau should have confined himself to writing satires rather than attempting thorny critical questions, though satire was a base literary activity. Boileau was nothing but an imitator—or, in Horace’s words, “a beast born for slavery”—and utterly lacking in erudition. Surely, one should be able to expect more from a member of the academy.95 Thus, Huet had the last, ugly word in the “Fiat lux” debate. The JesuitJansenist divide obviously contributed to its acrimony, while Huet’s willingness to go public with his essay during Boileau’s lifetime indicates his utter contempt for the “legislator of Parnassus.” However badly the denouement of the “Fiat lux” dispute reflects on Huet, the dispute itself was of a piece with the others discussed in this section. Whether they were conducted in the vernacular or in Latin, in manuscripts or in print, Huet began by assuming that intellectual questions should be settled on the basis of erudition and expertise. Huet’s attacks on Boileau were potentially devastating precisely because the satirist wanted to be considered a competent spokesman for classical standards and taste. Challenging the expertise of an opponent becomes pointless, however, when the opponent rejects the criteria for expertise implicit in the challenge. The salonnières, for example, appropriated the right to judge literary works on their terms, not Huet’s or Rapin’s; they ignored learned objections that literary criticism required mastery of a particular body of knowledge. Yet they confined their defiance to one realm of learned endeavor. The Cartesians did not.

The Triple Alliance: Cartesians, Jansenists, and Salonnières In the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes declared his intellectual independence. He had once believed that letters would give him clear and certain knowledge of everything useful. Disappointed, he began to consider that his own era was just as intelligent as any other had been, which led him to claim the liberty to think for himself. Linguistic knowledge was useful for reading old books, he conceded, but studying the past was like travel: It alienated individuals from their own time and place. Descartes found the Jesuit curriculum—to which he did not refer directly, but which


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he had personally experienced—deficient in nearly every respect. History omitted too much and was a dangerous model for behavior. Eloquence and poetry were gifts of the spirit, rather than the fruits of study, and useless for improving moral character. Ancient ethical works, magnificent palaces built on sand and mud, made poor teachers of virtue. Mathematics pleased him, “because of the certitude and evidence of its reasoning,” but he condemned philosophy and whatever knowledge it allegedly produced. Cultivated for centuries by the best minds, it had not yielded a single, indisputable truth. Rather than read all those old books, Descartes would seek knowledge (science) in the “great book of the world.” There he would learn more than any scholar who, dedicated to useless speculations and nonsensical notions, then misused his wit to defend them.96 Descartes’ Discourse dismissed the neo-Aristotelian science of the schools and the logical tools considered essential to acquiring it. No wonder a contemporary print depicted Descartes at his writing desk with a volume of Aristotle underfoot!97 Descartes also dismissed the humanist curriculum, exiling it from the realm of “useful” knowledge—while challenging its claim to be knowledge at all. He severed the connection between learning and virtue that had always justified humanist study, sounding a note of antierudition that has already become familiar to readers of this book. Finally, Descartes reached beyond scholarly circles to a wider public; he wrote in French “in the hope that those who avail themselves of their natural reason alone, may be better judges of my opinions than those who give heed only to the writings of the Ancients.”98 What bolder attack can be imagined on the education that Huet’s generation had received and on the intellectual ethos of Huet’s Republic of Letters?99 The Discourse was first published in the Netherlands, which quickly became “the cradle of Cartesianism.”100 The first Cartesian professors established themselves at Utrecht in the late 1630s. By the 1640s, the university’s rector, Gisbert de Voët, opposed the spread of the new philosophy. Polemics followed. In Admiranda methodus novae philosophiae Renati des Cartes (1643), Martin Schoock criticized Cartesianism in gendered, status, and political terms that would soon become typical and anticipate Huet’s critiques.101 Cartesianism seduced students away from traditional learning, wrote Schoock. It filled “the soul with an agreeable sensation,” leading to scorn for antiquity and inciting a craving for novelty in church, state, and academy. The philosophy of Descartes required the acolyte to forget everything he knew and to scorn books; indeed, if those “blind sectarians,” those lunatics and enthusiasts, had a leader as bloody-minded as Caligula, they would have torched all the world’s libraries. Worst of all, the new philosophy threatened to spread to common folk, including women at work at the spindle, scissors, and hearth.102 Other scholars in the Netherlands echoed Schoock’s fears. In 1655, Georg Hornius (1620–70) lamented that the century of philology had been


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superseded by an era of philosophy. “And thus today we discern a philosophical struggle, and the minds of diligent students, having neglected the humanities, are borne to those rocks just as if following the song of the sirens.”103 On his peregrinatio academica, Huet had chatted pleasantly with the Cartesian physician and first Cartesian “apostate,” Henricus Regius, during his illness in Leiden.104 Correspondents subsequently kept Huet informed of the philosophy’s impact and spread. In 1669, Isaac Vossius wrote that nothing else was read in the academies—the Ancients had been expelled.105 In 1677, Le Moyne complained that, even in Leiden, “the learned are rare and live in great solitude, and the last Romans were extinguished long ago.”106 In France, Cartesianism found some of its earliest supporters among the Jansenists. “In everything the antipodes of the Jesuits,” Simon recalled, “the people of Port Royal also strongly embraced the Cartesian party.”107 Pirot claimed in 1706: “Cartesianism is scarcely one step from Jansenism.”108 Two Jansenists, Arnauld and Nicole, created a popular presentation of Cartesian principles in La logique ou l’art de penser (1662), which was reprinted many times as La logique de Port Royal and which Huet criticized roundly in the Demonstratio (see below).109 They also denied the notion that humanistic study produced certain knowledge, and they excoriated “pedantry” as eagerly as any salonnière. Pedants piled up Greek and Latin citations helterskelter and obsessed over useless trivialities. Confronted with an etymological disagreement, they raged as if the survival of civilization were at stake. They flew to the defense of an ancient philosopher’s reputation as if he were a close relative. In short, they were obstinate and uncivilized, and their work absurd and useless.110 The French campaign in the Cartesian wars began in earnest in the 1670s. State and Church tried to suppress the new philosophy.111 In 1671, the archbishop of Paris convened an assembly of university faculties to prohibit the teaching of Cartesianism, but a request to the Parlement of Paris to follow up with its own prohibition failed. A flurry of pamphlets sympathetic to Cartesianism appeared that lent credence to Graindorge’s suggestion that attempts to suppress the new philosophy only increased its appeal. François Bernier commented on the absurdity of attempting to legislate knowledge. One might as well expect Saturn to divest itself of its rings; the sun to scrub the spots from its face; the astronomers to destroy their telescopes; the air to become lighter than a feather; the air pumps to be destroyed to protect the plenum; and Gassendi, Descartes, and a crowd of other natural philosophers and experimenters dragged to Athens to repent of insulting Aristotle!112 Boileau offered a tongue-in-cheek proclamation that banished reason forever from the university so that Aristotle could remain in undisturbed possession of it.113 Nevertheless, a 1675 arrêt of the Great Council banned the teaching of Cartesian philosophy. The religious orders followed suit, persecuting Cartesian


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instructors;114 the universities of Caen and Angers took measures to prevent the philosophy’s spread.115 But, “repulsed by the schools, French Cartesianism spread rapidly into all strata of learned, literate and polite society.”116 In 1679, a university theologian at Angers noted with horror the continuing impact of Cartesianism on young minds. Children were taught “to rid themselves of childhood prejudices and to doubt all things,” and the rage for novelty had driven out all common sense and ancient truths.117 Cartesianism found powerful patrons, too, such as the Prince de Condé, who studied it with Pierre-Sylvain Régis, France’s leading Cartesian.118 Even Bossuet was sympathetic (though not without reservations), appointing the Cartesian Gerauld de Cordemoy as one of the dauphin’s tutors. Indeed, the king declared to some Oratorian delegates that the philosophy could be taught to other students as it had been to the dauphin.119 Three aspects of the spread of Cartesianism in France must be stressed. First, “Cartesianism” was never a monolithic body of thought, though opponents frequently characterized it as such. “After the death of Descartes, what was Cartesianism?” Henri Gouhier asked. “It was the philosophy of Descartes interpreted by his disciples.”120 Descartes’ French followers modified his basic ideas in important ways and quarreled amongst themselves, thus creating “a plurality of Cartesianisms.”121 Second, when scholars use terms like “cultural event” or “social Cartesianism” to describe the philosophy’s impact, they indicate two interrelated, but not necessarily coterminous aspects:122 Cartesianism as a distinctive epistemology that offered a framework for investigation of the natural world, and Cartesianism as a sociocultural phenomenon. In the latter, which was probably more influential, any identifiable Cartesian philosophical content could become quite attenuated. The antierudite rhetoric of both Cartesianisms merged seamlessly with other cultural trends. Finally, the French Cartesians created no distinctive mode of intellectual sociability; rather, they “colonized” existing forms. The rapid spread of Cartesianism owed much to its adherents’ willingness to take their case to a wider public outside the snug, even smug, scholarly spaces described in earlier chapters. As already noted, Descartes pointedly wrote the Discourse in French. In 1647, the Duc de Luynes, assisted by Descartes himself, published his French translation of Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophiae (1641).123 Claude Clerselier financed another edition of the Meditations in 1647 and published collections of Descartes’ letters in the 1660s.124 Clerselier also probably financed the lectures of his son-in-law, Jacques Rohault, who appealingly combined Cartesianism with experimental demonstration for a general public.125 A contemporary description of one of Rohault’s gatherings emphasized its politesse, implicitly contrasting it with the (straw-man) image of tumultuous scholarly disputation; the description also noted the female spectators, who left thoroughly delighted with the new philosophy.126


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No one recruited women to Cartesianism more eloquently than the renegade Jesuit François Poulain de La Barre, who published three treatises in 1673 and 1674. He argued generally that women should be permitted to study all the arts and sciences because it followed from Cartesian principles that “the mind has no sex.”127 La Barre’s ideas have been analyzed in detail and his importance assessed elsewhere.128 Here I stress how astutely La Barre gauged his audience in On the Education of Ladies, the treatise in which he argued that the education contemporary society denied women was simply not worth having; how skillfully he enhanced the attractiveness of Cartesianism by using it to provide a firm philosophical basis for female intellectual aspiration; and how well his work converged with the salonnières’ ideology of antierudition by undercutting the prestige of the humanist curriculum. It is no surprise that La Barre cast the treatise as a series of conversations resembling those explored in chapter 3. Thus, just as Eulalie enunciated the principles of préciosité in La Pure’s La précieuse, so La Barre’s Eulalie was educated to articulate Cartesian principles. Although she and Sophie, the other female participant, contributed more to the proceedings than Scudéry’s women did, the intellectual work still fell largely to the men: the honnête homme Timandre, but especially Stasimaque, who was La Barre’s literary personification. Both men obeyed the gallant imperative, if less frequently, and the quartet of speakers expressed much disgust for learned women. They consistently condemned learned men as ridiculous, querulous, antisocial, and misogynistic, and they highly praised the “civilizing” function of conversation with women. A particularly dramatic moment arrived when Eulalie recounted how, fully schooled in Cartesian precepts, she had treated two érudits with humiliating rudeness.129 Stasimaque walked the company through Descartes’ attack on traditional learning and procedure of methodical doubt. Women should not waste their time with erudite learning. An accumulation over millennia of prejudice and preconceptions, it actually inhibited the acquisition of knowledge. Learning Greek and Latin was unnecessary, because everything worth reading had been translated, and there were modern authors who equaled the Ancients in literary quality and intellectual substance. Stasimaque savaged the Jesuit curriculum. It was good only for reproducing itself, because it turned students into sheep, who became masters in turn. Thus, “we have as much assurance today [of what we know] as did those who lived in Aristotle’s day.”130 Most books were utterly useless; still more would be “if men could resolve to withdraw into themselves and use the key to the library they carry within themselves . . . their reason.” Not surprisingly, Stasimaque concluded with an essential reading list of works by Descartes and other Cartesians. La Barre’s presentation of Cartesianism was designed to appeal to female readers by flattering their cultural pretensions. Though intellectually sound, his treatise shrewdly traded in intellectual stereotypes. He gave no hint that


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the Aristotelianism of the Jesuit collèges was more than a sclerotic pseudodiscipline or that philosophical alternatives to Aristotelianism (such as Gassendist-Epicureanism) existed. His work demonstrates the brilliance of the Cartesian appeal to a reading public whose curiosity about science had been piqued—especially the women of that new public, who were excluded from both advanced formal study and from the scientific academies. Descartes’ ideas continued to find able popularizers after La Barre, including Fontenelle, whose Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) familiarized the reader with Cartesian cosmology in even more exquisitely crafted dialogues. What Robert Darnton has written of the eighteenth-century philosophes is no less true of the seventeenth-century Cartesians: They were masters of the media of their time. Gassendist-Epicureanism challenged Aristotelianism as fundamentally as Cartesianism did, but intellectual merits were not the point.131 Initially at least, Gassendists and Cartesians were relatively evenly matched in the academies.132 Still Christiaan Huygens, who never abandoned Cartesianism despite his criticisms of it, advanced both the scientific literacy of the French reading public and increased its familiarity with Cartesian philosophy by reporting his research in French in Journal des sçavans.133 Significantly, La Barre had no Gassendist-Epicurean counterpart; nor did the popular Cartesian experimenter Rohault or the Port Royal logicians. There was not even a complete, vernacular account of Gassendi’s views until Bernier’s Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (1674). Finally, Cartesianism dominated the salons, though Madame de la Sablière and Madame Deshoulières hosted gatherings with a Gassendist cast.134 In the world of the salons, Maria Dupré, whom Huet tutored in Latin during the 1660s, became one of a famous trio of cartésiennes. Huet could have met the other two, Anne de La Vigne and Catherine Descartes, niece of the great man himself, at Scudéry’s salon.135 Because these and other Cartesian women wrote little or nothing, assessing the depth or sophistication of their philosophical views is difficult.136 Dupré’s letters to Roger de Rabutin Bussy give no indication of her Cartesianism; rather, she sent poems expressing typical précieuse attitudes toward love.137 “Ombre de M. Descartes” (1673), written by Catherine Descartes for La Vigne, presented the caricature of Aristotelianism common in Cartesian literature. In it, Descartes’ ghost implored La Vigne to take up his cause, assuring her in the language of gallantry that Truth would be irresistible when such a lovely mouth spoke it.138 Indeed, the overall tone of Catherine Descartes’ poem even raises questions about the compatibility of serious Cartesian science and salon culture.139 It is just this incompatibility that makes an unpublished, undated, and anonymous poem so humorous. Framed as a dialogue between Tirsis and Climène, the poem reflects the topical nature of salon poetry and, with its pseudonyms and allusions, the cliquishness of its culture. It presents two incongruities: the précieuse who composed love poetry, and the


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presentation of Cartesian science in the language of gallantry. It clearly poked fun at Catherine Descartes’ “Ombre,” so it must have been composed after 1683. As in Scudéry’s conversations, the classicizing names probably did not conceal the participants’ true identities to anyone in the know. Perhaps Tirsis frequented Deshoulières’ salon, which gives the poem an Epicurean edge. Climène could have been Dupré, because Tirsis alluded to Climène’s love poetry and her entry in the Dictionnaire des précieuses, which acknowledged Dupré’s interest in science, letters, verse, novels, “and all those things that serve as usual conversation among those who are précieuses.”140 Climène and Tirsis began by debating the merits of composing love poetry. Climène maintained that it was an innocent amusement, while Tirsis argued that she risked succumbing to the charms of gallantry. He suggested alternative, more suitable amusements for “une fille savante et prude” (the second adjective being interchangeable with précieuse), such as contemplating the hidden qualities of those atoms that, with “subtle matter,” composed the universe.141 “These atoms, Tirsis, give me a headache,” Climène complained. Tirsis conceded that a madrigal would be more amusing, but “one must prefer the useful to the agreeable.” Thus, Climène should meditate on the tourbillons that transported the planets, the melancholic glow of fateful comets, the ebb and flow of the tides, the movements of the earth, the weight of air, and the anatomy of the human body. Anything but the human body, Climène recoiled, conflating her revulsion for anatomy with her feelings for the publisher Barbin. Barbin was indiscreet, she declared, but what use discretion? For the “palace will know all our secrets,” while officers of the court would pry into their lives and plaintiffs speak ill of them. When Tirsis announced his intention to withdraw to the somber kingdom of death, the reader becomes aware that he, like Descartes in Catherine’s poem, was a phantom. He would retreat, because everyone rejected him, précieuses scolded him, and no one took seriously a man brought back from the dead. “I pledge never to write again,” he concluded, “and will never cease to say ‘that terrible man Barbin!’” As Cartesianism spread through French culture, it became increasingly diffuse, reduced almost to the quip from one visitor to the Hôtel de Liancourt: “Good sense is worth more than erudition.”142 The former was innate and (one hoped) widespread, while the latter was only acquired through laborious and ultimately wasted effort. At its most attenuated, Cartesianism authorized challenges to traditional notions of expertise and to the authority of those groups who claimed to possess such expertise. It also encouraged the appropriation of a right to criticize. This exploded the technical meaning of “criticism,” which had traditionally applied to the erudite endeavors undertaken by Huet and his friends and which, we have seen, required considerable training.


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On the eve of the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, Adrien Baillet defined and celebrated this new “liberty to judge” in Jugemens des savans (1685–86). He also connected it with a new expansive vision of the “Republic of Letters.” Just as anyone could become an author, he wrote, anyone could become a critic. “If the commerce of Letters is a true Republic, . . . its true character must be liberty . . . [which] belongs entirely to Readers.”143 This power could be abused, of course, as “nothing is so sweet and so flattering to a reader’s amour-propre than to see himself judge and censor.” Nevertheless, an author should expect all members of the public, even the most humble, to evaluate his work. True, Baillet instructed his readers in the qualities that led to sound judgments; he also defended official censorship; and he by no means excluded learned works from his voluminous inventory. Yet he refused to limit the essential right to judge. Finally, when enumerating the qualities that inhibited good judgment, he struck a familiar antierudite tone. He quoted Nicole and Arnauld’s definition of pedantry verbatim before adding to the list of the pedant’s sins.144 The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, which officially began during that tumultuous meeting of the Académie Française in 1687, looks overdetermined and overdue in the cultural context reconstructed here and in earlier chapters. It is a cultural context in which literary and scientific enterprises produced complementary and mutually reinforcing discourses of antierudition and where salonnières and Cartesians alike promoted the individual’s ability to judge for him or herself. While the battle is associated more with literature than science, two of the first stanzas of Perrault’s “Le siècle de Louis XIV” attacked Aristotle’s “obscure system.” Indeed, they described a cosmology that recalls the illustration gracing Fontenelle’s Entretiens, which depicted Descartes’ multiple worlds and suns aswirl in their discrete tourbillons. When Perrault expanded the ideas from his poem into the conversations of Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (1692–97), his Modern spokesman, an abbé, justified and celebrated the same liberty to judge as Baillet. He insisted on the individual’s right to judge matters for himself, rather than to follow others blindly. He did not deny the surpassing erudition of the scholarly generation that included Scaliger and Casaubon—yet he qualified his praise. They shined as much because of the profound ignorance of their time as for their own merits. Times had changed, however; learning was widespread, making learned men oaks in a forest, not great trees in a ploughed field. Learning transmitted in manuscripts and books made scholars reliant on memory, which was why they appeared to be prodigies of erudition. Now people spent their time reflecting, a more fruitful activity for the intellect. “The abundance of books has brought yet another change in the Republic of Letters, where once only learned men by profession dared judge authors’ works . . . today all the world joins in.” Translation into vernacular languages


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made the savant no different from other men, “and thus there are hardly any ladies or courtiers who do not judge intellectual works.”145 For the abbé, this was all to the good. “Everywhere Reason acts as a sovereign and exerts its rights . . . And I, I am persuaded that the praiseworthy liberty we grant ourselves today to reason about all that is within Reason’s jurisdiction, gives us all the more reason to congratulate our century.”146 A corollary to extending the right to criticize was expanding the borders of the Republic of Letters to include many who would never have been considered worthy of citizenship previously. Vigneul-Marville’s description in Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature (1700) makes this abundantly clear: The Republic of Letters is very old. . . . Never has it been larger, never more populated, never more free, never more glorious. It extends throughout the world and is composed of people of all nations, of all conditions, of all ages, of all sexes . . . Here one speaks all manner of tongues, living and dead. The arts are joined to letters, and the sciences have their place, but there is no uniformity of religion, and customs here as in all other republics are a mixture of good and evil. One finds piety and libertinage . . . sects are found here in great number, and every day new ones are formed . . . 147

What Baillet, Perrault, and Vigneul-Marville celebrated was a democratization of knowledge—though paradoxically without seeking to disturb the social hierarchy that limited literacy to a thin slice of society.

Barbarians at the Gates However limited the democratization of knowledge that Moderns, Cartesians, and salonnières promoted, such a prospect could only horrify Huet. Indeed, he had been confronting an array of opponents furthering this goal since the 1670s. At one end, Cartesianism posed the challenge of a sophisticated epistemological and scientific system; at the other, Perrault’s Parallèles asserted the supremacy of the Moderns in the visual arts, eloquence, poetry, and science and technology. From Huet’s perspective, the unifying thread that ran through his opponents’ views was their stance toward erudition and antiquity; from this, equally objectionable notions logically followed regarding the freedom to criticize and the accessibility of knowledge. What unified Huet’s responses was a focus on the ethical dimension of intellectual endeavor. For him, the moral deficiency of self-love was nearly always at fault for imprudent intellectual choices, which in turn had dolorous ethical consequences for the intellectual. But the variety of challenges required Huet to formulate a variety of responses. His choice of genre and language reflected both the audience he desired to reach and his judgment of the


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opponent’s intellectual capacities. Huet engaged with the “first principles” of Cartesianism, as he promised Rapin in 1666, by composing two learned Latin treatments.148 He also developed a cultural critique that scorned attitudes and behaviors he considered foolish, intellectually disreputable, and ultimately immoral and dangerous. These he presented in the vernacular essays gathered into the Huetiana (1722) and in his anti-Cartesian satire. Huet’s counteroffensive against the forces attacking learned culture did not begin with an original work, but with the creation of a canon in the Ad usum Delphini. His work on the series coincided with La Barre’s advancement of a Cartesian pedagogical program, though it did not explicitly respond to La Barre’s suggested reading list. Rather, it responded to the perception of intellectual decline that Huet and his friends associated with both the spread of Cartesianism and the rise of mondain culture. The series’ importance transcended the education of the crown prince in two ways. First, with an authors list that read like an honor role of Latin writers, it was an entry into an expanding cultural conflict. The visual pun of the books’ frontispiece and motto, “It was drawn by the song’s sweetness,” illustrated the state’s role in preserving classical culture: It depicts Arion, the singer whose talents had brought him great wealth, in the prow of the ship whose crew had determined to rob and kill him. He was finishing that last song the sailors permitted him to sing, while the dolphin that would safely bear him to shore on his back listened from the waves. Second, the education of the dauphin was intended to benefit the French people as a whole. Montausier, the dauphin’s governor, told the king, “it is worthy of his Dignity and his Magnificence that all the children of his subjects take part in the instruction of his august son, and that his particular education should become in some way common and general.” The king himself demanded “that we make available to the public all that is done for the instruction of the Prince . . . so that all the world might profit.”149 Huet penned his defense of the studia humanitatis in the Censura many years later, yet it illustrates well the siege mentality of Huet’s learned community in the 1670s and the crisis that the Ad usum Delphini was meant to address. There he wrote that the Cartesian faction had rejected the judgment of all time, of all nations, of all men by refusing to esteem the Ancients. They swept everything away that delighted or improved the human spirit— until only Cartesianism remained. They dismissed the study of Oriental languages, which were crucial to plumbing the Bible’s mysteries; they pronounced against history, yet where else could people find precepts for governing their lives and their states? Everywhere there was evidence of Cartesianism’s pernicious influence, especially in Paris. Consequently, people rejected the effort of pursuing wider studies and abandoned the Ancients, limiting themselves to the most recent and limited perspectives. They wrote everything in the vernacular, dismissing Latin as simple and


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inelegant. “And thus we are made laughing-stocks by the Cartesians,” Huet concluded, “because we are learned.”150 Enthusiastic comments from learned friends at the inception of the Ad usum Delphini confirmed the broader cultural significance that Huet later attributed to the series: it was, he wrote, a “preservative against ignorance and barbarism.”151 In a letter of April 1673, Leibniz combined a critique of Cartesianism with plaudits for the series. Some people, he wrote, misused the ideas of Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes to destroy ancient wisdom and to conceal their own ignorance. The Ad usum Delphini would “recall fleeing Letters, . . . revivify the nearly extinguished light of Antiquity, and then give the best authors a third life, as, after the course of barely one century, contempt for them has revived, and another sort of barbarism come into being.”152 In October 1673, Oldenburg prophesied enduring fame for the series: “The minds of many young men will be reconciled to liberal studies, who otherwise would be put off, disgusted by the thorny problems occurring in many authors.”153 Graevius greeted the project with the heartiest enthusiasm. Yes, it was a pity that editorial duties would delay the eagerly anticipated Demonstratio, he wrote in September 1672. Nevertheless, it would be more honorable and praiseworthy, because it would benefit the entire human race by educating Europe’s most outstanding prince.154 The Ad usum Delphini was meant for schoolboys. In contrast, Huet directed the Demonstratio evangelica (1679) and the Censura philosophiae cartesianae (1689) to highly sophisticated and rigorously trained readers. His decision to compose both works in Latin indicates a willingness to engage the Cartesians as serious philosophical opponents—and perhaps implicitly chastised them for not confining dispute to the intellectually qualified. 155 Edward Bernard objected to Huet’s treatment of geometry in the Demonstratio, but it is not immediately apparent to us what Christian apologetics and geometry have to do with each other.156 Because the prophesies-fulfillment argument was fundamentally historical, Huet used the Demonstratio to respond to the Cartesian dismissal of history as a form of knowledge. In a sense, he was attacking a Cartesian syllogism: (1) Only some areas of intellectual endeavor are amenable to deductive argumentation (i.e., arguments similar to geometrical proofs). (2) Only deductive arguments can yield certain knowledge. (3) Therefore, areas of intellectual endeavor not amenable to deductive argumentation (i.e., history) cannot yield certain knowledge. When Huet composed the Demonstratio, he responded to a recent and influential statement of this Cartesian argument, La logique, and he constructed the sophisticated epistemological framework that launches the Demonstratio to refute its authors, Arnauld and Nicole. (Again, he refrained from mentioning either Jansenist by name, thus following his own rule of not naming living opponents.)157 He rebuffed the second proposition by arguing two points of his own: first, that historical arguments possessed a higher degree


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of certainty than Cartesians were willing to allow; second, that deductive or geometric arguments possessed a lower degree of certainty than the Cartesians claimed. Huet addressed the first proposition by structuring the entire Demonstratio as a geometric proof. Admittedly, this is an odd approach, but it makes sense in the context of the Cartesian challenge to historical study as truly productive of knowledge and the Cartesian overestimation (in Huet’s mind) of deductive reasoning. Huet’s argument in the Demonstratio was complex and highly technical. It required a sophisticated understanding of epistemology, detailed knowledge of the history of geometry, a mastery of ancient languages, knowledge of ancient civilizations, and skill in biblical exegesis, not to mention the acuity needed to evaluate Huet’s philological and critical arguments. Huet offered a more accessible challenge to the Cartesian preference for geometry over humanistic study in the Huetiana. There he also rejected Descartes’ distinction between allegedly “certain” (because demonstrable) knowledge and merely “probable” (because not demonstrable in the deductive manner of a geometric proof) knowledge. “A philosopher of this time . . . has dared to assert that we ought to limit our speculations and studies to Philosophy and Mathematics, all the other branches of learning being vain and frivolous.” Descartes was merely using his own taste and humor to set a standard for all human intelligence, claimed Huet. Each discipline offered something worthwhile, Huet continued, and a balanced mind knew how to assess each according to its worth.158 Huet knew that no one could be equally expert in all areas of knowledge, but he rejected an ideal of learning that violated the ethos of nonspecialized erudition practiced by Huet and his friends. Thus, he found it unacceptable when Cartesians dismissed their critics as lacking specialized expertise, writing to a friend in 1698: “[The Cartesians] say of [Leibniz] what they say of me, that these matters are not my domain, that we ought to confine ourselves to our respective spheres, [Leibniz] to mathematics, me to the study of Antiquity.”159 By challenging the stark division that Cartesianism imposed between demonstrable and indemonstrable knowledge, Huet attacked a basic principle of the new philosophy. He continued his offensive in the Censura, in which he tried to dismantle Cartesianism bit by bit from its foundations. In individual chapters, Huet examined the cogito (the cornerstone of Descartes’ philosophical system), Descartes’ criterion of truth, his conception of the human mind, his argument for the existence of God, his conceptions of body and the void, his explanation of the origin of the universe, and his analysis of the cause of gravity. Huet exploited whatever weaknesses he could perceive in Descartes’ logic, exercising well the training he had received from his Jesuit schoolmasters. The imaginary confrontation between an Epicurean and a Cartesian in chapter 4 gives a good idea of the process and tenor of Huet’s argumentation.


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Descartes never intended his fundamental ideas to provide philosophers something to argue about endlessly, of course. He meant to establish a basis for ascertaining certain knowledge about the natural world. Thus, Huet did not just pick apart Descartes’ arguments; he wanted to show that Descartes’ first principles led not to certainty, but to bad science. According to Huet, when Descartes argued from them in the Principia (1644), he failed to provide a causally necessary and accurate description of the universe. Even if you accepted the existence and actions of Descartes’ “building blocks” of matter (the “subtle” matter and two other types of particles invisible to the eye), we could conceive of a world very different from our own.160 For example, if Descartes had known about the rings of Saturn, he could probably have fashioned an explanation for them after rooting around in his fundamental principles. Yet, Huet commented sarcastically, Descartes would also have argued from his universal principles that all planets, even the Earth, should have been similarly adorned.161 Certainly, it was unfair for Huet to extrapolate Descartes’ argument about a phenomenon that Huygens only discovered and deciphered years after Descartes’ death. But Huet had a more important point. By mentioning Huygens, who had instituted an empirical program of research at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Huet was criticizing both Descartes’ results and method. He invited the reader to compare Descartes’ Principia with Huygens’ Systema Saturnium. In the former, Descartes enumerated a handful of principles about the fundamental nature of matter, and then proceeded to construct a system of the universe consistent with them. Huygens offered his conclusions about Saturn’s rings after presenting several pages of data culled from night after night of astronomical observations. Anyone who thought his ideas strange, wrote Huygens, “should take into account that I did not arbitrarily construct a hypothesis based solely on my imagination, as the Astronomers construct their epicycles, which appear nowhere in the heavens, but only with my eyes.”162 To be sure, Huet’s implicit comparison of Descartes and Huygens was overstated, even misleading.163 Descartes demanded observations of natural phenomena, too, and Huygens remained a Cartesian. No matter. Huet’s point was that the Cartesian deductive method led to fantastic speculations, while Huygens’s empiricism resulted in true knowledge. Huet concluded by charging that Descartes had not sought out the true causes of things, but had made the world fit his a priori ideas. After spinning his fine fantasies, Descartes not only asserted the truth of his original falsehoods, but also boldly insisted that they were as trustworthy as geometric proofs—indeed, that no other way of explaining things could be found.164 Finally, Huet accused Descartes of intellectual recklessness, compounded of “perverse” reasoning, self-love, and arrogance. This made Descartes limit the power of God and subject the truths of faith to his own human reason.165


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Thus, Huet pounced on Descartes’ treatment of creatio ex nihilo in the Principia. He did not believe that Descartes was sincere when he asserted that he only hypothesized that the world could have arisen from preexisting matter, that he fully acquiesced to Christian doctrine. Huet had some reason for being dubious, as statements immediately before this in the Principia indicated some ambivalence, if not a contradictory goal on Descartes’ part. There Descartes argued for Copernicanism, writing that, if he had reasoned properly and if his conclusions agreed with the natural phenomena being investigated, “it would be an injustice to God to believe that the causes of the effects which are in nature and which we have thus discovered are false. For we would then be accusing Him of having made us so imperfect as to be liable to make mistakes, even when correctly using our reason [which he has given us].”166 In the Censura, Huet never explained how he connected Descartes’ impiety with Descartes’ construction of the relationship between truth and God, yet the connection is quite clear from notes he made on the Principia in preparation for writing the Censura. Descartes had based the certainty of clear and distinct ideas in God’s nature. He argued that God was truth, that it was repugnant to Him to deceive us, and, thus, that He could not be the source of our errors. Huet commented on this passage in his notes, agreeing that God did not deceive us—but adding that God did permit us to deceive ourselves. Because sometimes we erred and sometimes we did not, we were continually reminded of our own weakness and our inferiority to God.167 So human beings had to be humble, but humility was utterly opposed to what Huet condemned as Descartes’ intellectual arrogance. This perspective informed Huet’s explosive denunciation of Descartes in the Censura as a man who “reasons so perversely, loves himself so absurdly” that “because he believes his opinions are certain, he concludes indubitably that they do not oppose faith; whereas, because they are against faith, he ought to conclude that they are false.168 This religioethical component of Huet’s counteroffensive against the foes of the Republic of Letters was more prominent in those essays of the Huetiana where he addressed general threats to learned culture. There he did not employ the exalted terms that he used to castigate Descartes’ intellectual egotism in the Censura. Intellectual egotism remained a problem, but, in his Latin works, Huet considered Descartes a real philosopher who had to be taken seriously (as he did Arnauld and Nicole). The vulgar, however, were simply lazy. Laziness, of course, inverts Huet’s conception of a life dedicated to the service of the Muses. In the Huetiana, Huet wrote that the life of the mind required formidable intellectual skills, good judgment, sound moral character, unwavering commitment to study, indifference to worldly success, and perhaps even the strength to withstand the disapproval of relatives.169 Having overcome all these obstacles in his own life, Huet never believed that the érudit was obliged


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to make things easy for his readers. Thus, when Huet published a vernacular, but nonetheless erudite, treatise on the location of paradise, he warned his readers, “Do not look for an elegant discourse here, nor charming reflections. On the contrary, prepare yourselves for dry reading, a thorny investigation, the tedium of citations; prepare to attempt a little Greek and Hebrew. A matter as obscure as this can only be clarified by such means.”170 Not surprisingly, Huet identified sloth as the cause for the decline of learning. Every day, the taste, love, and esteem for letters was being extinguished, he wrote in an essay on the “decadence of letters” in the Huetiana. Although well aware of their incapacity, ignorant people would never commit to years of study, preferring their idle, soft, and trivial lifestyles. Rather than repair their own deficiencies, they ridiculed erudition, scorned the knowledge of savants as pedantry, and made themselves the arbiters of genius, good taste, and true learning.171 Paradoxically, learned men themselves had made this popular contempt possible. Heroic generations of earlier scholars had strived to spare others the pain they endured to acquire knowledge. They smoothed the way for their descendents with dictionaries, grammars, and other reference works. Unfortunately, the relative ease of study promoted laxity, while abundant reference books cooled the eagerness required to become truly learned. It had become too easy to acquire a “false erudition,” to rest content at the foot of Parnassus and forsake the effort to ascend to the summit.172 “I find . . . the same difference between a savant of [yesterday] and one of today as that between Christopher Columbus discovering the New World and the master of a packet boat who daily crosses from Calais to Dover.”173 Huet elaborated on this theme in the essay he wrote in response to the first volume of Perrault’s Parallèles. Intellectually lazy people would never know anything of antiquity, he explained. “As a consequence of amour-propre,” they scorned, rather than studied it. It was no wonder that Huet’s contemporaries lacked the patience to read an epic and the expertise to judge it properly. “Our nation and our century, corrupted by the taste of women, are enemies of long and sustained works.”174 Thus, worthy savants like Huet’s English friend Edward Bernard were ignored, Huet complained in the Huetiana, while others of diminutive learning acquired absurdly inflated reputations. That was what happened when reputations depended on “the opinion of the vulgar, who are ignorant.”175 Although Huet bemoaned the decline of learning and the consequent loss of prestige to his particular community of learning, he was not the Ancient that Perrault depicted in his Parallèles. In fact, Huet resembled Perrault’s Modern abbé in many respects. Huet himself acknowledged the limitations and the abuse of linguistic study and erudition in a passage in his autobiography that he translated nearly verbatim in the Huetiana.176 Criticism, like the mastery of languages, was a tool for acquiring knowledge, not knowledge itself. Huet also recognized the achievements of his contemporaries in both


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literature and the sciences. “I respect the Ancients, but I do not at all adore them,” he wrote to Perrault. “I see their faults, and I agree with many of your accusations.”177 When it came to science, how could anyone deny that the knowledge of the Moderns exceeded that of the Ancients? Huet knew from his own experience how true this was in astronomy.178 Where Huet differed from the abbé was in his general assessment of the Ancients’ contributions and, more important, the stance the Moderns should adopt toward them. For sheer intellectual brilliance, the Moderns simply could not compare to their predecessors. Seventeenth-century achievements in poetry, as in science, were merely additive. Thus, “the praise of this century is the praise of Antiquity. Because what we esteem now is what the Ancients taught and left us, and we are entitled to no other portion of this praise than having further adjusted, arranged, ornamented, and augmented it.” The men of Huet’s century were pygmies; though “the pygmy standing on the Giant’s head sees further than the Giant, . . . it is the Giant’s height that makes [it possible for him] to see so far.”179 Most important for Huet, the Ancients served a profoundly moral function in the life of the mind. They counseled humility, the opposite of amourpropre, which caused so many intellectual sins. If the Ancients, for all their genius, had erred on occasion, this only reinforced the case for intellectual caution. As Huet’s friend Rapin put it in Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité (1686), if Plato and Aristotle, with their peerless rational powers, could have been “mistaken in so many things, would it not be frightfully presumptuous for mediocre minds to think they are incapable of error? Can one see the weakness of reason, however consummate, in such great men, without at least distrusting one’s own?”180

A Cautionary Tale Huet composed his last explicitly anti-Cartesian work, Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartesianisme, in a fit of pique over Adrien Baillet’s La Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691). He recorded his reactions to the biography in two pages of notes that now accompany a manuscript version of the Nouveaux mémoires. “This life of Descartes is most impertinent,” Huet fumed. “It is a mass of bagatelles treated with an air so serious and with the same exactitude as if the salvation of the human race were in question.” Baillet obsessed over trivial details. He wrote as if Descartes had been “extraordinarily inspired,” dispatched “by God in order to banish error from the world and to show to the rest of humanity the way of truth.” Huet heaped scorn on Baillet’s account of the dream that supposedly revealed “Truth” to Descartes’ mind; he characterized it sarcastically as the result of some “black humor” or “an enthusiasm.” What was the reader to make of a man who, during his


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time in Holland, was so continually agitated that he moved about from city to city? Or to make of the fact that Descartes fathered a bastard daughter, despite Baillet’s claim that Descartes had no other objective than the glory of God and the reformation of morals? In the margins of one manuscript version of the Nouveaux mémoires, he even indicated the specific passages in Baillet’s biography that angered him.181 The hagiographic tone of Baillet’s biography spurred Huet to compose an antihagiography. By his own account, Huet composed Nouveaux mémoires solely for his own amusement and that of a few friends; it was “too ribald,” he admitted to his nephew years after publication, even to appear under his own name.182 At the time, though, friends encouraged him to publish it. “Nothing appears to me better or more agreeably written,” Niçaise wrote from Dijon in 1692. He stressed the satire’s accessibility; he was convinced that it would be more effective against the Cartesians than many “huge, useless, and boring tomes.”183 A group of Jesuits, “all sage and enlightened men,” similarly assured Huet that “it would damage the Cartesian faction more than all those dogmatic and Christian works that appear daily.”184 One recent scholar has wrongly called Nouveaux mémoires “something of an embarrassment.”185 The satire was as finely attuned to the contemporary scene as La Barre’s dialogues, and it similarly exploited the cultural predispositions of the French reading public. Admittedly, it was a concession because it was written in a genre Huet disliked. A sarcastic note he inscribed into the 1714 edition of Boileau’s works stated that Jansenism and satire were equally deserving of praise—and we know what Huet thought of Jansenism.186 But Huet’s anti-Cartesian arguments in the Demonstratio and the Censura were obviously impenetrable to most readers. If Huet wanted to take his case against Cartesianism to a wider public—the same public Descartes’ advocates had cultivated for years and for whom Perrault wrote his Parallèles—he would have to write in French and in an appealing genre, even if that meant sacrificing philosophical fine points and erudite allusions. Yet Huet hardly softened his position because he wrote in French. He went beyond countering Baillet’s biography to develop an acute cultural critique of where Cartesianism was leading Europe—and it was not to general enlightenment. Nouveaux mémoires was allegedly authored by a loyal Cartesian who, much to his astonishment, discovered his dead leader alive and well and teaching a group of Laplanders in the far north of Sweden. He could hardly believe his eyes, because he knew the Laplanders’ reputation for enchantment, including the ability to adopt the form of a wolf or another man.187 In a swipe at his opponent and the salonnières, Huet had the acolyte dedicate the work to Régis, whom “spiritual and virtuosic ladies” recognized “as the protector of the subtle matter, patron of the globules, and defender of the tourbillons.” The remainder of the book is a conversation between Huet’s fictional Descartes and Chanut, the French ambassador to the Swedish court; in it, Huet


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explained his reasons for wanting to leave the court and appealed to the ambassador for assistance. Descartes admitted to Chanut that his new philosophy was not new at all; it was just stitched together from bits and pieces culled from ancient philosophers and more recent thinkers. There was nothing original in his physics, anatomy, or geometry, and his proof of the existence of God was pinched from Anselm and Thomas. Chanut warned that Descartes could be found out, but Descartes was not worried. He had achieved such notoriety that he could risk asserting even the most extravagant proposition.188 The success of the cogito was especially risible. “My disciples kill themselves . . . [trying to] support it, as unsupportable as it is. . . . See what pridefulness, shrewdness and dissimulation have gotten me!” Descartes went on to recount his famed evening of intellectual revelation.189 Chanut countered, how did Descartes know that his “visions and revelations” were not ordinary dreams prompted by tobacco, beer, or melancholy? How did he know that the melon supposedly given to him by the “spirit of truth” actually symbolized solitude or that the Laplanders would prove receptive to his philosophy? Descartes dismissed Chanut’s objections. The fact that his philosophy was constituted of truths “so far removed from human reason” was precisely what made it so admirable—not to mention the elements from other philosophies, particularly Rosicrucianism. Chanut retorted “there are two sorts [of Rosicrucians]: the ones who are deceivers, the others who are deceived.” Not at all, Descartes claimed, they were inspired by God to reform the sciences most useful to humanity. Descartes had long been anxious to meet them and learn their secrets of invisibility, prolonging life, and mind reading. After meeting their leader, he underwent the entire Rosicrucian course of instruction, abandoning geometry for the study of physics, medicine, chemistry, the Kabbalah, and other occult sciences. All this prepared Descartes to carry out his true mission in life: advancing and protecting his philosophical sect. As soon as the Laplanders taught him how to transport himself magically to wherever he desired, he would be able to evaluate the status of his “sect” in Paris and Holland. He would reveal himself to his best friends and tutor them in the precepts necessary for the sect’s propagation and the “extirpation of Peripaticism.” He would furnish his disciples with “captious distinctions, equivocal terms, [and] ambiguous expressions good enough to stop the most accomplished Dialectician in his tracks.” He would stiffen their resolve when caught in flagrant contradiction, showing them how to save themselves with specious reasoning. “And I won’t have to wait as many centuries as Aristotle did to have as long a list of Commentators . . . You can take care of a lot of business with a lifespan of 500 years.”190 Yet Descartes also confessed to Chanut that his hopes for pliant students had been repeatedly disappointed. The Sorbonne was against him. If even


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the Protestant Dutch could not tolerate him, what could he expect of the Thomists, Scotists, and Jesuits, “people so prickly and irritated by the scorn that I have for Aristotle?” The liveliness of French intelligence did not bode well for the reception of his dogmas, and he had failed to find “something more soft, more supple, more manageable” in Holland, Westphalia, or Frisia (where they even used pages from his books to wrap fish.). Even his greatest disciple had disappointed him, for Regius had become Cartesianism’s first schismatic instead of its first martyr. Would that he had more female disciples, as they always proved “more sweet, more patient, more docile.”191 He had been no more successful at the Swedish court, he complained, because Queen Christina had little taste for the new philosophy. She held “to her Plato and her Aristotle, [because] reveries for reveries, the Ancients were worth more than the New”; she teased him, asking whether the “principle of love resided in subtle matter or in the globules of the second element” and humiliating him before the court.192 Everything changed, though, when Descartes met a Laplander who delivered a letter to him from a professor at Uppsala. Descartes detained him, impressed with the “penetration and clarity” of the messenger’s intelligence despite his savage physiognomy. He learned “a thousand curious things that will be very useful in my Physics,” and he resolved to go to Uppsala, where he would find disciples “more faithful, more docile, and more grateful” than any he had found before. “They will be a tabula rasa on which I will be able to draw the first traces of the truth, without having to fear the obstacle of prejudices.”193 Although initially reluctant, Chanut helped Descartes simulate his demise and subsequent escape. The account concluded with Descartes beginning his first lesson to the eager Laplanders.194 In Nouveaux mémoires, Huet sought to discredit Descartes by identifying him with intellectually suspect groups: the Rosicrucians and the Laplanders. The real Descartes once admitted that he went looking for the Rosicrucians while in Germany, but later denied any association with them.195 Indeed, the existence of any actual Rosicrucian movement is debatable. Supposedly its founder, “the most godly and highly illuminated father” Christian Rosenkreutz, brought the philosophy back from the East, where he had learned it from wise men in Damascus.196 The movement’s founding documents, all published in Germany before 1616, give the impression of a quasi-mystical hodgepodge of Renaissance magic and occult learning, all of which became increasingly marginalized during the seventeenth century. By identifying Descartes’ philosophy with this dubious brew of occult wisdom, Huet suggested that Descartes had been a wrong-headed visionary, not a serious philosopher guided by reason. He gave literary form to an observation Huet had made in a letter to a friend: “[the Cartesians] want the Cartesian doctrine to appear as a species of black magic, impenetrable to anyone but those who have been initiated into its mysteries.”197 In a more general sense, he


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identified the new philosophy with “enthusiasm,” which his contemporaries regarded as just as dangerous in scientific endeavor as in religion.198 Huet’s satiric representation drew upon a general image of the Laplanders as barely Christianized, less than civilized, and perhaps not even fully human. Like many contemporaries, Huet still believed in the effects of climate on intelligence. When he described his peregrinatio academica in the autobiography, he wrote how the Swedes avoided an island that, according to fable, had imprisoned a magician for centuries. Such superstition was inevitable, he explained; their frigid environment and lack of the sun’s beneficent rays made their minds sluggish and incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. This was true of Laplanders, Icelanders, and Greenlanders, too.199 Thus, the Laplanders had already caught Huet’s attention on his trip to Sweden. In a letter to Mambrun in December 1653, he wrote of their fabled ability to transport themselves to other locations and to transform themselves into animals.200 The exact source of Huet’s information is unknown, but during the Renaissance much had been written about Laplanders and magic,201 and John Steffer’s Latin ethnography had been published in French in 1678. Steffer confirmed that the Laplanders were “addicted to Magic . . . one of the greatest of their impieties that yet continues among them.” Steffer alleged that they could even stop ships under full sail,202 and he repeated Olaus Magnus’s explanation of the Laplanders’ ability to transport themselves across great distances. To what better place, then, could Huet have exiled Descartes? What more savage way to suggest the caliber of Descartes’ disciples? When Huet burlesqued Descartes’ night of revelation and his methods more generally, he stated what many of his colleagues felt: that Cartesianism insulted people’s intelligence. Huet’s friend, the physician Antoine Menjot (1615–96), made the same point when congratulating him on the Censura: “Hippocrates places among the infallible marks of delirium believing that one perceives objects which are not at all present to our senses, or not to remark those that present themselves. . . . Monsieur Descartes demands first that his catechumen begins by becoming mad, in doubting, for example, that he suffers pain when he is pricked hard.”203 Huet also echoed friends like Rapin, who described a world full of “obscure and profound geniuses” whose presumption and boldness was the key to their intellectual dominance, and whose incomprehensibility, “a certain mysterious ‘je ne sais quoi,’” charmed their disciples.204 When Huet depicted Descartes as a dogmatist and his typical followers as unthinking, ignorant disciples (worse yet, salonnières), he focused on aspects of Cartesianism that even some of the philosophy’s sympathizers considered problematic.205 Responding to a gift of the Censura, an old friend of Huet admitted that, while he admired some aspects of Descartes’ thinking, “I do not want to adore him, and that is enough to be excommunicated from all


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his sect . . . I would say only that this could be, not asserting as his partisans do, it is this way and can be no other.”206 The dogmatic aspects of Cartesianism offended Huygens and Leibniz, too. Leibniz believed that the Cartesians had even become what they claimed to despise: “interpreters or commentators on their master just as the philosophers of the schools [were] with Aristotle.”207 Descriptions of Cartesians frequently borrowed the language of religious enthusiasm, and the Cartesians themselves did not help matters when they characterized their fellow-believers’ positions as “schisms” or “heresies” against Descartes.208 The Cartesian Desgabets, for example, accused a Cartesian who adopted atomism of creating “a schism which is all the more considerable in that it all at once takes away one of the strongest supports from the true philosophy and strengthens the side of Monsieur Gassendi.”209 Nouveaux mémoires was heavy-handed satire, but subtlety was not Molière’s strong suit, either. The point is that Huet recast his learned objections to Descartes as entertaining ridicule, eschewing the logical arguments and learned allusions that only learned readers could appreciate. He portrayed Descartes as mentally unstable (even verging on madness), arrogant, a poseur, mendacious, vain, canny in the management of his career, a shameless poseur, and a plagiarist. Huet did not argue philosophical subtleties; he discredited Descartes’ philosophy by showing that it was the abortive offspring of a diseased mind rather than the result of rational thought. Descartes had abandoned geometry, the area where he had done his most important work, to promote a philosophy based on mirages. In the process, he transgressed all the ideals of the Republic of Letters. Descartes had not really dispensed with the learning of the Ancients; he plagiarized their erudition and passed off the resulting pastiche as original work. The Descartes of Huet’s satire did not reason with other reasonable men. Instead, he made disciples of the unreasoning. To Huet, this signaled his utter lack of virtue. Descartes’ followers meekly accepted their leader’s opinions, while true philosophers argued their points vigorously and settled their disputes through rational discourse, not assertions of authority. Descartes’ magical abilities made him a shaman, not a natural philosopher. The moral was clear: To become a Cartesian was to abandon learned society and civil discourse, to follow a reckless egoist who had mistaken personal fantasy for certain truth.


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Conclusion

A DIALOGUE WITH THE FUTURE C’est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul. —La Rochefoucauld In 1751, the first volumes of the Encyclopédie began to appear; the last would roll off the presses twenty years later, surviving violent criticism and clearing the hurdles of official censorship. What began as a modest commercial venture swelled to twenty-eight folio volumes. It contained tens of thousands of articles by more than 150 authors, accompanied by thousands of meticulously rendered illustrations that detailed everything from brain surgery to pin making, from sewing garments to the proportions of the Belvedere Apollo. The Encyclopédie is regarded as one of the Enlightenment’s greatest achievements. It was also a manifesto of the self-described society of men of letters who wrote it.1 They claimed the right to question all received knowledge, from the political to the religious, to test it in the light of their natural reason. They distinguished between useless and useful knowledge, offering the latter to the public as an encouragement to future progress. They defined themselves as a new kind of intellectual—a philosophe—one entitled to a special status, regardless of birth, and one entitled to be heard. Such pretensions demanded explanation, if not justification, and this task fell to Jean d’Alembert (1717–83). Then in his thirties, d’Alembert was one of the project’s editors, and he would eventually author some 1,400 articles. He was also an exemplar of the new intellectual type, combining innovative work in mathematics with success in the Paris salons, and he was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In his introduction, d’Alembert set the Encyclopédie in an artfully constructed historical context. It was not a history of kings and kingdoms, but of ideas and intellectuals culminating in the Encyclopédie. It was also profoundly polemical. Starting with “the renaissance of letters,” argued d’Alembert, “the progress of the mind” had followed a natural sequence; it began as erudition, continued as belles-lettres, and blossomed into philosophy during d’Alembert’s own age.2 Because the progression was “natural,” each state was necessary, and each was necessarily surpassed by the next. 184


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Erudition developed first, d’Alembert wrote, because it depended on memory, a crucial, but relatively primitive cognitive faculty in the view of many philosophes. However, the Renaissance scholars mistook reading for learning and understanding. The érudits consumed everything written by the Ancients, and then began to slavishly imitate and worship them. Full of pride, “[they] gloried . . . in practicing a science that was thorny, often ridiculous, and sometimes barbarous.” They disdained their own languages, believing that one could only speak well in an ancient tongue, but “the trouble it took to write in [Latin] was . . . time lost from the advancement of reason.” They stuffed libraries with books written in a “[Latin style] we can hardly evaluate.” No matter, for even if translated, no one would bother to read them anyway.3 D’Alembert claimed that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not scorn the earlier periods. He was not an intellectual bigot. He celebrated the second phase, for example, when literary men had liberated themselves from the obsession with ancient tongues and directed their energies to perfecting their own. “All the masterpieces of the past century [i.e., the seventeenth] were seen to burst forth almost simultaneously,” and the vernacular conquered every genre. Yet, like Huet and Graindorge, he lamented the fact that more and more scholars wrote in the vernacular, a development that would impede, rather than promote, the spread of knowledge. D’Alembert even admonished intellectuals of all types to “recognize the reciprocal need they have of each other’s works and the assistance which they could draw from them.” Still, he characterized the outmoded avatars of erudition in sharply pejorative terms. While the literati, representing imagination, and the philosophes, representing reason, regarded one another as madmen, they at least agreed in condemning the érudit as “a sort of miser who thinks only of amassing without enjoying and who heaps up the basest metals along with the most precious.” The érudit puffed himself up with a “vain show of erudition,” because “the cheapest [intellectual] advantages are . . . those whose vulgar display gives most satisfaction.” Indeed, he was vainer than the philosophe (or even the litterateur), because the philosophe possessed an “inventive mind [that] is always dissatisfied with its progress because it sees beyond [it].” Indeed, among the greatest philosophes, even “their amourpropre may harbor a secret but severe judge whom flattery may momentarily silence but never corrupt.”4 D’Alembert’s history of the intellect had heroes, too. Gratitude (not to mention national pride) demanded that he find a place for Descartes among the other patron saints of the Enlightenment, the Englishmen Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Yet, by 1751, many philosophes believed that French science had definitely erred in accepting Cartesianism, so d’Alembert’s praise of Descartes became an apologia. Whatever the failings of his intellectual system, Descartes had freed himself from the intellectual


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chains of the period, casting off “scholasticism . . . opinion . . . authority . . . prejudices and barbarism.” He showed the way, even if he could not travel the path himself. “[Descartes] can be thought of as a leader of conspirators who, before anyone else, had the courage to arise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier government, which he himself was not able to see established.” D’Alembert implied that Cartesian science was a necessary error on the way to truth. England should thank France for this misdirection, because, in Descartes, France had given England “the origins of [the true science] which we have since received back from her.” His last resort was hagiography, reminding his readers that Descartes had been “persecuted . . . as if he had come to bring the truth to men.”5 It is easy to imagine Huet in dialogue with d’Alembert. D’Alembert’s polemical history of intellectual life echoes nearly every criticism leveled at erudition during Huet’s own lifetime. If d’Alembert could not evaluate the Latin style of learned tomes, Huet might retort, that just proved how ignorant he was. Érudits like Huet did not slavishly imitate the Ancients; instead, the past gave a solid foundation to their endeavors. They did not worship the Ancients; rather, the Ancients put them, the Moderns, in their rightful place and counseled a necessary intellectual humility. He would scoff at d’Alembert’s attempt to turn back the accusation of intellectual egotism. (He would take issue, too, with d’Alembert’s era of belles-lettres, reminding him that women had helped to make French a great literary language.) He would ridicule the ambition and question the wisdom of the Encyclopédie’s mission to offer all knowledge to all readers. Finally, when it came to Descartes—well, Huet and his friends had always known that he was wrong. How absurd to suggest that the French had to stumble through Cartesianism to get to “truth.” If more Frenchmen had paid attention to their English colleagues in Huet’s time, they would not look so foolish in d’Alembert’s. Still, once Huet recovered from his pique at d’Alembert’s pretensions, I like to think he would have acknowledged d’Alembert for what he was: a man of superior intellectual abilities, accomplishing important work in a discipline that Huet always passionately admired. Perceiving d’Alembert as a colleague, he might seek a way to make his points more temperately and pleasantly—to teach and to delight, as he had learned from Horace as a schoolboy. He could offer d’Alembert a Latin poem, precisely the kind of gift he had given to so many learned colleagues and which had been his calling card in the Republic of Letters decades earlier. “Magnes” (1709) might strike him as a perfect choice; it was, after all, a more considered, if no less admonitory meditation on the problem of knowledge, the intellectual, and his public than his anti-Cartesian satire.6 “Magnes” is a didactic poem, a literary genre whose pedigree extended back to the Ancients and which had been revitalized during the Renaissance.7 Given


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their pedagogical mission and commitment to Latin poetry, it should come as no surprise that Jesuits dominated the genre by the end of the seventeenth century.8 Huet wrote other didactic Latin poems, such as “Sal,” a poem about salt that he dedicated to Montausier. With “Magnes,” a very old man returned to the astronomical interests of his youth while exploring the larger theme of the pursuit of knowledge.9 Huet made his discussion timeless by disassociating himself from contemporary debates between Aristotelians, Gassendists, and Cartesians, engaging instead with an ancient, well-known and highly regarded model of Latin didactic poetry, Manilius’s Astronomica (ca. 43).10 Huet knew Manilius’s work well. Although he did not have time to edit the version published in the Ad usum Delphini, he added his extensive notes to it. Manilius’s intentions had been both encyclopedic and philosophic: To present current astronomical and astrological knowledge, and to argue for the presence of divine providence in the workings of the universe against Epicurean chance. It is as if Huet’s poem answers the rhetorical question that Manilius posed in his first book: “Who of but human understanding would have essayed so great a task as to wish against heaven’s wish to appear a god himself?”11 The answer was Magnes, the protagonist of Huet’s poem, a name that evoked a mythical past of deities wooing human females and struggling with human heroes. 12 “Magnes” was a word rich in contemporary allusions, too. One of them was magnetism, which fascinated the seventeenth-century. Athanasius Kircher’s first book had been Ars magnesia (1631), and Gautruche’s treatment of magnetism in his textbooks showcased the work of his colleague at La Flèche, Jacob Grandami.13 The subject arose more than once in Huet and Graindorge’s letters, and Huet was anxious to hear more from Oldenburg about an instrument for measuring this fascinating force.14 It is tempting to see in Huet’s “Magnes” a comment on Kircher, the Jesuit polymath whose endeavors had been spoiled, according to Huet, by “amour-propre and an immoderate desire for praise.”15 In “Magnes,” Huet returned to Asia Minor and not far from Mount Ida, whose dramatic dawns had prompted his dispute about refraction with Vossius. He did not dedicate the poem to a pagan deity, a patron, or an allegedly divine emperor (as Manilius had dedicated his poem to Augustus). Instead, he dedicated it to Magnes, whose fame had spread from Tyre in the east to Thule at the western edge of the world: “You were bold enough to attempt heaven’s highest reaches, and, sleepless, to measure out the stars, to discover through meditation the causes of things, and to publish the secrets [of nature].” Spurning the pleasures and power sought by others, he desired to surpass all other men by cultivating his own brilliance. His mind liberated from lowly concerns and directed to study, Magnes withdrew from human company, wandering the beaches, mountains, and valleys of Lydia and Phrygia to seek the origins of all things. His curiosity was boundless. He wanted to know the source of the elements that constitute the world and the


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motive force that brought and held them together. Where did metallic ores come from? Or thunder? Or the tides? “Who devised the rainbow, and who painted the glistening clouds with a variety of colors?” He scrutinized the heavens from lofty mountaintops, noted the location and movements of the constellations and the sun, divided the heavens into the wheel of the Zodiac, and transfixed them on an axis around which the universe wheeled.16 He ordered sailors who were too timid to lose sight of land to unfurl their sails, to place their confidence in his knowledge of the heavens, and to follow the stars. Indeed, he did not remain silent about what he had learned. Rather, he broadcast what he knew, revealing the hidden marvels of the universe in crowded assemblies. Just as all true knowledge of religion had descended from Moses (the ancient thesis upheld by Huet in his Demonstratio evangelica), Huet’s poem proposed that all knowledge of nature descended from Magnes and spread throughout the known world. Magnes captured the imaginations of young and old, who urgently sought his answers to their questions. He determined to shape an unruly and primitive humanity, to resolve human doubts, and to elevate the human spirit. He encouraged human beings to investigate all things, from the celestial ether to the depths of the sea and the deepest recesses of the earth—even to seek out knowledge that Nature had prudently denied mankind. Vainglory began to fill men’s minds, and pride began to replace piety. In the end, Magnes exhorted his followers to abandon the gods—even worse, to deny their very existence. They were nothing but asinine fables, belief in which was superstition. Nature alone governed the world. Jove heard about Magnes’s activities, and he was not happy. He resolved to meet this challenge to the gods. Like Prometheus, he bound Magnes to a rock; unlike Prometheus, he did not permit Magnes to suffer in human form. Jove transformed him into stone (a process that Huet imagined with an anatomist’s gift for detail) and imprisoned him in a secret cave. Still wrathful, he turned Magnes’s disciples into iron filings, crushing the life out of them without entirely extinguishing their spirits. Indeed, they retained such love for their old master that their deformed bodies became restless in his presence. Nor did Magnes, despite his metamorphosis, entirely forget his previous preoccupations: He continued to follow the track of the pole, to seek out the Ursas, major and minor, and to align with the true axis of the universe. “Magnes” would have made an appropriate gift for d’Alembert. The poem’s protagonist was not an intellectual charlatan like the Descartes of Huet’s satire, but, in Huet’s mind, he lacked the humility and discretion of the curious gentleman from Provence. Without considering the consequences, Magnes revealed his learning to an unruly, unready humanity. D’Alembert distinguished between “the inspired men who enlighten the people and the enthusiasts who lead them astray”17—but was it so easy to know the difference? Was it too easy to become like Magnes, who, emboldened by his own


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virtuosity, became an intellectual egoist leading the unwary to disaster? As in Huet’s satire, a lone genius became a lone madman. He acknowledged no limits to his capacity to know. He defied the gods. He tumbled into atheism. Was there a better demonstration of La Rouchefoucauld’s adage, “It is a great folly to wish to be wise alone”? “Magnes” was Huet’s last, most mature literary embodiment of the intellectual values he cherished as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. The poem did not reject innovation or intellectual striving. For Huet, these had never been desirable, even possible options. We have seen him move away from the neo-Aristotelian science of the Jesuits—though he selectively combined other ancient philosophies, Epicureanism and Skepticism, to guide his investigations into natural philosophy. He adapted the genres and conventions of neo-Latin poetry to express contemporary concerns and interests. He applied state-of-the-art methods of historicocritical method to his biblical studies. Moreover, he dabbled in vernacular literature, defending the novel as a serious genre (albeit by confecting a tradition for it) and writing one of his own. The context of innovation mattered a great deal to Huet, however, and he might have tried to explain that to d’Alembert. Only by innovating within received tradition could an investigator be confident that he was advancing cautiously and conducting himself modestly. Collective contexts for the pursuit of learning served and reinforced the same purpose: the learned community of the past accessible through the printed word, and the contemporary communities of respectable and respectful colleagues created by dialogue. Tradition and collaboration together made the advancement of learning possible and kept the process (and the investigator) ethical. These communities of learning were necessarily self-contained, providing a space for the safe exercise of libertas philosophandi. Had the cause of French science been well served, Huet might ask d’Alembert, by arguing Cartesianism in public? Was it truly wise to indulge in religious speculation in vernacular texts that anyone could read? Certainly, this ideal and ethos of learning excluded many, especially women, and it was obviously antithetical to the project of d’Alembert and his encyclopedist friends.18 Yet it was the logical and necessary consequence of a powerful fact: Thinking was dangerous. Finally, how would Huet have judged d’Alembert’s Republic of Letters? Certainly, he would have found many features of Enlightenment intellectual culture very familiar. There were salons, scientific academies and spectacles, literary societies, and cafés aplenty in France and throughout Europe. Indeed, intellectual sociability was all the rage. Even the making of an intellectual career—from participating in a variety of intellectual groups to soliciting patronage from the well-heeled—remained largely the same, though an increasing number of authors were succeeding in wresting a living from their writings alone. Huet probably would have admired new developments in


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the world of natural philosophy. Yet I suspect that he would have frequently derided this so-called enlightened intellectual world too, perhaps delivering judgments similar to the one he gave his nephew on the revived academy of Caen: “We will be able to say of this academy what the Duc de Montausier said of the fountains of Versailles: They are the most beautiful fountains in the world; they only lack water. Similarly, we will be able to say that it is the most beautiful academy in the word; it only lacks learning.”19 No doubt, Huet would have considered most authors of that self-important “society of men of letters” who authored the Encyclopédie as a collection of intellectual interlopers and rabble-rousing atheists and would heartily have supported the suppression of their work. From Huet’s perspective, d’Alembert’s Republic of Letters could only be an impostor; the true Republic of Letters was dead. Huet possessed in abundance the typical virtues and vices of the scholar. My account attests to his diligence, curiosity, and collegiality—and to his pedantry, pettiness, and self-importance. Toward opponents, he could be vindictive, dismissive, and obdurate—and toward friends, generous, unstinting with his praise and assistance, and encouraging. His critics were right to criticize him; his friends had good reason to love him.20 In the deepest human sense, Huet’s fate was common enough, though no less tragic for that: He grew old and alone in a world strange to him, and he angrily rejected it as a betrayal of all that he had learned to value. However, while I have sometimes found Huet less than endearing or convincing, I am a historian. I care less about judging him than learning what he has to teach us about an extraordinary period of intellectual change. Following Horace’s motto, he has instructed and delighted me as well as he did Maria Dupré, Anne Dacier, and the Madames de Lafayette and de Rohan. Of course, the Republic of Letters did not die with the passing of Huet’s era. It thrived in the eighteenth century, though we still have much to learn about it. What was this new, expansive world of learning whose citizenship included so many and so various individuals: the author of a heterodox treatise in Prussia, a Jesuit botanist in St. Domingue, the attendee of a provincial French academy, an enlightened printer in Amsterdam, a salonnière at a scientific spectacle in Paris? We must assess too what was created and what destroyed in the republic’s transformation. Finally, we should confront the questions that agitated Huet, his friends, and his opponents: What is learning? Who is entitled to it? What is it good for? What is worth knowing? Who decides?


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NOTES Introduction 1. Joan. Baptistae Santolii Victorini Opera poëtica (Paris, 1694), 335–49. Please note that, unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French and the Latin are my own. 2. I will return to neo-Latin poetry, including the Pléiade latine and the “French Virgil,” in chapter 2 of this volume. 3. Periodization of the Republic of Letters is problematic, as Goldgar indicates in her disagreement with Dibon over what the old and new republics were. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters (1680– 1750) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 234. I am not thrilled with the descriptor old, but I have found none better; I will considerably flesh out this brief characterization of old in my first two chapters. 4. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Huetiana (Paris, 1722), 3. 5. Quoted by Paul Dibon, Regards sur la Hollande du siècle d’or (Naples: Vivarium, 1990), 64–65. 6. Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 136–37. Some accounts of the Republic of Letters: L. W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Goldgar, Impolite Learning; Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Françoise Waquet, “Le Polyhistor de Daniel Georg Morhof, lieu de mémoire de la République des lettres,” in Les lieux de mémoire et la fabrique de l’oeuvre, ed. V. Kapp (Paris: Bibio 17, 1993), 47–60; “L’espace de la République des Lettres,” in Commercium Litterarium: Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters, 1660–1750 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Maarssen, 1994); “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres?,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 147 (1989); with Hans Bots, La République des Lettres (Paris: De Boeck, 1997). Robert Mayhew admirably sums up the debates about the destiny of the Republic of Letters: “Miller [saw] it as having risen to prominence in the later sixteenth century but in terminal decline by 1720. By contrast Goldgar shifts the era of the republic of letters to 1660–1750, and most recently Brockliss has argued for the essentially healthy state of the republic of letters into the era of the French revolution.” Robert Mayhew, “British Geography’s Republic of Letters: Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600– 1800,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (2004): 251. 7. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 158. 8. Paul Dibon, “Les échanges épistolaires dans l’Europe savante du XVIIe siècle,” Revue de synthèse 81–82 (1976): 31–50.

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Notes, pp. 3–5

9. Huet’s name appears in the Recherche de la noblesse en la généralité de Caen en 1666 et années suivantes (reprint, Paris: Sedopols, 1981, 405–6) in the category of those who could prove their nobility to at least the fourth degree, which was poised between the most ancient (hence, most august) lineages and those that could only claim a recent nobility. The intendant charged with the investigation, Guy Chamillart, annotated Huet’s entry: “Said Pierre-Daniel justified no part of the genealogy given and nevertheless was listed in the Catalogue of Nobles, following the order of the king, 13 January 1668.” 10. He also published treatises on Dutch commerce, ancient navigation, and the history of Caen, but only the last, Les origines de la ville de Caen (1702) figures in this study. 11. On the novel, Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). On anti-Spinozism, Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954). On early modern religious thought, Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Jean Delumeau, Une histoire du paradis, I (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Albert Monod, De Pascal à Chateaubriand: Les défenseurs français du christianisme de 1670 à 1802 (1916; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). On Skepticism, Christian Bartholmèss, Huet, evêque d’Avranches, ou le scepticisme théologique (Paris, 1850); Carlo Borghero, La certessa e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e cognoscenza storica (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983); Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and “Pierre Bayle and Bishop Huet, The Master Sceptics,” The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Huet has also figured in many articles by French scholars, which I cite throughout this book. 12. Léon Tolmer, Pierre-Daniel Huet (Bayeux, France: Colas, 1949). 13. Katherine Stern Brennan, “Culture and Dependencies: The Society of the Men of Letters of Caen from 1652 to 1705” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1981); David Lux, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France: The Académie de Physique de Caen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 14. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, trans. Thomas M. Lennon (New York: Humanity Books, 2003); James DeLater’s translation of De optimo genere interpretandi, in Translation Theory in the Reign of Louis XIV (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002); Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme, ed. Claudine Poulouin (Rezé, France: Séquences, 1996); and Huet’s treatise on novels appears in Poétiques du roman: Scudéry, Huet, Du Plaisir et autres textes théoriques et critiques du XVIIe siècle sur le genre romanesque, ed. Camille Esmein (Paris: Champion, 2004). 15. Elena Rapetti, Pierre-Daniel Huet: Erudizione, filosofia, apologetica (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1999); Percorsi anticartesiani nelle lettere a Pierre-Daniel Huet (Florence: Olschki, 2003). 16. While Huet’s religious beliefs and priorities are prominent in this account, I have not dealt extensively with the confessional issue here. See April Shelford, “Faith and Glory: The Making of the Demonstratio evangelica (1679)” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1997), Part I, Section 2; “Confessional Division and the Republic of


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Letters: The Case of Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721),” Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 96 (Fall 2001); “Amitié et animosité dans la République des Lettres: La querelle entre Bochart et Huet,” Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), ed. Suzanne Guellouz (Paris: Biblio 17, 1994), 99–108. 17. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10. 18. For a brief and excellent summary of the quarrel and scholarship on it, Levent Yilmaz, “La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes et sa postérité,” Intellectual News 10 (2002): 9–18. 19. Joseph M. Levine, “Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 1 (1981): 77; also, Hans Baron, “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship, Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 2 (1959): 3–22. 20. Critics often objected on religious grounds. Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse: L’invention de l’honnête homme (1580–1750) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), chap. 4; Henri Gouhier, L’antihumanisme au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1987). 21. Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939; reprint, New York: Cooper Square, 1961). 22. On the persistence of Latin, Françoise Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 23. Even this schema leaves out some of Huet’s connections, for example, the Italian clerics with whom he corresponded after he became a bishop. 24. David Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 185. 25. Quoted in Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York: Garland, 1985), 21.

Chapter 1 1. Dissertations sur diverses matières de religion et de philologie (1712; hereafter Huet, Dissertations), Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (Paris, 1718), and Huetiana. Throughout this book, I refer to the Venice 1761 edition of the Commentarius (hereafter, Huet, Commentarius) and Charles Nisard’s recently republished 1853 French translation, introduced by Philippe-Joseph Salazar (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993; hereafter Huet, Mémoires). Although I have not compared the Latin and French versions systematically, Nisard’s translation strikes me as both good and reliable, though it does omit some material. 2. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xviii. 3. John Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller and Christine Brooke-Rose (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 17.


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Notes, pp. 13–16

4. William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 1. 5. Huet, Mémoires, 5–6. 6. Ibid., 39. These chapters resemble a travelogue, a genre Delany groups with military and political memoirs in the res gestae form of autobiography. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969), 116. 7. Sylvestre de Sacy, “Mémoires de Pierre-Daniel Huet,” Variétés littéraires, morales et historiques (Paris, 1858), 572. 8. René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (1943; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1983), 380; Divers portraits (Caen, France, 1659), 521. 9. Philippe Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France (1971; reprint, Paris: Armand Colin, 1998), 41. 10. Quoted by Weintraub, Value, 264. 11. Huet, Mémoires, 156. 12. Lettres inédites de P.-D. Huet, évêque d’Avranches, à son neveu, M. de Charsigné, ed. Armand Gasté (Caen, France: Delesques, 1901), 185. 13. Huet, Dissertations, 1:aii verso. 14. Ibid. 15. Huet, Mémoires, 153. 16. Undated, BNF Fr 15189, fols. 137r–v. 17. To Martin, July 13, 1712, P.-D. Huet . . . et le P. François Martin, . . . Correspondance inédite, ed. Armand Gasté, 360–61. 18. To Fayus, July 1712, BNF Lat 11433, fols. 607–8. 19. BNF Lat 11432 and 11433; Lat 11451, fol. 191r. 20. Huetiana, 69. 21. Jean Mesnard, “Les origines grecques de la notion d’amour-propre” and “Sur le terme et la notion de ‘philautie,’” La culture du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 45–66; “Amour-propre,” Dictionnaire de la spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937), 1: cols. 533–44. 22. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1:11.15. 23. Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: Augustinianisme et littérature (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 85; Louis van Delft, Le moraliste classique: Essai de définition et de typologie (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 214. Protestant authors and pedagogues expressed the same concern with the moral effects of self-love, including on intellectual endeavor. See Robert E. Stillman, “The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and Tyranny in Sidney’s ‘Defense,’” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2002): 1287–1319. 24. Mesnard, “Les origines grecques,” 44, and “‘Honnête homme’ et ‘honnête femme’ dans la culture du XVIIe siècle,” La culture, 142–59; Robert Garapon, “Saint François de Sales: Peintre de l’amour propre,” Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Droz: Geneva, 1984), 319–30; Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld, chap. 2; Patrick Laude, “Les leçons de l’amour-propre chez Pierre Nicole,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 78, no. 2 (1994): 241–70; Anthony Levi, French Moralists (Oxford, UK: Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1964); Van Delft, Moraliste, 213–17. 25. P. Jacques du Bosc, L’honneste femme (Paris, 1658), 269.


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26. Huetiana, 346. Huet’s formulation is in a tradition that began with Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1.7.22. 27. Pascal had the same criticism. Delany, British Autobiography, 15. 28. Huetiana, 17. 29. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor (Lübeck, 1688), chap. 19. 30. Jean-Pierre Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres, avec le catalogue raisonné de leurs ouvrages (1727–38; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), 1:6–7. 31. Huet, Mémoires, 154. 32. Passages of the Commentarius were translated in the Huetiana, however, which was compiled by Huet and published posthumously by Abbé d’Olivet. MarieGabrielle Lallemand, “Le Huetiana: Contribution à 1étude d’un genre,” Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), 155–68. 33. BNF Lat 11433, fols. 430–32. 34. Lettres inédites . . . [à] Charsigné, 27. 35. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599, trans. Allan P. Farrell, S.J., 1970, http://www. bc.edu/bc_org/avp/ulib/digi/ratio/rati01599.pdf, 1, 25, 62 (accessed May 27, 2006). 36. A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 62. 37. Quoted by François Dainville, La naissance de l’humanisme, I: Les jésuites et l’éducation de la société française (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), 249. 38. Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum, ad disciplinas et ad salutem omnium gentium procurandam (Cologne, 1607), 1:1. 39. Ibid., 1:33. 40. “Amour-propre,” Dictionnaire, 1: col. 534. 41. Quoting Richeome, Dainville, Naissance, 253; for more on learning and piety, 247–75. 42. For cycle on logic and science, see chap. 4. Characterization of humanist curriculum draws on Dainville’s Naissance and L’éducation des jésuites (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978); Paul Richard Blum, “Apostolato dei collegi: On the Integration of Humanism in the Educational Programme of the Jesuits,” History of Universities 5 (1986): 103–15; Roger Chartier et al., L’éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976), chap. 5; Marie-Madeleine Compère, Du collège au lycée (Paris: Editions Gallimard/Julliard, 1985); L.-H. Parias et al., Histoire générale de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France, II: De Gutenberg aux Lumières (Paris: Nouvelle Libraire de France, 1981); Aldo Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986), chap. 5. 43. Blum, Apostolato, 101. 44. Dainville, Naissance, 223. The Jesuit program was consistent with the claims made for the humanist curriculum by early humanist pedagogues. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “The School of Guarino: Ideals and Practice,” From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1–28. 45. Quoting Augustin Sicard, Camille de Rochemonteix, Un collège de jésuites aux XVIIIe siècles (Le Mans, France, 1889), 3:43. 46. Dainville, Naissance, 217–18.


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Notes, pp. 19–22

47. Quoting Richeome, Dainville, Naissance, 224. The example of the Hebrews and Egyptian gold dates back at least to Augustine. 48. Dainville, Naissance, 231. 49. Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence (Paris: Champion, 1980), 2. For a general discussion of humanities instruction in Jesuit as well as other institutions in France in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see L. W. B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 111–81. 50. Dainville, L’éducation, 185–208; Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:25–29. 51. “Rationis, & orationis tanta est similitudo, ut Graeci, qui non intelligendi solum, sed loquendi etiam principatum tenuerunt, uno utranque vocabulo, Latini Graecorum prudentiae aemuli, eodem pene, nominarint.” Cyprian Soarez, De arte rhetorica libri tres, ex Aristotele, Cicerone & Quintiliano praecipue deprompti (Rotterdam, 1605), 13, 18. 52. Dainville, L’éducation, 188. 53. Dainville, Naissance, 67, 85. 54. Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:13–15; for how the text became progressively more accessible from a graphics perspective, see Jean Hébrard, “L’évolution de l’espace graphique d’un manuel scolaire, le ‘Despautère’ de 1512 à 1759,” Langue française 59 (1983): 68–87. 55. Dainville, Naissance, 213. The church fathers were more important in the Greek curriculum. Compère, Du collège, 76–77. 56. For Cicero’s ubiquity in rhetorical pedagogy throughout Europe, see Joseph H. Freedman, “Cicero in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Rhetoric Instruction,” Rhetorica 4 (1986): 227–54. 57. Anthony Grafton, “Teacher, Text and Pupil in the Renaissance Classroom: A Case Study from a Parisian College,” History of Universities 1 (1985): 37–70; Gabriel Codina Mir, Aux sources de la pédagogie des jésuites, le “modus parisiensis,” (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1968); Ratio studiorum, 67, 73. 58. I use the French translation, Joseph de Jouvancy, De la manière d’apprendre et d’enseigner, trans. H. Ferté (Paris, 1892). A close contemporary of Huet who also taught in Caen, Jouvancy (1643–1719) would have transmitted Jesuit pedagogy much as Huet experienced it. The one change was a greater prominence of French, though Latin instruction continued to dominate. Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:154. 59. Latin and English translation (Christopher Smart), http://www.perseus.tufts. edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Phaed.+1.7 (accessed May 28, 2006). 60. Jouvancy, Manière, 111–13. 61. Dainville, Naissance, 124–27, 137–38, 144–47; Chartier, L’éducation, 158; Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:51–55. 62. Rochemonteix, Collège, 4:348. 63. Dainville, Naissance, 106. 64. Gabriel Guéret, Le Parnasse réformé (1668; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), 50–53. 65. Grant Boswell, “Letter Writing among the Jesuits: Antonio Possevino’s Advice in the Bibliotheca Selecta (1593),” The Huntington Library Quarterly 66, nos. 3/4 (2003): 247–49.


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Notes, pp. 22–25

197

66. Paul F. Grendler, “Schooling in Western Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1990): 783; Charles Nauert, Jr., “Humanist Infiltration into the Academic World: Some Studies of Northern Universities,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1990): 799–812. 67. Huet, Mémoires, 8. 68. To Jacob Graindorge, March 1650, BNF Lat 11432, fols. 1, 2. 69. Ratio studiorum, 25, 29, 62, 63, 71. 70. Jouvancy, Manière, 71–139. 71. Adrien Baillet, La vie de Descartes (1691; reprint, New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987); Rochemonteix, Collège, 4:66. 72. Plato never made such a statement. Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 88. 73. BLA #1107. 74. Boswell, “Letter Writing,” 250. 75. Ratio studiorum, 17, 83–85, 88, 92; Boswell, “Letter Writing,” 250–52. For historical background, see Ch. Fantassi, “Vives versus Erasmus on the art of letterwriting,” Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, ed. T. van Houdt (Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2002), 39–56; Marc Fumaroli, “Genèse de l’épistolographie classique: Rhétorique humaniste de la lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 6 (1978): 886–900; Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James Jerome Murphy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 331–55. 76. Quoting Fumaroli, “Genèse,” 893; J. R. Henderson, “Humanist Letter Writing,” Self-Promotion 38. 77. Henderson, “Humanist Letter Writing,” 23. On self-fashioning, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1309–42. 78. BNM Lat 11432 and 11433. 79. Translated by Fantassi, “Vives versus Erasmus,” 44–45. 80. Marc Perachon’s introduction to his translation of Alexander Morus, Poëme sur la naissance de Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1665), õv. 81. BNM Lat 11433, fols. 370–73. 82. Quote from the introduction to Jean Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas Heinsius (1649–1658), ed. Bernard Bray (The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 60, 61; on correspondence in the republic generally, see Bray, “L’enquête des correspondances,” in Actes du 6e Colloque de Marseille: Le XVIIe et la recherche (Marseille: Archives communales, 1976), 65–75; Paul Dibon, “Les échanges épistolaires,” 31–50, “Communication in the Respublica litteraria of the 17th century,” Respublica Litteraria: Studies in the Classical Tradition 1 (1978): 43–55, “Communication épistolaire et mouvement des idées aux XVIIe siècle,” in Regards, 171–90; Vito R. Giustiniani, “La communication érudite: Les lettres des humanistes et l’article moderne de revue,” La correspondance d’Erasme et l’épistolographie humaniste (Brussels: University of Brussels, 1985), 109–33; Helen


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198

Notes, pp. 25–28

Harth, “L’épistolographie humaniste entre professionalisme et souci littéraire: L’exemple de Poggio Bracciolini,” La correspondance d’Erasme, 135–44; Françoise Waquet, “Les correspondances franco-étrangères au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 45, no. 1 (1993): 99–118, “Les éditions de correspondances savante,” XVIIe siècle 45, no. 1 (1993): 99–118; Ruth Whelan, “République des lettres et littérature: le jeune Bayle épistolier” and H. J. M. Nellen, “La correspondance savante au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 45, no. 1 (1993): 71–86 and 87–99; Maarten Ultee, “The Republic of Letters. Learned Correspondence, 1680–1720,” The Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 96–112; and special issue, “Les correspondances: Leur importance pour l’historien des sciences et de la philosophie,” Revue de Synthèse 3rd ser., 97 (1976). The journal Lias frequently publishes articles on scholarly correspondence. 83. Quote from Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (1685–86; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 3:171; Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 131–32; Leicester Bradner, “The Latin Drama of the Renaissance (1340–1640),” Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957): 33–35, 49, and “The Rise of Secular Drama in the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 3 (1956): 8, 10–11; A. M. Nagler, “Sixteenth Century Continental Stages,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1954): 358–70. 84. David McPherson, “Roman Comedy in Renaissance Education: The Moral Question,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 12, no. 1 (1981): 20, 22, 27; Dainville, “L’éducation,” 182. 85. BLA #1110. 86. The Comedies of Terence, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968), 82, 382, 52. 87. Ibid., 291. 88. BLA #1115. 89. Terence, Comedies, 318. 90. Relations between Catholics and Huguenots had historically been quite good in Caen. According to Huet’s account, though, “controversies between Catholics and Calvinists burned at their hottest” when he and Bochart began to study together during the 1650s—so much so that they met secretly at night to preserve Huet’s reputation. Huet also returned to Caen alone and before Bochart for the same reason. Huet, Mémoires, 18, 47. 91. La Bible, manuscrits, imprimés, estampes, Bibliothèque de Rouen, April 27–May 15, 1982, 29–30; François Laplanche, L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: Érudits et politiques protestants devant la bible en France au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 1986), 250–54; Peter T. Van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989); J. Brugman, “Arabic Scholarship,” Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1975), 204–15. 92. Positive assessments by Tanneguy Le Fèvre, Vossius, Fabricius, Méric Causaubon in Tolmer, Pierre-Daniel Huet, 71–72; quotation of Richard Simon, La Bible, manuscrits, 34. 93. Huet, Mémoires, 16–17. 94. Samuel Bochart, Geographiae sacrae pars prior Phaleg seu de Dispersione gentium et terrarum divisione facta in aedificatione turris Babel (Frankfurt, 1681), fol. *3r.


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Notes, pp. 28–31

199

95. “Tertullianus adversus Praxeam recte asserit ‘id esse verum quodqunque primum, id esse adulterum quodcunque posterius.’ Necesse enim est ut veritas sit prior mendacio, cum mendacium nihil aliud sit quam corruptio veritatis.” For the connection of “truth” with “antiquity,” especially pertaining to the Bible, Laplanche, La Bible en France: Entre mythe et critique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 15–22. On prisca theologia, Roger Arnaldez, “La Bible de Philon d’Alexandrie,” in Le monde grec ancien et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 37–54; Allen, Mysteriously Meant; Fumaroli, “Hiéroglyphes et lettres: La ‘sagesse mystérieuse des anciens’ au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 40, no. 1 (1988): 7–20; Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972). 96. Huet, Dissertations, 2:306–8. 97. Ibid., 2:332–37. 98. BLA #1148. 99. BLA #1156. 100. BLA #1120. 101. Bossuet was equally suspicious of Huet’s reliance on Hebrew scholarship in the Demonstratio evangelica. April G. Shelford, “Of Sceptres and Censors: Biblical Criticism and Censorship in Seventeenth-Century France,” French History 20, no. 2 (2006): 161–81. 102. Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1996), 104. 103. Ratio studiorum, 33. 104. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 30. 105. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 33–35. 106. BLA #1122. 107. Huet, Mémoires, 70–71. 108. BLA #1124. 109. 1654, BLA #1123. 110. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. William Ellery Leonard, http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Lucr.+2.1, 2:14–16 (accessed May 27, 2006). 111. BLA #2801. 112. Huet, Mémoires, 71. 113. Huet was tonsured, however. In a rather playful letter, he mentioned to Mambrun a certain Brother Bobinet, who could make quick work of fifty of the most learned Jesuit heads, though not without some loss of blood and skin. September 1655, BNF Lat 11432, fols. 55–56. 114. BLA #1108. 115. BLA #1109. 116. BLA #1147. 117. BLA #1117. 118. BLA #1148. 119. BLA #1120. 120. BLA #1116. 121. Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:123–27. 122. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 11.


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200

Notes, pp. 33–37

123. BLA #1149. 124. BLA #1140. 125. BLA #1155. 126. BLA #1135. 127. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 103. 128. Huet, Mémoires, 25–27. 129. “Cum tu me nuper, Sirmonde, vir illustris, hominem provincialem, et admodum adolescentem, non humaniter solum, sed comiter etiam acceperis, scrinia, literariasque opes reseraveris, saluberrimis consiliis juventutem nostram instruxeris, et a primo aditu, post paucos dies inter admissionis intima amicos receperis, illiberalis sim et ingratus, ni aliqua saltem memoris animi significatione prosequor egregiam hanc tuam adversum me voluntatem.” BNF Lat 11432. 130. BLA #1153. 131. Phaedrus, The Fables, trans. Christopher Smart, http://www.perseus.tufts. edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Phaed.+3.prologus, prologue to Book 3 (accessed June 7, 2006). In the original, the poet has overcome his desire for money and urges Eytychus to do likewise. 132. Huet, Mémoires, 28. 133. Pintard, Libertinage, 94. 134. Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Domat, 1948–56), 1:292; on the Dupuys, Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius, 1646–1656, ed. Hans Bots (The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1971); Claude Dupuy, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Une correspondance entre deux humanistes, ed. Anna Maria Raugei (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 135. To Jacob Graindorge, April 1650, BNF Lat 11432, fols. 1–2 136. On perceptions of Italian intellectual life, Françoise Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante (1660–1750) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), 117. 137. On Christina, see Jeanette Lee Atkinson, “Queen Christina of Sweden: Sovereign between Throne and Altar,” in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 405–31; F. S. de Vrieze, “Academic Relations between Sweden and Holland,” Leiden University, 345–66. 138. Huet, Mémoires, 41. 139. Letters to Edward Bernard, 1676 and 1679, BNF Lat 11432, fols. 195–97 and 230–31; Leibniz to Huet, March 1673, B. Groethuysen, “Trois lettres de Leibniz,” Revue Philosophique 98 ( July 1924): 5–10; Leibniz Philosophischer Briefwechsel, 1663– 1685 (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl, 1926), 1:237. 140. G. C. Gibbs, “The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepôt of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 86 (1971): 322–49; Dibon, Regards, 29. 141. Quote from Dibon, Regards, 19; on philology at Leiden, see J. H. Waszink, “Classical Philology” and J. Brugman, “Arabic Scholarship,” Leiden University, 161–76 and 203–16. 142. Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 148. 143. He published his treatise on translation before the Origen, but that was an offshoot of that project.


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Notes, pp. 37–39

201

144. Charles Stinger, “Italian Renaissance Learning and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 2:473–75; Eugene F. Rice, Jr., “The Renaissance Idea of Christian Antiquity: Humanist Patristic Scholarship,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 1:17–28. 145. Quoting H.-J. Martin, Livres, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598– 1701) (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 1:109; Louis Doutreleau, “L’Assemblé du Clergé de France et l’édition patristique grecque au XVIIe siècle,” in Les Pères de l’Église au XVIIe siècle, ed. Emmanuel Bury and Bernard Meunier (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 99–116; Dominique Bertrand, “The Society of Jesus and the Church Fathers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century,” Daniel-Odon Hurel, “The Benedictines of the Congregation of St. Maur and the Church Fathers,” and Jean-Louis Quantin, “The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Roman Catholic Theology,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Dorota Backus (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 2:889–950, 1009–38, 951–86, respectively. 146. Ismäel Boulliau to Huet, 1654–55, BL #182–85; Huet to Jacques Dupuy, May 1655, BNF Lat 46r–47r; Ménage to Huet, Spring and Summer 1660, Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage à Pierre-Daniel Huet (1659–1692), ed. Lea Caminiti Pennarola (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1993), 92–104. 147. Commentaria in sacras scripturas (Cologne, 1685), 2:211, nn. 108–10. 148. BNF NAFr 1341, fols. 95–96. 149. For biographical information, Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1854–66); introduction to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage (1620–1637), ed. Agnes Bresson (Florence: Olschki, 1992), xiii–xx. 150. Quoting Sorbière, Baillet, Jugemens, 2:234. 151. BNF Fr 15189, fols. 94r–95r. 152. Julia Gasper, “More, Alexander (1616–1670),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxyau.wrlc. org/view/article/19172 (accessed May 27, 2006); Stephen Fallon, “Alexander More Reads Milton: Self-Representation and Anxiety in Milton’s Defences,” Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 111–24; John Milton, Second Defense of the English People, The Works of Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 8:46. 153. Huet, Mémoires, 54. 154. Gasper, “More.” 155. They quarreled on the eve of the publication of Huet’s Origen commentaries; their disagreement focused largely on the interpretation of a passage widely believed to support Protestant views of the Eucharist. Its underlying causes included a failure to negotiate the transition from a master-student to a collegial relationship, and Huet’s desire to distance himself from his Huguenot teacher as royal persecution of the religious minority increased. Shelford, “Amitié et animosité dans la République des Lettres: La querelle entre Bochart et Huet,” Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), 99–108; “Confessional Division,” 39–57; “Faith and Glory,” Part I, Section 2. 156. Huetiana, 4. 157. Phrasing adapted from Philippe-Joseph Salazar, “Philia: Connaissance et amitié,” L’esprit en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. François Lagarde (Paris: Biblio 17, 1997), 12.


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202

Notes, pp. 39–42

158. Quoted by Dibon, Regards, 63. This does not mean that sincere affection did not exist among individuals defined a priori as unequal. Nor does it mean that the Republic of Letters lacked rituals of deference, though submission was based theoretically on intellectual criteria. Goldgar, Impolite Learning, chap. 3. 159. BLA #1149, #1123. 160. Quotation from Minna Skafte Jensen, Friendship and Poetry: Studies in Danish Neo-Latin Literature (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculaneum Press, 2004), 39; phrase “ars amoris” from Salazar, “Philia.” 161. Salazar, “Philia”; Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, chap. 2; special issue on friendship of XVIIe siècle 51, no. 4 (1999), especially Salazar, “La société des amis: Éléments d’une théorie de l’amitié intellectuelle,” 583–94; Eric Mechoulan, “Le métier d’ami,” 633–56; Emmanuel Bury, “L’amitié savante, ferment de la République des Lettres,” 729–47. For a discussion of classical ideals of friendship, see Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994), chap. 1. 162. Cicero, De amicitia, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 163. 163. Jensen, Friendship, 193. 164. Bury, “L’amitié savante,” 738; quoting Charron, Mechoulan, “Métier,” 636. 165. Lettres inédites de P.-D. Huet . . . [à] Charsigné, 183, 186. 166. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain à P.-D. Huet, ed. Pelissier (Paris, 1894), 10–11. 167. In their search for intimacy and authenticity, Huet and his friends did not differ much from his female friends (chap. 3). 168. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 13–15. On praise in letters, see Bernard Bray, “La louange, exigence de civilité et pratique épistolaire au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 167, no. 2 (1990): 135–53. 169. BLA #2000. 170. Ovid, The Poems of Exile, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), “The Black Sea Letters,” 3.2, 99–100. 171. “Toxaris: A Dialogue of Friendship,” The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1905), 65. 172. Ibid., 70. 173. See scholars cited above. Salazar and Bury also quote Huet’s autobiography, though such testimony, because it is retrospective and mediated by a variety of autobiographical and literary motivations, resembles evidence drawn from treatises more than that taken from letters. 174. Interpreting the language of patronage presents similar problems. Arthur L. Herman, Jr., “The Language of Fidelity in Early Modern France,” Journal of Modern History 67 (March 1995): 1–24. 175. See Salazar’s biography of Huet in Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History (London: Routledge, 2001). For a good discussion of the difficulties, Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–19. Neo-Latin poetry raises the same interpretive problems. Jensen, Friendship, 187–88. 176. Paraphrased from Sharon Kettering, “Patronage in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 851.


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Notes, pp. 42–46

203

177. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 7. 178. BLA #1116, 1121, 1123, 2801. In the first letter, Mambrun quotes Catullus. Huet might have used “My Peter” earlier, but this is the earliest usage I have encountered. 179. October 1661, BNF Fr 1341, fols. 55–59. 180. October 1659, BNF Fr 1341, fols. 5–9. 181. November 1659, BNF Fr 1341, fols. 9–11. 182. “Merito amo te, doctissime vir: nam et patria mihi tecum communis est . . . et delectamur studiis iisdem . . .” Huet, Dissertations, 2:343. 183. “Iam diu est . . . cum excellens tua eruditio, et insignis in Poeticis facultas, laudem primum a me, deinde etiam amorem expresserunt.” BNF Lat 11432, fol. 149. 184. “Merito amo te, mi Evalde, cum et quae ad pertinent, et quae ad te, pari candore mihi exponis.” BNF Lat 11433, fols. 332–333. 185. BNF Lat 11433, fol. 553 186. Bury, “L’amitié savante,” 746. 187. Le Fèvre’s seventeenth-century biographer rejected the notion that Le Fèvre intended to convert; nevertheless, while Huet might have been overly optimistic, their letters suggest that the Hellenist at least entertained the possibility. Huet to Le Fèvre, April 1671, Le Fèvre to Huet, May 1671, À travers les papiers de Huet, ed. Leon Pélissier (Paris, 1889), 7–12; Emmanuel Bury, “Tanneguy Le Fèvre, professeur de grec, à l’Académie de Saumur,” Saumur, capitale européenne du protestantisme au XVIIe siècle (Fontevrault, France: Centre culturel de l’Ouest, 1991), 79–89. 188. BLA #1153. 189. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 14–15. 190. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 119. 191. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 14. 192. Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars poetica, trans. Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann, 1932), Satires, 2.6.65, 72–76. 193. He edited Cicero, Catullus, Tibullius, Propertius, Callimachus, Lucian, and Suetonius. He also published antiquarian works, such as a collection of rare treatises on Roman antiquities. Nicéron, Mémoires, 2:170–74. 194. BLA #499. 195. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 173–77.

Chapter 2 1. Graevius’s introduction, Poemata latina & graeca (Utrecht, 1694), 2r–4v. 2. The exception is Tolmer, who does translate and discuss some of Huet’s poems. 3. Antoine Houdar de la Motte, “L’orgueil poëtique,” Odes (Paris, 1714), 169–74. 4. Witt has written that the “learned classicism” that became a signal feature of humanism began in the desire of Italian poets to compose Latin poetry that resembled their ancient models as much as possible. Ronald G. Witt, “Medieval Italian Culture and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal,” Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988),


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204

Notes, pp. 49–49

1:29–70; for the humanist defense of poetry in Renaissance Italy, Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, “Humanism and Poetics,” Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, III:85–101; for neo-Latin poetry thereafter, Jozef Ijsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1990), and the proceedings of the International Association of Neo-Latin Studies. 5. Stevenson proves, however, that there were far more female Latin poets than were ever thought previously. Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6. My paraphrases do not do justice to Huet’s poetry. In this chapter and elsewhere, I do not offer formal analyses, make judgments about quality, or discuss extensively the relationship between his poems and ancient models. All three would certainly illuminate important aspects of Huet’s poetry, but these tasks are more appropriate to a scholar trained in the classical tradition, and my analyses suffice in a discussion that focuses on intellectual sociability. 7. Quoted by J. A. Vissac, La poésie latine en France au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1862), 24. The Oratorians also expressed a dim view of the Jesuit fervor for poetry (Vissac, Poésie latine, 21). 8. Dainville, L’éducation, 182–83. 9. Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta, 411–14, 453–60. 10. The physician reference comes from Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, 1.935. 11. Pierre Mambrun, Dissertatio peripatetica de epico carmine (Paris, 1652), 273–78. 12. Jouvancy, Manière, 48. 13. Jacob Pontanus, Reformata poeseos institutio (London, 1624), 438. 14. Ibid., 78. 15. On the meanings of imitation in early modern Europe, G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1980): 1–32; JoAnn DellaNeva, “Reflecting Lesser Lights: The Imitation of Minor Authors in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1989): 449– 79; Clifford Endres and Barbara Gold, “Joannes Secundus and his Roman Models: Shapes of Imitation in Renaissance Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1982): 577–89; Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 7. Especially useful is the discussion of imitation in John Peacock, “Inigo Jones and Renaissance art,” Renaissance Studies 4, no. 3 (1990): 254–62. 16. Pontanus, Reformata, 78. 17. Referring to “Epistle to the Pisos (The Art of Poetry),” The Epistles of Horace, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 22–25. 18. Waquet, Le Latin, 168. 19. L. V. Gofflot, Le théatre au collêge du moyen âge à nos jours (1907; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), 94. 20. Paul Shore, “Baroque Drama in Jesuit Schools of Central Europe, 1700–73,” History of Universities 20, no. 1 (2005): 146. Much of what Shore writes applies equally well to France in the seventeenth century. 21. Leicester Bradner, “Latin Drama,” 51–52; Vissac, Poésie latine, 121–32.


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Notes, pp. 49–51

205

22. Gofflot, Théatre, 131–32; François Dainville, “Décoration théatrale dans les collèges de jésuites au XVIIe siècle,” La Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 3 (1951): 371. 23. François Dainville, “Lieux de théatre et salles des actions dans les collèges de jésuites de l’ancienne France,” La Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 2 (1950): 189. 24. Jean Loret (see below) estimated crowds of more than five thousand at 1657 and 1663 performances at Clermont. Christopher Gossip, “Le décor de théâtre au collège des jésuites à Paris au XVIIe siècle,” La Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 33 (1981): 37. 25. Loyola Maria Coffee, Adrien Jourdan’s “Susanna” (1653): A Critical Edition of the Latin Text with a Study of the Play and its Influence on Brueys’s Gabinie (1699) (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1942). 26. Gofflot, Théatre, 153. 27. Joseph Mac Donnell, “The Play’s the Thing,” http://www.faculty.fairfield. edu/jmac/sj/cj/cj4drama.html (accessed August 14, 2004). 28. Dainville, “Décoration,” 359–61. 29. On rhetoric and Jesuit theater, Brendan Thomas Scott, “Jesuit Theater in Paris: 1680–1740” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1993). 30. Quoting Loukovitch, Scott, “Jesuit Theater in Paris,” 76. 31. Shore, “Baroque Drama,” 158. 32. Ernest Boysse, Le théâtre des jésuites (1880; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 93. 33. Labrousse, Higher Education, 167. 34. Edith Weber, “Le théâtre humaniste protestant . . . et le théâtre jésuite: influences, convergences, divergences,” Les jésuites parmi les hommes (Clermont-Ferrand, France: University of Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), 456. 35. Ratio studiorum, 17. 36. Boysse, Théâtre des jésuites, 33–37. 37. Weber, “Le théâtre humaniste,” 543; Dainville, “Décoration,” 364; Boysse, Théâtre des jésuites, 148. 38. Raymond Lebègue, Études sur le théâtre français (Paris: Nizet, 1978), 191–92. 39. Gofflot, Théatre, 114–15. 40. Quoted by Edmon Pognon, “Littérature latine de la Renaissance. L’antique retrouvé,” Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 7:296; Boysse, Théâtre des jésuites, 80–90. 41. BNF Fr 11934, fol. 228. 42. Henry Bardon, En lisant le “Mercure galant” (Rome: Edizioni Dll-Ateneo, 1962), 12–14. 43. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 592– 605, 1119–20. 44. Pognon, “Littérature latine,” 293. 45. Pognon, “Littérature latine,” 298–303; for samples of Jesuit poetry, La lyre jésuite: anthologie de poèmes latins (1620–1730), ed. André Thill (Geneva: Droz, 1999); Noël Golvers, “Daniel Papebrochius, S.J., and his Propempticon to three Flemish Jesuits leaving for the China mission (Louvain, 2 December 1652),” and Rudolf De Smet, “‘Displiceant multis, multis mea forte placebunt’: Janus De Bisschop (fl. 1686–1700), deux poèmes néo-latins inédits et quelques lettres destinées à Jacob Gronovius,” in


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Notes, pp. 51–54

Myricae: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Memory of Jozef Ijsewijn, ed. Dirk Sacré and Gilbert Tournoy (Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2000), 39–50, 565–89. 46. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985), 112. 47. Georges Grente, Fléchier (Paris: Flammarion, 1634), 21–23. 48. Pognon, “Littérature latine,” 297; Vissac, Poésie latine, 179–87. 49. Huet, Mémoires, 9–10. 50. “Elegia de poetis cadomensibus,” [n.d.], BNF Yc 10978. According to a note in the endpapers of a copy of the 1694 edition of Huet’s Poemata, Huet wrote the poem in 1694. Huet gave a copy of the book as a gift to his secretary, Simon de Valhébert. Eventually, the copy passed to Valhébert’s nephew, the Jesuit François Desbillons (1711–89), a well-known Latin poet who taught at several Jesuit collèges, including Caen’s collège. In 1764, he settled in Mannheim at the invitation of the Count Palatine Karl Theodor, bringing his ample library with him. Jesuit Family Album, http://www. faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/jp/jpnames.htm (accessed June 7, 2006). Desbillons’ copy passed into the University of Mannheim library, which has digitized it at http://www. uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/poem.html (accessed June 7, 2006). 51. Huet, Origines, 9. 52. “Moisant de Brieux, fondateur de l’Académie de Caen (1614–1674),” ed. René Delorme, Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Caen (1872), 37. 53. Jacques Moisant de Brieux, http://www.academiecaen-scabl.com/francais/ moisant.htm (accessed May 19, 2005). 54. Ijsewijn, Companion, 135. 55. Phrasing adapted from Leo Spitzer, “The Problem of Latin Renaissance Poetry,” Studies in the Renaissance, 2 (1955): 120; for a more positive assessment, Muses reducae: Anthologie de la poésie latine dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, trans. and ed. Pierre Laurens and Claudie Ballavoine (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1975), 22. 56. Victor-Evremont Pillet, “Antoine Halley,” Mémoires de l’Académie impériale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Caen (1858), 190. This is the main source of the biographical information that follows. 57. Henri Moulin, “Deux académiciens caënnais au XVIIe siècle,” Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Caen (1882), 396–97; Pillet, “Antoine Halley,” 177–78. 58. Ibid., 195. 59. Ibid., 181. Pillet provided French translations of Halley’s poetry. 60. On prefatory neo-Latin poetry, see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, UK: Cairns, 1990), 165–71. 61. Huet, Mémoires, 12–13. 62. Pillet, “Antoine Halley,” 199. 63. Ibid., 210. 64. Ibid., 205–6. 65. Biographical information from Delorme’s introduction to Oeuvres choisies de Moisant de Brieux unless otherwise indicated. 66. On Sannazaro, see Charles Fantazzi, “The Neo-Latin Muse” and J. Hankins, “The Lost Continent: Neo-Latin Literature and the Rise of Modern European Literatures,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 12, nos. 1–2 (2001): 13–20, 29–86.


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Notes, pp. 54–59

207

67. On his eclogues, William Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 199–200. 68. Latin paraphrases of the Psalms had been popular in the Middle Ages, but “in the sixteenth century the genre was pursued with an urgency and passion that might well surprise a modern reader.” Jensen, Friendship, 80. 69. Huet, Origines, 1. 70. Brennan, “Culture,” 38, and “Culture in the Provinces: Scholarly Communities and Royal Patronage in the Late Seventeenth-Century,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 26 (2000): 45–52; Viala, Naissance, 15–29. 71. See breakdown of published works, Brennan, “Culture,” 56. 72. Oeuvres choisies de Moisant de Brieux, 379–86. 73. BLA #1123. 74. This is similar to the appropriation of authority in literature and science, respectively, in the Parisian salons (chapter 3) and the Royal Society of England, which “was not naturally endowed with authority but became a central node of the republic of letters by enticing its ‘subjects’ to ‘submit’ their work (as gifts) to its journal.” Mario Biagioli, “Etiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in SeventeenthCentury Science,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): 209. 75. Perachon’s introduction to his French translation of a Latin poem by Alexander Morus, Poëme sur la naissance de Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1669), õ2v. 76. Vissac, Poésie latine, 152–54. 77. Huet, Mémoires, 58. 78. Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, 64–76, 193–200; Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 162–77. 79. For Huet’s prose summaries, “Les éclogues de Huet,” Mémoires de l’Académie imperiale des sciences, arts et belles lettres de Caen (1870); for French translation of eclogue on glowworm, Lampyris ou le ver luisant (Paris, 1709); on Renaissance precedents for using the eclogue for Ovid-like metamorphoses, W. Leonard Grant, “New Forms of Neo-Latin Pastoral,” Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957): 76–78. 80. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 161. On the female neo-Latin poets Elizabeth Jane Weston, Sophia Elisabeth Brenner, and Anna Maria van Schurman, see Binns, Intellectual Culture, 110–14; Elisabet Göransson, “Letters, Learning and Learned Ladies: An Analysis of Ottto Sperling, Jr.’s (1634–1715) Correspondence with Scandinavian Women,” in Houdt, Self-Presentation, 204–11; on the erotic in neo-Latin poetry, Eros et Priapus: Érotisme et obsénité dans la littérature néo-latine, ed. Philip Ford and Ingrid de Smet (Geneva: Droz, 1997). 81. “Ad Leydam Urbem,” in Huet, Poemata, 50. 82. Pontanus, Reformata, 529. 83. Huet, Poemata, 36–40. 84. Huet, Mémoires, 59. 85. Huet, Poemata, 47–48. 86. BLA #3070. 87. Reporting Ménage’s judgment and his own, Baillet, Jugemens, 4:269–71. 88. The draft became one of Mambrun’s nine eclogues. Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, 197–98. 89. BLA #1111. 90. BLA #1122.


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Notes, pp. 59–63

91. Hankins, “Lost Continent,” 36. 92. BLA #1116, 1143, 1161; BNF Lat 11433, fols. 55–56. 93. BLA #1162. In fact, Huet toned down “Vitis” slightly for the version that appeared in the 1694 anthology. He made Vitis less eager to return Bacchus’s advances, and he made more chaste the situation in which Bacchus discovered Vitis and Ulmus. 94. BLA #1136. 95. BLA #1158. 96. BNF NAFr 1341, fols. 58–59. 97. Huet, Commentarius, 366–67, omitted from Mémoires. On Heinsius as a Latin poet, see Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, 184–85. 98. Julien Travers, “Le Bréviare de P.-D. Huet,” Mémoires de l’Academie imperiale des sciences, arts et belles lettres de Caen (1860); on the subject of hymns generally, Ann Moss, “The Counter-Reformation Latin Hymn,” Acta conventus neo-latini Sanctandreani (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), 372–78. 99. BLA #459. 100. BNF Lat 11433, fols. 433–34. On Francius’s poetry, see Grant, Neo-Latin Literature, 184–87. 101. Baillet, Jugemens, 4:358. 102. Huet, Mémoires, 76, 81. One presumes that the ode to which Huet referred was not the one that Ménage wrote and had Huet present as his own to Périer. Until someone let him in on the practical joke, Périer was quite flattered—proof of the gullibility Ménage makes fun of in Menagiana (Paris, 1704), 1:275–76. 103. On his disputes, see Adam, Histoire, 2:97–101. 104. Other works include Dictionnaire etymologique, ou origines de la langue françoise (Paris, 1650) and Mulierum philosopharum historia (Paris, 1690). 105. Biographical details from Nouvelle biographie générale and Pennarola’s introduction, Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage. 106. Elfrieda Dubois, René Rapin: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Lille: Service de Reproduction des thèses, 1971), 60–61, 85. 107. My account here is based on BLA #1195–2128. 108. Dubois, Rapin, 60–69. 109. Rapin was influential in England, too. Joseph Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 52–55. 110. Baillet, Jugemens, 4:349. 111. Yasmin Annabel Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16–38 for analysis; additional analysis and fortuna, Dubois, Rapin, 143–228. 112. Haskell, Loyola’s Bees, 16–17. 113. Dubois, Rapin, 25–34; Jacques Le Brun, “Le Père Pierre Lalemant et les débuts de l’Académie Lamoignon,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 61, no. 2 (1961): 11–17. 114. On Chapelain’s biography and poetry, see Adam, Histoire, 1:231–38, 2:57–60. 115. Robin Briggs, “The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility,” Past & Present 131 (1991): 38. 116. BLA #2049.


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Notes, pp. 63–68

209

117. BLA #2052. 118. BNF NAFr 1341, 2–7. 119. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 120–22. 120. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 324. 121. BNF NAFr 1341, 73–74. 122. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 125. 123. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 129. 124. BNF NAFr 1341, 84–86. 125. BNF NAFr 1341, 96. 126. Jouvancy, Manière, 59. 127. Bernard Beugnot, “La lyre et le précepte: Notes sur la réception de l’‘Art poétique’ d’Horace,” Rivista de Letterature Moderne e Comparate 52, no. 3 (1999): 197– 211; Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531– 1555 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1946); Jean Marmier, Horace en France au dix-septième siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 128. Marmier, Horace, 83. 129. Marmier, Horace, 54. 130. Sylvie Gaussig, “Gassendi lecture d’Horace, dans les Lettres latines,” Revue des Études latines 75 (1997): 241–59. 131. Bardon, En lisant, 15. 132. Quoting Marc Fumaroli, introduction to Thill, La lyre jésuite, xvi. 133. Quoting D’Aguesseau, Balzac, Chapelain, Patru, and Coignard, Marmier, Horace, 86. 134. René Rapin, Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes (1674; reprint, New York: Georg Olms, 1973), 233. 135. Phrase from Bardon, En lisant, 9. This “parure antique” was evident in visual representation too. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 136. BNF NAFr 1341, 13–17, 413–14; Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 86–89. 137. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 89–91; BNF NAFr 1341, 413–14; BLA #1995, #2046, neither of which are dated, which is infuriatingly typical of Rapin. 138. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 10–11. 139. Henri Moulin, “Chapelain, Huet, Ménage et l’Académie de Caen,” Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Caen (1881), 370. 140. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 77–79. 141. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 86. 142. Ibid., 78. 143. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 86. 144. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 294. 145. BLA #2046. 146. Adam, Histoire, 3:9. 147. BNF NAFr 1341, fol. 54. 148. Jensen, Friendship, 28–34. 149. Adam, Histoire, 3:11; on program of royal support generally, 9–11; George Couton, “Effort publicitaire et organisation de la recherche: Les gratifications aux gens de lettres sous Louis XIV,” Actes du 6e Colloque de Marseille: Le XVIIe siècle et la recherche (1976), 41–45; Richard Maber, “Colbert and the Scholars.”


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210

Notes, pp. 68–73

150. Guéret, Le Parnasse, 104–5. 151. English translation, Chapelain to Colbert, November 18, 1662, http://www. history.ox.ac.uk/currentunder/honours/history/further/courtcultureresources/chapelain.pdf (accessed August 16, 2004). 152. Jean Chapelain, Opuscules critiques (Paris: Droz, 1936), 350–51. 153. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 308. 154. Huet, Mémoires, 91. 155. In a conversation with Colbert after the first awards, Rapin even had to argue against a rumor that Huet was too zealous in pursuit of a pension. BLA #2078. 156. Apparently Chapelain renewed his efforts on Huet’s behalf. Brennan, “Culture,” 123. 157. BLA #2078, #2119. 158. BLA #2079. 159. BLA# 2080. 160. BLA #2073, 2074. 161. Louis Doutreleau, “L’Assemblée du Clergé de France et l’édition patristique grecque au XVIIe siècle,” in Bury and Meunier, Les Pères d’Église, 113–14. 162. BLA #2005. 163. Brennan, “Culture,” 131–32; Adam, Histoire, 3:10. Given the evidence of Huet’s single-mindedness in Rapin’s letters, Huet was perhaps disingenuous in asserting his moral qualms. 164. BLA #1197. 165. BLA #1198. 166. BLA #1195. 167. BLA #2001. 168. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 168–69, 171–72. 169. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 366. 170. Fantassi, “Latin Muse,” 18. 171. Haskell, Loyola’s Bees, 17. 172. For Aristotle’s Poetics and Renaissance humanism, Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, “Humanism and Poetics”; E. N. Tigerstedt, “Observations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin West,” Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968): 7–24; Luc Deitz, “‘Aristoteles imperator noster . . . ’? J. C. Scaliger and Aristotle on Poetic Theory,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2, no. 1 (1995): 54–67; Bernard Weinberg, “Scaliger on Poetics,” Modern Philology 39, no. 4 (1942): 337–60. For an assessment of Rapin’s importance, H. A. Mason, “The Founding of Modern European Literary Criticism, III: Rapin’s Critical Reflections on Modern Poetry,” The Cambridge Quarterly 13 (1984): 93–128. 173. Rapin, Réflexions sur la poétique, “Avertissement.” 174. Ibid., 184. 175. Ibid., 187. 176. Vissac, Poésie latine, 233–47. 177. Waquet, Le Latin, 284–85. 178. Vissac, Poésie latine, 241. 179. On the form and friendship, Jensen, Friendship, 39–40. 180. “Ad Aegidium Menagium Epistola,” Huet, Poemata, 36–40.


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Notes, pp. 73–79

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181. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.32.18; Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983). 182. “At non haec de te dederas promissa, juventam nobilibus Phoebi statuens consumere curis. Quod si non omnis cecidit de pectore virtus, / Excute mollitiem, et vitae te redde priori.” “Ad Aegidium Menagium Epistola,” 39. 183. Jean-Pierre Collinet, “La fable neo-latine avant et après La Fontaine,” Acta conventus neo-latini Amstelodamensis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1979), 245–46. 184. BLA #2041. 185. BNF NAFr 1341, fols. 60–63. 186. Ménage’s and Huet’s letters refer to Huet’s poem and the anthology, which was never published. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 139–41. Mambrun dedicated an eclogue to Montmor and one of the poems, “Prudence,” in Psychourgicon, sive De cultura animi (La Flèche, 1661). Haskell, Loyola’s Bees, 246–52. 187. With Huet frequently in Caen, Chapelain mediated between him and Montmor. Chapelain’s letters indicate some disagreement among Huet’s friends about how Huet should revise it; Chapelain identified the main source of trouble as Périer. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 207, 212, 218. 188. In fact, the final version of the poem is almost identical to Huet’s draft, showing that, true to his word, Huet listened to his friends’ criticisms and then satisfied himself. A transcription of the final version of the poem appears in the endpapers of Desbillons’ copy of Poemata, http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/poem. html (accessed June 7, 2006). 189. BLA #3058.

Chapter 3 1. BNF Fr 15188, fols. 123–24. On Lambert, Benedetta Craveri, L’âge de la conversation (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 276–89; Katherine B. Clinton, “Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of French Feminism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 3 (1975): 283–99; Paul Hoffman, “Madame de Lambert et l’exigence de dignité,” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 11, no. 2 (1973): 20–32. 2. Huet, Mémoires, 101. Diane de Castro, ou le faux Inca was published posthumously in 1728; for Huet’s age when he composed the novel, see “Éloge,” Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain (1741), xxvi. 3. Phrasing adapted from Bernard Beugnot, L’entretien au XVIIe siècle (Montréal: Université de Montréal, 1971), 20–21. 4. Alain Niderst, “‘Traits, notes et remarques’ de Cideville,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 69, no. 5 (1969), 825; unattributed quote, Pierre Clément, Madame de Montespan et Louis XIV (Paris, 1910), 172. According to Niderst, Cideville, a native of Rouen and friend of Voltaire, collected such tidbits on seventeenth-century literary figures who he himself, born in 1693, could not have known. Clément identified his source as a contemporary of Huet. 5. Huetiana, 320. 6. Viala, Naissance, 163–64.


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212

Notes, pp. 79–83

7. Scudéry’s was the most famous of many such cartographic representations. Roger Duchêne, Les précieuses, ou comment l’esprit vint aux femmes (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 30, 56–59; Jean-Michel Pelous, Amour précieux, amour galant (1654–1675) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1980), 12–34; DeJean, Tender, 87–93. 8. On the collective nature of female authorship, DeJean, Tender; Viala, Naissance. 9. Dubois, Rapin, 173. 10. Huet, Mémoires, 381. 11. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 4; Wendy Gibson, Women in SeventeenthCentury France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), chap. 2. 12. Tally from Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1977), 122–23; Gibson, Women, 17; Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977); Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pt. 1. 13. Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle, ed. and trans. Joyce L. Irwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Marie de Gournay, Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, ed. and trans. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 14. Quoting Réflexions sur les femmes (1727), Amelia Gere Mason, The Women of the French Salons (New York, 1891), http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/ lit/historical/TheWomenoftheFrenchSalons/chap10.html (accessed May 30, 2006); Hoffman, “Madame de Lambert,” 26–27. 15. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 162–70; Maclean, Woman Triumphant, chap. 1. 16. Kathleen Wellman, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot 1633–1642 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 342–43. 17. Quoted in Roger Duchêne, “L’école des femmes au XVIIe siècle,” Écrire au temps de Madame de Sévigné (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 144. 18. Quoted in Jean Meyer, Bossuet (Paris: Plon, 1993), 87. 19. Parias et al., Histoire générale, 2:481. 20. François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Traité de l’éducation des filles, trans. H. C. Barnard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 208, 86. Fénelon also rejected the mondain learning of salon society. Lougee, Paradis, 175–87; Colleen Fitzgerald, “To Educate or Instruct,” Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara J. Whitehead (New York: Garland, 1999), 159–92. 21. Gibson, Women, 19. 22. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 29–57. 23. Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 9; Schurman, Christian Woman, 28, 44; A. D. Cousins, “Humanism, Female Education, and Myth: Erasmus, Vives, and More’s To Candidus,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (2004): 213–30.


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Notes, pp. 83–88

213

24. Martine Sonnet, “A Daughter to Educate,” A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3:122. 25. Chapter 5 this volume. 26. Parais et al., Histoire générale, 382; Duchêne, “L’école,” 82–83. 27. For the limited biographical information on Dupré, Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 78–83, 90–95. 28. BNM Lat 11432, fol. 121. 29. BLA #398. 30. “Tene adolescentem puellam, ‘Quam Jocus circumvolat et Cupido,’ tam severe utrumque a te repellere! Riserunt aliae, item doctae.” BNM Lat 11432, fols. 122–23. 31. Published in Huet, Commentarius (325), omitted from Nisard’s translation. 32. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 189, 385, 190. 33. Gilles Ménage, The History of Women Philosophers, trans. Beatrice H. Zedler (New York: University Press of America, 1984). Regarding Ménage’s nominations of women for membership in the Academie Française, DeJean, Tender, 234, n. 52. 34. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 105–6. 35. Madame de Lafayette, Correspondance, ed. André Beaunier (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 1:214; on Ovid’s importance for female writers, see DeJean, Tender, 78–79. 36. Dubois, Rapin, 70. 37. Charles Henry, Un érudit: homme du monde, homme d’église, homme de cour (1630–1721) (Paris, 1879), 2, 3–4, 7. 38. Henry, Un érudit, 9–20. 39. Lafayette, Correspondance, 2:12–13. 40. For accounts of her role, Hippolyte Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes (1859; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), 375–89; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 132–46. 41. Nicéron, Mémoires, 1:246–51. 42. Ménage, The History of Women Philosophers, 3. 43. Baillet, Jugemens, 2:271. 44. Catherine Volphilhac-Auger, La Collection “Ad usum Delphini”: L’antiquité au miroir du Grand Siècle (Grenoble, France: Ellug, 2000), 303. 45. Henry Oldenburg, Correspondence, ed. by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–86), 10:251–55, translation by the editors. 46. Dictys of Crete on the Trojan war (1680); Florus’s Rerum romanarum epitome (1674); Eutropius’s history of Rome (1683); Aurelius Victor’s Historiae romanae compendium (1681). 47. Huet, Mémoires, 112. 48. Volphilhac-Auger, Collection, 315, 358, 363–64, 367–68, and on financing, 121–28. 49. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 25–26. 50. Lafayette, Correspondance, 1:175. 51. Huet, Mémoires, 93. 52. BNF Fr 15188, fols. 59–61.


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214

Notes, pp. 88–91

53. Dominique Bouhours, La vie de Madame de Bellefont (Paris, 1686), 26–27. 54. Bouhours, Bellefont, 16–17, 87. Protestant women experienced this tension too; Anna Maria van Schurman renounced learning for similar reasons. 55. Huet, Mémoires, 141. 56. Linda Lierheimer, “Female Eloquence and Maternal Ministry: The Apostolate of Ursuline Nuns in Seventeenth-Century France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1994), 350; Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 77. 57. Pierre-Daniel Huet, “Portrait de Madame l’Abbesse de Caen,” Divers portraits (Caen, France, 1659), 327. 58. Huet similarly encouraged the nun Jacoba Boette de Blemur. Huet, Mémoires, 75–76; Mary Rowan, “Between Salon and Convent: Madame Rohan, A Precious Abbess,” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 12, no. 22 (1985): 191–207, and “Manifestations of Mind as Wit and Intellect: Marie-Eléanore Rohan and Jacqueline Bouëtte de Blémur,” in Lagarde, L’esprit en France au XVIIe siècle, 291–98; on Blémur, see Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1923), 3:394–441. 59. Such “snatching” is a conventional trope of modesty; one finds it in the works of Jesuits and in Huet’s autobiography. Given Huet and Rohan’s closeness, Rowan’s misattribution of the introduction to Huet in “Between Salon and Convent” is understandable. Clef du cabinet (Sept. 1708), 239. 60. Marie-Éléonore de Rohan, La morale du sage (Paris, 1667), aviv. 61. James Albert DeLater, “The 1683 De optimo genere interpretandi (On the best kind of translating) of Pierre-Daniel Huet” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1997), 31, 67; nn. 27, 127–130. 62. She wrote one other work, a paraphrase of several Psalms, which was published posthumously. 63. Vincent J. Pitts, La Grande Demoiselle at the Court of France: 1627–1693 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2000); Craveri, L’âge, 148–86; Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Monpensier, Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Demoiselle, ed. and trans. Joan DeJean (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002). 64. Huet et al., Divers portraits, 211. 65. Huet et al., Divers portraits, 56. 66. Rohan, Morale, 161. 67. Ibid., 77. 68. Ibid., 170. 69. Ibid., 179. 70. Huet, Mémoires, 23. 71. Description synthesized from Adam, Histoire, 2:31–46; Emmanuel Bury, Littérature; DeJean, Tender, chap. 1; Gibson, Women, 175–81; Lougee, Paradis; Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 141–52; Viala, Naissance, 133–37. 72. Bury, Littérature, 62. 73. Lougee, Paradis, 129. 74. Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 141. 75. Perhaps 3,000 in Paris, 8,000 to 10,000 in the country overall. Viala, Naissance, 133.


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Notes, pp. 91–94

215

76. Viala, Naissance, 143. In absolute numbers, the production of learned works did not decline. 77. Madeleine de Scudéry, The Story of Sapho, trans. Karen Newman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 141. 78. Huet, Mémoires, 43. 79. Waquet, Le Latin, 248. 80. Noémi Hepp, “La belle et la bête, ou la femme et le pédant dans l’univers romanesque du XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de la Littérature française 77 (1977): 564–77. 81. Duchêne, Précieuses, 75. 82. Abbé de Pure, La précieuse, ou le mystère des ruelles (1656; reprint, Paris: Droz, 1938), 170. I do not deal directly with the phenomenon of préciosité in French intellectual culture. Précieuse was a notoriously imprecise and promiscuously applied label, and a flesh-and-blood précieuse sometimes seems as elusive in French society as a Rosicrucian. See Pelous, Amour, 307–454. That some female intellectual subculture existed seems without doubt, and Divers portraits even included a group portrait of them. As an adjective, it could carry very pejorative connotations (most famously in Molière’s Les précieuses ridicules), but Duchêne has argued that the term was generally used in a positive, if not always precise sense. His assertion that Abbé de Pure’s La précieuse should be understood as an expression of female intellectual aspiration more generally strikes me as prudent and useful. Duchêne, Précieuses, 83. 83. Pure, Précieuse, 170. 84. Mechthild Albert, “Du paraître à l’être: Les avatars de la conversation féminine dans La Prétieuse,” Art de la lettre, art de la conversation à l’époque classique en France, ed. Bernard A. Bray and Christoph Strosetzki (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), 237. 85. The book was published under her brother’s name. Madeleine de Scudéry, Les femmes illustres (1644; reprint, Paris: Côté-femmes éditions, 1991), 28–29. 86. Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 149. 87. Duchêne, “L’école,” 84–85. 88. “Contrived negligence” from Gibson, Women, 184. 89. Baillet, Jugemens, 1:25. 90. Stevenson, Women, 5. 91. Description of exhibition item, James Hankins, ed., “The Lost Continent,” 34. 92. Huet, Mémoires, 112, 141. 93. Bernard Beugnot, “La fonction du dialogue chez La Mothe Le Vayer,” Cahiers de l’Association des Études françaises 24 (1972), 32. 94. Quoting Marc Fumaroli, “Otium, convivium, sermo: La conversation comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettrés,” in Le loisir lettré à l’âge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 29; also Fumaroli, “De l’âge de l’éloquence,” in Art de la lettre, 27–45; Bernard Bray, “Le dialogue comme forme littéraire au XVIIe siècle” and Maurice Roelens, “Le dialogue philosophique, genre impossible? L’opinion des siècles classiques,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des Études françaises 24 (1972): 10–29, 43–58; Beugnot, “La fonction.” 95. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 706–8.


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216

Notes, pp. 94–100

96. Quoting Salabert’s Adresses du parfait raisonnement (1638), Beugnot, “Loisir, retraite, solitude,” in Fumaroli et al., Le loisir lettré, 180. 97. Huet, The 1683 De optimo, 24, 29, 75. 98. “I like a strong, manly fellowship and familiarity, a friendship that delights in the sharpness and vigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.” Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 705. 99. On conversation as a social art, Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Exclusive Conversations”: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 41–46; Craveri, L’âge, 351–64; as a literary genre, Adam, Histoire, 2:127–34; Beugnot, L’entretien; DeJean, Tender, 78–93; Marc Fumaroli, La diplomatie de l’esprit (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 321–39. 100. Madeleine de Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Champion, 1998), 61–65. 101. Quoting Fumaroli, “Otium,” 44; Adam, Histoire, 1:121–34. 102. “De la sociéte et de la conversation” in Jean de La Bruyère’s Les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (Paris, 1688) amusingly demonstrates conversational dysfunction and the limitations of politesse. 103. Scudéry, “De l’air galant,” 68–72, 74; for an analysis of components of “successful” conversation based on Scudéry and other seventeenth-century authorities, see Alain Montandon, “Les bienséances de la conversation,” Art de la lettre, 61–79. 104. The identifications are Niderst’s. The identification of Huet is less secure, yet is very plausible given Huet’s association with Scudéry and Rohan’s identification of curiosity as one of Huet’s prominent traits (see below). Alain Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson, et leur monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), 532; Madeleine de Scudéry, Célinte (1661; reprint, Paris: Nizet, 1979), 11–13. 105. Scudéry, Célinte, 53. 106. Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 152. 107. Maurice Magendie, L’honnête homme; ou, l’art de plaire à la cour (1925; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 632. 108. Lougee, Paradis, 29. 109. Scudéry, The Story of Sapho, 22–23. 110. Pelous, Amour, 431. 111. Roelens, “Dialogue philosophique,” 51. 112. Huet et al, Divers portraits, 521. 113. Lettres inédites . . . [à] Charsigné, 196. 114. Clément, Montespan, 282–85. 115. On Huet’s theory of translation, Emmanuel Bury, “Bien écrire ou bien traduire: Pierre-Daniel Huet théoricien de la traduction,” in Littératures classiques: La traduction au XVIIe siècle 13 (1991): 251–60; Delater’s introduction and notes, The 1683 De optimo. 116. Huet, The 1683 De optimo, 35, 24–25, 33–34, 38, 61. 117. “Mimus, sive Speculum,” BNF Yc 10980. This is a feuille volante indicating neither place nor date of publication. 118. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8:728–44, 11:211–66; Greek Mythology Link, http:// www.forumancientcoins.com/cparada/GML/Proteus2.html (accessed May 16, 2006); Theoi Project Guide to Greek Mythology, http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/NereisPsamathe. html (accessed May 16, 2006).


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Notes, pp. 100–104

217

119. Johannes Buchler, Phrasium poeticarum thesaurus (1624), Binns, Intellectual Culture, 69. 120. Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac, “Quelques métaphores de la lettre dans la théorie épistolaire au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 43, no. 3 (1991), 247. 121. Scheibinger, Mind, 122–23. 122. Quoting George North’s English translation, Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning, 164. 123. Rohan, Morale, 214–17, 130–31. 124. Fritz Nies, “Un genre féminin,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 6 (1978): 994–1003. 125. Duchêne, “Le mythe de l’épistolière: Madame de Sévigné,” in L’épistolarité à travers les siècles, ed. Mireille Bossis and Charles A Porter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 14. 126. For the relationship between letter writing and conversation, Mireille Gérard, “Art épistolaire et art de la conversation,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 6 (1978): 959–74; Yves Giraud, “De la lettre à l’entretien,”in Bernard and Strosetzki, Art de la lettre, 217–31; Haroche-Bouzinac, “Quelques métaphores.” 127. On the history of French correspondence, Bernard Bray, “L’épistolier et son public en France au XVIIe siècle,” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 11, no. 2 (1973): 7–17, and “Style ou styles épistolaires?,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 6 (1978): 939–52; Denis, “De l’art galant,” 144; Roger Duchêne, “Réalité vécue et réussite littéraire: le statu particulier de la lettre,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 71, no. 2 (1971): 177–94, and “Le mythe,” 11–19; P. Dumonceaux, “Le XVIIe siècle: Aux origines de la lettre intime du genre épistolaire,” in Écrire, publier, lire les correspondences, ed. Philippe Richard (Nantes, France: Université de Nantes, 1983), 289–302; Marc Fumaroli, La diplomatie de l’esprit, 163–81. 128. Barre Matéi’s etiquette manual quoted in Gérard, “Art épistolaire,” 972. 129. First published in Clélie (1655); edited and republished in Conversations nouvelles sur divers sujets (1684). Scudéry, “De l’Air galant,” 153–5. 130. BNM NAFr 1341, 2–5. 131. BNM NAFr 1341, 35–36. 132. BNF Fr 15189, fols. 54v–55v. 133. The epigram was by Abbé Charles Cotin. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 91. 134. Quoted by Haroche-Bouzinac, “Quelques métaphores,” 248. 135. Poésies d’Anne Rohan-Soubise et lettres d’Éléonore Rohan-Montbazon (Paris, 1862), 128–29. 136. Ibid., 117, 137, 103–4. On identification of Ysarn, Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry, 368; Adam, Histoire, 3:167; Les poésies françaises de Daniel Huet, ed. Gaston Lavalley (Caen, France, n.d.), 30. 137. Mademoiselle de Scudéry, sa vie et sa correspondance, ed. Rathery et Boutron (1873; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), 286. 138. Boutron, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, sa vie, 403. 139. Lettres inédites de Madeleine de Scudéry, ed. Léon-G. Pélissier (Paris: Henri Leclerc, 1902), 16. 140. Henry, Un érudit, 8–9. 141. Lafayette, Correspondance, 1:206. 142. Lafayette, Correspondance, 2:12–13.


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Notes, pp. 104–111

143. Clément, Montespan, 274–79. 144. Clément, Montespan, 282–83. 145. Clément, Montespan, 280–81. 146. Quoted by Haroche-Bouzinac, “Quelques métaphores,” 251. 147. Quoting Paul Jacob’s Le parfait secrétaire, Goldsmith, “Exclusive Conversations,” 30. 148. Lettres inédites de Madeleine de Scudéry, 20, 23–24, 25–27. 149. Niderst, Scudéry, 367. 150. “La Fontaine de Bourbon à M. l’Evêque de Soissons,” BLA #3205. A transcription of the poem and Huet’s response appears in the endpapers of Poemata, www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/desbillons/poem.html (accessed June 5, 2005). 151. Notes accompanying transcription of “Coeur normand,” ibid.; poem also appears in Huet, Poésies françaises, 10–11. 152. Huet, Poésies françaises, 10. 153. Lafayette, Correspondance, 1:189–90. 154. À travers les papiers de Huet, 16–17, 19; Poésies françaises, 32–33, 41–42. 155. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage, 102–5. 156. Huet et al, Divers portraits, 321–22. 157. Lettres inédites de Madeleine de Scudéry, 11–13. 158. Lafayette, Correspondance, 1:220. 159. Pelous, Amour, 1:c1, 2:c1–3. 160. Huet, Poésies françaises, 96. 161. Lougee, Paradis, 21–26, 59–69; Gibson, Women, 41–70; Maclean, Woman Triumphant, 88–118. 162. Undated, BNF Fr 15188, fols. 136–39. The other two errors were selling one’s library and going to a foreign country. 163. Huet, Diane de Castro, 97. 164. Highet, Classical Tradition, 164; Laurence Plazenet, L’ébahissement et la délectation: Réception comparée et poétiques du roman grec en France et en Angleterre aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Champion, 1997). 165. Lafayette, Correspondance, 2:22–23. 166. Huet, Mémoires, 99–101. 167. Huet, Mémoires, 100. 168. Highet, Classical Tradition, 164. 169. Huet, Mémoires, 100. 170. Pelous, Amour, 79. 171. Huet, Mémoires, 87. 172. Oeuvres diverses du Sieur D*** avec le Traité du sublime (Paris, 1674), BNF Réserves D.21513. 173. For other interpretations, Bury, Littérature, 99–103; DeJean, Tender, 169–76. 174. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Traité de l’origine des romans (1670; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 4–5, 126–27. 175. Huet, Traité de l’origine, 18, 43–44. Huet made the common error of confusing Heliodorus of Emesa (third century C.E.), the novel’s true author, with Heliodorus (d. 390), the bishop of Altino. 176. Huet, Traité de l’origine, 129–30. 177. Huet, Traité de l’origine, 59–60.


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Notes, pp. 112–116

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178. Huet, Traité de l’origine, 122–24. 179. BNM NAFr 1197, fols. 266r, 55r.

Chapter 4 1. Virgil, Aeneid, 6.893–96. 2. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio evangelica, Praefatio IV. Several editions of the Demonstratio were published after the first Paris edition of 1679. In my text, I use Huet’s subdivisions, rather than page numbers, to facilitate consultation of a variety of editions. 3. Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe Word Histories (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1998). 4. Quoting Mordechai Feingold, “Jesuits: Savants,” in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 3; Steven J. Harris, “Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Tradition,” Science in Context 3 (1989): 29–65. 5. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667; reprint, St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1959), 373. 6. William Ashworth, Jesuit Science in the Age of Galileo (Kansas City, MO: Lowell Press, 1986). 7. J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 95. 8. J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 88. 9. Quoting Loyola, see Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 78; Ratio studiorum, 40. 10. Charles Nauert, “Humanist Infiltration,” 809. 11. Phrasing regarding “neo-Aristotelianism” adapted from Stephen Pumfrey, “Neo-Aristotelianism and the Magnetic Philosophy,” New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought, ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), 177–89. These points are especially well argued by Harris, “Transposing,” and supported in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Feingold, ed., The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2003); and Feingold, Jesuit Science. 12. Huet, Mémoires, 13–15. 13. François Dainville (see below); L. W. B. Brockliss, “Philosophy Teaching in France,” History of Universities 1 (1981): 131–68, French Higher Education, 337–50, “Pierre Gautruche et l’enseignement de la philosophie de la nature dans les collèges français vers 1650,” in Les jésuites à la Renaissance, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995); Patricia Reif, “The Textbook Tradition in Natural Philosophy, 1600–1650,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 1 (1969), 17–32. 14. Huet, Mémoires, 16; Huet’s introduction to projected fourth part of Alnetanae quaestiones (1690) in P. Desmolets, Mémoires de littérature et d’histoire (Paris, 1749), 2:487–95.


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Notes, pp. 116–117

15. Pierre Gautruche, Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius clara, brevis, et accurate institutio (Caen, France, 1665), 1:126–33. 16. “Notandumque est, contra Methodum Cartesii, vix ullam perfecte acquiri disciplinam, nisi duce magistro aliquo; et saepe turpiter hallucinari eos, qui sibi nimium credunt, tritam antiquioribus viam aspernando.” Gautruche, Philosophiae, 1:153–58. 17. Dear emphasizes a strong probabilistic streak in Jesuit thought, which is absent from Gautruche’s textbook. Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 66. 18. Choice was hardwired into rationalis, which only human beings possessed and which comprised two faculties: intellectus, divided into apprehension, judgment, and ratiocination; and voluntas or will. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 1:7–10; Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84. 19. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 1:144–48. The literature on Skepticism in early modern Europe has been steadily expanding since Richard Popkin’s History of Scepticism, which has been revised twice to cover the period up to Bayle; also see Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1993). 20. Rochemonteix, Collège, 3:26–27, 150–55, 4:26. 21. Ratio studiorum, 120, n. 23. 22. Ibid., 15, 20–24, 26–29, 33, 36–39, 43–45, 54, 96–98, 100, 104, 106–9. 23. Quoted by Françoise Waquet, Parler comme un livre (Paris: Albin, 2003), 168. 24. On salons, see chap. 3; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 25. Gautruche, Mathematicae totius institutio (Cambridge, England, 1668), 89–92. Gautrache’s volume on mathematics enjoyed several independent reprints. 26. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 4:258–68, 103–7, 3:178. 27. To compare Gautruche’s cosmology with that of other textbook authors, Heilbron, Sun, 188–91; on resistance to Copernicanism, see L. W. B. Brockliss, “Copernicus in the university: the French experience,” New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought, ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), 191–200; Alfredo Denis, “Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science of His Time,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science, 195–224; Edward Grant, In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility: Scholastic Reaction to Copernicanism in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: American Physical Society, 1984), 11–19, and “The Partial Transformation of Medieval Cosmology by Jesuits in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science, 127–56; Heilbron, Sun, 176–97; Irving A. Kelter and Ann Blair, trans., “The Refusal to Accommodate: Jesuit Exegetes and the Copernican System,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 273–83; James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 115–17; Michel-Pierre Lerner, ‘L’entrée de Tycho Brahe chez les jésuites ou le chant du cygnet de Clavius,’ Les jésuites à la Renaissance, ed. Giard Luce (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 150–52. 28. Brockliss, Higher Education, 441–42.


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29. Rivka Feldhay makes a similar point in “The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science,” in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits: Cultures, 115. 30. Ratio studiorum, 22. 31. Tolmer, Huet, 49. 32. These theses resemble some of those found in Marin Mersenne’s Questions inouyes, ou récréation des scavans (Paris, 1634). 33. Tolmer, Huet, 681–88. 34. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts, 83. 35. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–42. 36. Dainville, L’éducation, 311–22, 323–55. 37. Gautruche, Mathematicae, 272–74. 38. “Terra, si mundus relinqueretur in statu, in quo est, post longum tempus, tandem suapte natura rediret in orbem perfectum, sine montium et collium tumore, et aquam a se excluderet, ita ut terram aqua circumquaque ambiret; ex quo conficitur ut mundus non sit ab aeterno.” Tolmer, Huet, 684. 39. Huet, Mémoires, 34–39, 88. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Tolmer, Huet, 209. 42. H. J. M. Nellen, Ismaël Boulliau (1605–1694): Astronome, épistolier, nouvelliste et intermédiare scientifique (Amsterdam: Academic Publishers Associated, 1994). 43. Huet, Mémoires, 27. 44. BLA #2821. 45. Tolmer, Huet, 291–94. In 1655, Huet also sent to Boulliau solutions of two geometrical problems. BLA #2825. 46. Henri L. Brugmans, Le séjour de Christian Huygens à Paris . . . suivi de son journal de voyage à Paris et à Londres (Paris: Droz, 1935); Jean Mesnard, “Les premières relations parisiennes de Christiaan Huygens,” Huygens et la France, ed. René Taton (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 33–40. 47. For more detail, April Shelford, “Cautious Curiosity: The Legacies of a Jesuit Scientific Education,” History of Universities 19, no. 2 (2004): 91–128. 48. Gautruche, Mathematicae, 269–72. 49. Huygens to Boulliau, Oeuvres complètes (The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1888–1950), 2:453–54. 50. Huet, Mémoires, 80. 51. Robert S. Westman, “Huygens and the Problem of Cartesianism,” Studies on Christiaan Huygens, ed. H. J. M. Bos et al. (Liss, UK: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1980), 83–103. 52. Ibid., 95–96. Unlike Huet, Huygens always remained a Cartesian. Aant Elzinga, “Christiaan Huygens’ Theory of Research,” Essays on Early Modern Philosophers from Descartes and Hobbes to Newton and Leibniz, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), 147–66, and “Christiaan Huygens and the Concept of Matter,” in Bos et al., Studies on Christiaan Huygens, 105–25; Geoffrey V. Sutton, “A Science for a Polite Society: Cartesian Natural Philosophy in Paris during the Reigns of Louis XIII and XIV” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1982). The published version of Sutton’s dissertation, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), omits technical discussions of Huygens’s works.


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222

Notes, pp. 120–121

53. Although superannuated and highly partisan, the most comprehensive history of the rise and spread of Cartesianism remains Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris, 1868). 54. Commentarius, 333. Huet’s reworking of Horace is omitted from Nisard’s version. It is: “diuque insanientis hujus sapientiae consultus erravi, donec maturescente aetate, totoque hoc doctrinae apparatu a fundamentis perspecto, vela dare retrorsum, et cursus iterare sum coactus, cum inanibus structuris niti eam, totamque ab imo solo vacillare certissima ratione deprehendissem.” The relevant portion of Horace’s ode (I.34) is: “Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens / insanientis dum sapientiae / consultus erro, nunc retrorsum / vela dare atque iterare cursus // cogor relictos.” 55. Huet, Mémoires, 67; The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, ed. and trans. Craig B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), 415–16; Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1987); Lynn Joy, Gassendi the Atomist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 56. Huet, Mémoires, 313; John Milton Hirschfield, The Académie royale des sciences (1666–1683) (Chicago: Arno Press, 1981), chap. 1; Sutton, Science . . . Gender, 111–13; on the history of the Montmor Academy, see Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1934). 57. Huet, Mémoires, 69; BLA #1134. 58. Ibid., 90. 59. A page of jottings on scientific subjects confirms his Epicureanism. The page includes a statement of his acceptance of atoms and motion as the principles of generation. BNF Lat 11453, fol. 47r. 60. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 101–2. 61. Some eclectic Jesuit natural philosophers incorporated such un-Aristotelian entities as corpuscles and Paracelsian elements, just as Gautruche accepted fluid and mutable heavens, though the concept made a mess of Aristotelian elemental theory. Heilbron, Elements, 100–104. 62. Cartesianism had the same problem; see chapter 5 of this volume. 63. BNM Lat 11433, fols. 370–73. 64. Stanislauz Lubienietz, Theatrum cometicum (Amsterdam, 1668; 2nd ed., Leiden, 1681) brings together correspondence on the comet from all over Europe. A second comet appeared March 27 and was visible throughout Europe until April 20. Donald K. Yeoman, Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 1991), chap. 4. 65. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1985), 208; Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, trans., The Controversy of the Comet of 1618 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 21–66; Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, “The Role of Comets in the Copernican Revolution,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19, no. 3 (1988), 299–319; Tabitta van Nouhuys, The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1998). 66. He also collected much of the pamphlet literature generated by the event; see BNF, Vz 987–1006. 67. Huet, Dissertations, 2:156–64.


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Notes, pp. 121–125

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68. Ibid., 2:158; Roger Ariew, “Theory of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (1992): 355–72. 69. BNF Lat 11453, fol. 50r. 70. July 1669, BLA #591. 71. Lux’s explanation that Huet’shift in interest was prompted by Graindorge’s having won an argument over the relative merits of mathematics (Huet) versus a physics based in empirical research (Graindorge) seems less likely to me. David Lux, Patronage, 48. 72. BLA #1134. 73. BLA #547. 74. February 1666, BLA #553. 75. “[Graindorge] entered very deeply into philosophical study, and particularly of physics. He followed the principles of Epicurus and of Gassendi.” Huet, Origines, 375–76. 76. See Lux, Patronage; Brennan, “Culture.” 77. BLA #642. 78. For text of the treatise, Tolmer, Huet, 215–18. 79. Lorrain Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 348; William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 303–32. 80. Antoine Schnapper, Le géant, la licorne et la tulipe (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 94. The literature on collecting and curiosities is quite large; see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Daston and Park, Wonders, chaps. 2 and 3. 81. An excerpt from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society based on a report from Stensen and published in the Journal des sçavans (April 1667, 121) claimed that a salamander from the Indies was, in fact, fire resistant. 82. André Graindorge, Traité de l’origine des macreuses (Caen, France, 1680), 1–2. 83. Lorraine Daston, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 37–63; Dear, Discipline; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Shapin, A Social History; Charles Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s in De Motu,” Studies in the Renaissance (1969): 80–138. 84. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 7:206–9. Translation by the editors. 85. Gerrit A. Lindeboom, “Dog and Frog: Physiological Experiments at Leiden during the Seventeenth Century,” in Leiden University, 279–93. 86. Lux reconstructed the time line of their exchanges. 87. May 1665, “Vingt-deux lettres inédites d’André Graindorge à Pierre-Daniel Huet,” ed. Harcourt Brown, Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts et bellesLettres de Caen, n.s., 10 (1942): 267–69. 88. Huet, Mémoires, 87–88. 89. BLA #552. 90. BLA #651.


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Notes, pp. 126–127

91. BLA #679. 92. Hebbel Hoff and Roger Guellemin, “The First Experiments on Transfusion in France,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 18, no. 2 (1963): 103–24, and N. S. R. Maluf, “History of Blood Transfusion,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 9, no. 1 (1954): 59–107. It is unclear precisely how much Huet and Graindorge knew of similar experiments in England, though at least one issue of Journal des sçavans (August 18, 1668) carried an excerpt from the Philosophical Transactions on the subject. Also see Robert G. Frank, Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 178–88. 93. Huet, Mémoires, 87–88. 94. Ratio studiorum, 42. 95. Gautruche, Mathematicae, 257–58. 96. Quoted by Jonathan L. Pearl, “Peiresc and the Search for Criteria of Scientific Knowledge in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History (1979), 110–19; Robert A. Hatch, “Coherence, Correspondence and Choice: Gassendi and Boulliau on Light and Vision,” in Quadricentenaire de la naissance de Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1992 (Digne-les-Bains, France: Société scientifique et littéraire des Alpes de Haute-Provence, 1994), 365–86. 97. For example, Mirko D. Grmek, “Mariotte et la physiologie de la vision,” in Mariotte, savant et philosophe: Analyse d’une renommée, ed. Pierre Costabel (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 155–84. 98. Nicholas J. Wade, “Light and Sight since Antiquity,” Perception 27 (1998): 637–70. 99. Brundell, Gassendi, 103. 100. Graindorge, “Vingt-deux letters,” 282–88, 290, 300–301, 304–5; BLA #549, #551, #554. 101. Manuscript notes by Huet and letters from Graindorge document their efforts to understand problems such as the blind spot, lazy eye, and where in the eye visual rays crossed. BNF NAFr 5856, fol. 163; BLA #651, #653. Another page of notes indicates Huet’s attempts to work out the problems of seeing double caused by an injury. BNF Fr 5856, fol. 163. 102. Brown, Scientific Organizations; Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Christian Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique: Le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630–1820) (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 1996), chaps. 1 and 2; Lux, Patronage; Sutton, Science . . . Gender; Wellman, Making Science Social. 103. Sutton, “Science,” 407–19; on Rohault specifically, see Sutton, Science . . . Gender, 106–9; Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes: Essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Presses de Sciences P, 2002), 48; for Richesource, see Siep Stuurman, “Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de La Barre and the Origins of Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (1997): 626 and n. 61. 104. Quoted by Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations, 167. 105. Licoppe, Formation, 47. Licoppe applies recent British insights to the French context, particularly those of Shapin and Simon, by analyzing the rhetoric of experiment. 106. Peter Zeeberg, “Science versus Secular Life: A Central Theme in the Latin Poems of Tycho Brahe,” in Acta conventus neo-latini Torontonensis, ed. Alexander


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Notes, pp. 127–133

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Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard Schoeck (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Texts, 1991), 831–38. 107. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain, 153. 108. In a defense of some of Huygens’s experiments, Huet reported that he consulted originals of materials presented to the Royal Academy of Science. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Lettre touchant les expériences de l’eau purgée décrite dans le journal des sçavans (Paris, 1673), 9. 109. Licoppe, Formation, 42, 55. 110. BLA #556, #567. 111. Graindorge, “Vingt-deux lettres,” 282–85; BLA #561, #565, #570. 112. BLA #591, #602, #605. 113. BLA #602, #605. 114. BNF Fr 15189, fols. 142r–42v, 145v–46r, 158v–59r, 164v–65r, 167v–68r. 115. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 4:153–56. Translation by the editors. 116. BNF Fr 15189, fols. 142r–42v, 141r–41v, 156r–57r, 159v–61r, 165r–67r. 117. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 4:29–33, 87–90, 255–58, 244–46. 118. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 4:339–40. Translation by the editors. 119. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 4:282–85, 306–8. Translation by the editors. 120. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 4:486–88; 7:206–9, 470–73. Translation by the editors. 121. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 10:491–93. Translation by the editors. 122. Boulliau similarly characterized the French, specifically comparing the Montmorians to the Venetians, “whom I have learned . . . are more agreeable, more polite, more urbane, and use complimentary words in discussion.” Quoted in Mario Biagioli, “Etiquette,” 200. 123. Huet, Origines, 173. 124. BLA #547. 125. Graindorge, “Vingt-deux lettres,” 290. 126. BLA #637. 127. Thomas Sprat, Histoire de l’institution, dessein et progrès de la Societé Royale de Londres (Paris, 1670); BNF Réserves R-14728, 16. 128. Ibid., 18. 129. “Qui experitur, auget scientiam; [illegible] credit, auget errronem.” Perhaps this is a quotation; if so, I have not been able to locate it. Alternatively, Huet might have been playing with a passage in Ecclesiastes 1:18: “Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem [He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow (KJV)].” It is impossible to determine whether Huet intended experience or experiment by experitur (i.e., “he who experiences / he who tests”). Coming out of the medieval period, there was considerable ambiguity in the Latin terms, not to mention different connotations. Schmitt, “Experience,” 86–89. 130. Sprat, Histoire, 103. 131. Ibid., 28–33; Huet, Foiblesse, 169–70. 132. Sprat, Histoire, 107. 133. Ibid., 107; Huet, Foiblesse, 247 134. BNF NAL 2133, fol. 327. 135. Robert Boyle, The Origins of Forms and Qualities (1666) (Hildesheim: Georg Olmo, 1966), 3:38; J. J. MacIntosh, “Robert Boyle on Epicurean Atheism and


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Notes, pp. 133–138

Atomism,” Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 197– 219; for Gassendi’s influence on Boyle, see Emily and Fred S. Michael, “Corporeal Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Psychology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (1989): 31–49, and “The Theory of Ideas in Gassendi and Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 3 (1990): 379–99. 136. Rossi, Dark Abyss, 43–44; Timothy Shanahan, “God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” Seventeenth-Century Natural Scientists, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1992), 123–45. 137. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, in The Works, 2:460–61. 138. J. J. MacIntosh, “Robert Boyle’s Epistemology: the Interaction between Scientific and Religious Knowledge,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 6, no. 2 (1992): 94. 139. McIntosh, “Robert Boyle on Epicurean,” 208. 140. Robert Boyle, “Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures,” in The Works, 2:256. 141. For Boyle’s epistemology, J. J. MacIntosh, “Robert Boyle’s Epistemology,” 91–121. 142. Jean Georges de Chauffepié, Nouveau dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam, 1750), 2:199. 143. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 143. 144. BLA #557. 145. BLA #642. 146. BLA #615. 147. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 39. 148. BLA #618. 149. BLA #657. 150. Rapetti’s chapter on Huet’s relationship with the Jesuit Louis Le Valois adds much to understanding Huet’s anti-Cartesianism in the period between the Demonstratio and the Censura. Rapetti, Percorsi, 51–89; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, “Huet lecteur de Malebranche,” XVIIe siècle 37, no. 2 (1985): 169–89. 151. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 139. 152. Lettres de M. Arnauld (Lausanne, 1775), 3:393–98. 153. Roger Ariew, “Damned if You Do: Cartesians and Censorship, 1663–1706,” Perspectives on Science 2, no. 3 (1994): 255–74; “Descartes and the Jesuits: Doubt, Novelty, and the Eucharist,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science, 157–94; Henri Gouhier, Cartésianisme et augustinianisme au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1978), 133–39. 154. BLA #562, #563. 155. April 1672, BLA #611. 156. May 1672, BLA #612. 157. December 1672, BLA #617. 158. Tanneguy Le Fèvre to Huet, May 20, 1671, see Volphilhac-Auger, Collection, 215. 159. BLA #615. 160. BLA #630. 161. BLA #635. 162. BLA #636.


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Notes, pp. 138–141

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163. BLA #645. 164. BLA #645. 165. October 1672, BLA #615. 166. Dedicatory epistle of Thomas Maloüin, see Graindorge, Macreuses. 167. For a different ordering of the books, see Germain Malbreil, “Les droits de la raison et de la foi, la dissociation de la raison, la métamorphose de la foi, selon P. D. Huet,” XVII siècle 37, no. 2 (1985): 119–34. 168. Popkin, History of Scepticism, 87–109. Huet picked up the Skeptical allegory that La Mothe Le Vayer made of Samson in Petit traité sceptique sur cette commune façon de parler, n’avoir pas le sens commun (1646). Huet, Foiblesse, 258. 169. BNF Fr 15188, fols. 328–31. La Rue’s letter is undated. Rapetti has dated it to 1685 in a half-dozen letters of La Rue’s held by the Biblioteca Laurenziana (#967–72, with #969 as the one in question; the letter I quoted is a copy held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). She sequences the correspondence as follows: #968—1685; #969—1685; #972—1685; #971—December 2, 1685; #967—December 10, 1685 (La Rue’s date); #970—1691 (La Rue indicates only April 19). The dates for #968, #972, #971, #967 are confirmed by transcriptions of portions of these letters on a sheet of notes in Huet’s hand dated 1685 (BNF NAFr 4047, fol. 57). For several reasons, #969 was more likely to have been written in 1691: The reference to securing approbations for an unnamed work suggests it was written nearer the date of Pirot’s letters (see below); both #970 and #969 counsel Huet to devote his time to religious rather than philosophical studies in nearly identical terms; and it is unlikely that either the Alnetanae quaestiones or the Censura would provoke the shocked response that La Rue expressed in #969. I believe #970 was probably written before #969, because #970 seeks to console Huet for Régis’s reply to the Censura, but counsels him that responding would be a waste of time; Huet might then have proposed what would have been the fourth part of Alnetanae quaestiones as a response to the Cartesians and a presentation of his philosophical “system,” to which La Rue reacted so negatively. Thus, Huet reconsidered his decision to publish, but sent the treatise to Pirot anyway to sound him out. 170. BNF Fr 15189, BLA #1970, #1969. 171. On Huet’s quarrel with Pirot, which involved Bossuet even more, see Shelford, “On Sceptres and Censors.” On Old Regime censorship, Jacques LeBrun, “Censure préventive et littérature religieuse en France au début du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 61, no. 166 (1975): 201–25; Henri-Jean Martin, Livres, vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 6, and vol. 2, pt. 2, chap. 2; Georges Minois, Censure et culture sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 81–85, 138–40; Daniel Roche, “La censure,” in Histoire de l’édition française: Le livre triomphant 1660–1830 (Paris: n.p., 1984), 76–83. 172. On Pirot, Nouvelle biographie générale; J.-B. Bossuet, Correspondance, ed. Charles Urbain and Eugène Levesque (Paris: Hachette, 1909–25), 3:379, note to #429; Le Brun, “Censure,” 207. Pirot is also mentioned frequently in J. M. Gres-Gayer, Le gallicanisme de Sorbonne: Chroniques de la faculté de théologie de Paris (1657–1688) (Paris: Champion, 2002). 173. As mentioned earlier, the Latin introduction was published in Desmolets, Mémoires. The “Avertissement” to the 1641 edition of the French translation states that Huet himself, who “regarded [it] as the best of all his works,” made the translation. Huet, Foiblesse, iv.


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228

Notes, pp. 142–148

174. “Verum audietis ex me, quae vereor ut probetis; res ancipites, insolentes, odiosas, non populares, non vulgi auribus accommodatas. Rationem oppugnabimus Ratione, secumque ipsam committemus in praelium; adeoque sive victricis, sive victae Cadmea erit victoria.” Desmolets, Mémoires, 2:487–95. 175. Huet, Foiblesse, 1. The content of the passage in Foiblesse is roughly the same as the last few lines of the Latin introduction, though it is interesting that the French version mentions the Provençal’s sojourn in Padua, whose university had long been associated with philosophically radical ideas. 176. Huet, Foiblesse, 3–4. 177. Ibid., 4. 178. Ibid., 7. The Provençal’s comments echo Huet’s own judgments of Plato in Huetiana, 24–25, 218–24. 179. Ibid., 8. 180. Ibid., 219. 181. Ibid., 224. 182. Ibid., 2–3.

Chapter 5 1. Anne Sauvy, Livres saisis à Paris entre 1678 et 1701 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), 67–68. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Huet gave an account of Pirot’s uncooperativeness in a letter to Bossuet in April 1692. Bossuet, Correspondance, 5:107–11; also see Shelford, “Of Sceptres and Censors.” 4. BLA #706. 5. See note 155, chapter 1 of this volume. 6. On the formulary and the arrest, R. Tavenaux, La vie quotidienne des jansénistes (Paris: Hachette, 1973); Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France: Voices in the Wilderness (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 68–74, 108. On Jansenism, see Antoine Adam, Du mysticism à la révolte: Les jansénistes du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1968); Jean Orcibal, “Descartes et sa philosophie jugés à l’hôtel Liancourt (1669–1674),” in Études d’histoire et de la littérature religieuses, XVIe– XVIIIe siècles, ed. Jacques Le Brun and Jean Lesaulnier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), and Orcibal, Saint-Cyran et le jansénisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961); Albert de Meyer, Les premières controverses jansénistes en France (Louvain, Belgium: Vin Linthour, 1917); René Tavenaux, Jansénisme et réforme catholique (Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992). 7. Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 67–68. 8. BLA #1117. 9. Dubois, Rapin, 476–77; BLA #2098. 10. Quote from Jean Daillé, Traicté de l’employ des saincts pères (1632); Mario Turchetti, “Jean Daillé et son Traicté de l’employ des saincts pères (1632),” in Bury and Meunier, Les Pères de l’Église, 69–87.


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11. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris: Letouzey, 1951–72) 11: col. 1489–1588; Claire Falla, L’apologie d’Origène par Pierre Halloix (1648) (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1983), pt. 2, chaps. 1 and 2. 12. Manfred Schulze, “Martin Luther and the Church Fathers,”in Backus, The Reception, 2:613; Falla, L’apologie; Henri Crouzel, “The Literature on Origen, 1970– 1988,” Theological Studies 49 (September 1988): 499–516, and Bibliographie critique d’Origène (The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1971); D. P. Walker, “Origène en France,” in The Ancient Theology, xii. 13. Quoting Pierre Halloix, Falla, L’apologie, 165. 14. Origeniana, 25. All citations from the 1679 version. 15. On Augustine and the Pelagians, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); on later history of theology of grace, see Heiko Augustinius Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); on Jansenists and grace, see Albert de Meyer, Premières controverses, and Henri Gouhier, L’antihumanisme. 16. Origeniana, bk. 2, qu. 7, sec. 2, para. 105–7; bk. 2, qu. 7, sec. 4, para. 107. 17. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1978), 42–43. 18. Even Richard Simon, a sharp-tongued critic, recommended Huet’s work to anyone who desired to understand Origen; many modern scholars also regard it highly. Richard Simon, Lettres choisies de M. Simon (Rotterdam, 1702), 117–20; Cerbu, “Autour de la Philocalie de Tarin,” 774; Falla, L’apologie, 122; Crouzel, Bibliographie critique, 115; Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 11: col. 1563. An attendee of the Hôtel de Liancourt was not so enthusiastic, commenting “[Huet’s] notes ne sont pas si grande chose. Il n’est pas théologien.” Port-Royal Insolite: Édition critique du “Recueil de choses diverses,” ed. Jean Lesaulnier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 305. 19. Michael Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1995). 20. Quoted by Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que,” 500. 21. “De la Grace de Dieu,” BLA #3114. 22. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, in The Works, 1:462. On civility and the management of intellectual conflict in the area of natural philosophy, see Biagioli, “Etiquette,” and Shapin, A Social History. 23. Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que,” 484. 24. BNF Fr 15188, fols. 345–51. 25. Huet, Dissertations, 1:428–30. 26. Ibid., 1:465. 27. Huet’s suggestion also indicates some conflation of aristocratic honor with intellectual reputation—understandable enough as his contemporaries were struggling to find appropriate models and given Huet’s own punctiliousness regarding his noble status. 28. Draft of a letter of Huet to Pirot, BNF NAFr 4047, fols. 73–74. 29. Baillet, Jugemens, 2:33. 30. Clément, Montespan, 292.


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Notes, pp. 153–156

31. From Huet to Morin, June 1698, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, PAP 15. 32. BNF Lat, fol. 11433; Huet, Dissertations, 2:338–41. 33. BNF Fr 9359, fols. 120–21. 34. Huet, Demonstratio, Praefatio 2; Mémoires, 55. 35. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 143. 36. Graevius was particularly keen on the Demonstratio as a response to Spinoza; BLA #502. On Huet’s anti-Spinozism, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 453–56; Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française, 126–37. 37. P.-D. Huet . . . et le P. François Martin, 217–19. 38. Huet, Demonstratio, Propositio 7.1; Praefatio 4. On geometrical framework, see April Shelford, “Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1679),” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 599–618. 39. Huet, Demonstratio, Propositio 9, “Jesus Nazarenus est Messias.” 40. Ibid., Propositio 9.121.2. 41. The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, ed. James Force and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994), 5. 42. Albert Monod, De Pascal à Chateaubriand, 36. 43. Huet, Demonstratio, Propositio 4.14.1–19. 44. For example, Propositio 4, “De libro Josue,” 1.1, 4; “De libro Regum,” 5. 45. Barach Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989), 53–54. On Descartes’ and Spinoza’s impact on biblical exegesis, see Richard Popkin, “Cartesianism and Biblical Criticism,” Problems in Cartesianism, ed. Thomas M. Lennon and John M. Nicholas (Montreal: McGillQueens University, 1982), 61–81; Louis Meyer, La philosophie interprète de l’écriture sainte (1673; reprint, Paris: Intertextes, 1998); Jacqueline Lagrée, “Louis Meyer et la Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres. Projet cartésien, horizon spinoziste,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 71, no. 1 (1987): 31–43; “Louis Meyer et Spinoza devant la lecture de la Bible,” Bulletin de l’Association des Amis de Spinoza 21 (1988). 46. Huet, Dissertations, 2:358–63. 47. “Magnum enimvero et formidabilem adversarium nobis orcus eripuit.” BNF Lat 11433, fols. 236–42. 48. BLA #2166, #2167. 49. BLA #2870; a similar message is more briefly expressed in BNF Lat 11432, fols. 247–53. 50. Huet noted and transcribed twenty-five passages from Simon’s work into his copy of the first edition of the Demonstratio. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio evangelica (Paris, 1679), BNF Réserves D.870. 51. Richard Simon, L’histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Paris, 1678), BNF Réserves A.3498. 52. For biographical information on Sandius, see Nouvelle biographie générale; on the corrector’s role, see Goldgar, Impolite Learning, 45–53. 53. BNF Fr 15189, fols. 170r–71v. 54. BLA #501. 55. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 209–12.


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56. On diffusion into France of Spinoza’s works, see Vernière, Spinoza, 1:91–117. 57. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 202–8. 58. BLA #2166. 59. The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 18:3:3. 60. Huet, Demonstratio, Propositio 3.11–18. Huet drew on a collection of scholarly correspondence published in 1661 and reprinted in The Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus, the Jewish Historian (London, 1737); for more details, see Shelford, “Faith and Glory,” Part 2, Section 2. 61. J. Neville Birdsall, “The Continuing Enigma of Josephus’s Testimony about Jesus,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 67, no. 2 (1985): 609– 22; Louis Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937–1980) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 679–703. 62. Huet, Demonstratio, 3.1–18. 63. BLA #2166. 64. Other letters in the dispute (author in parentheses): BLA #2476 (Huet), #2167 (Sandius), #2168 (Sandius), #2615 (Huet). 65. BLA #2169. 66. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio evangelica (Paris, 1679), BNF Réserves D.870. 67. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 275–76. 68. For biography, see Hugh de Quehen, “Bernard, Edward (1638–1697),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxyau.wrlc.org/view/article/2240 (accessed June 5, 2006). 69. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 201. 70. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 230–31; BNF Lat 11433, fols. 511–12. 71. BNF Lat 11432, fol. 198. 72. Pirot similarly objected to Huet’s identification of Priapus with Moses. 73. The idea that Hebrew was the language God taught Adam is extremely old and had been held by Origen, Augustine, and Jerome. Daniel Droixhe, “La crise de l’hébreu,” in La République des Lettres et l’histoire du judaïsme antique XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, ed. Chantal Grell and François Laplanche (Paris: Presses de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 1992), 65–99; François Laplanche, L’écriture, 60, and Laplanche, La Bible, 16–17. 74. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 269–70. 75. BNF Lat 11433, fols. 334–35. 76. For Boileau’s early career, see Adam, Histoire, 3:55–156; Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres completes (1966), introduction. 77. From Huet’s annotations to Oeuvres diverses du Sieur D***** (Paris, 1674), BNF Réserves YE 706. 78. For Boileau’s reputation, see Bernard Beugnot and Roger Zuber, Boileau: Visages anciens, visages nouveaux, 1665–1970 (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal), 9–36; Louis Marin, “On the Sublime, Infinity, Je Ne Sais Quoi,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis R. Hollier et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 340; on Horace, see “L’Art Poétique” and a seventeenth-century translation by O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Leon Golden, Horace for Students of Literature: The “Ars Poetica” and Its Tradition (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995).


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Notes, pp. 159–164

79. For a summary of the treatise and its fortuna, see Richard Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” Modern Language Notes 108, no. 5 (1993): 913–34; for bibliography of critical studies, see Gilles Declercq, “Boileau-Huet: la querelle du Fiat lux,” in Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), 237–62; Louis Marin, “Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux translates from the Greek Longinus’ Treatise On the Sublime,” A New History, 340– 45; John Richardson Miller, Boileau en France au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Société d’éditions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1942). 80. Boileau-Despréaux, Traité du sublime, in Oeuvres complètes de Boileau (Paris, 1864), 1:132. 81. Ibid., 1:134. 82. Ibid., 1:135. 83. Ibid., 1:132, 134–35, 123. 84. Marin, “On the Sublime,” 341. 85. Declercq, “Boileau-Huet,” 244. Declercq’s article is excellent on technical aspects of the dispute, though it omits Huet’s final response to Boileau and does not consider the dispute in the larger context discussed here. 86. Huet, Demonstratio, Propositio 4, 3:53. Discussion based on Huet’s own French translation in “Lettre de M. Huet . . . à M. le Duc de Montausier, dans laquelle il examine le sentiment de Longin sur le passage de la Genèse: Et Dieu dit: Que la lumière soit fait, et la lumière fut faite,” Huet, Mémoires (1853 edition), 276. 87. Echoing Louis Carbone in Divinus orator (1585) that “Scripture, the model of sacred eloquence, shines neither because of its vocabulary nor its elegance. The divinely inspired authors had better things to do than to tarry over such trifles.” Fumaroli, L’âge, 184. 88. Ironically, Boileau attacked the validity of Perrault’s views on Homer by charging him with ignorance of Greek during the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. 89. Boileau, Traité du sublime, 1:124. 90. Huet, “Lettre de M. Huet,” 277–87. 91. Quotations respectively from Charles Perrault, Memoirs of My Life, ed. and trans. Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 114–15, and C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (Paris, 1858), 2:177; Joan DeJean recounts the incident in Ancients against Moderns, 42. 92. Emile Magne, Bibliographie générale des oeuvres de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux et de Gilles et Jacques Boileau (Paris: L. Giraud-Badin, 1929), 264, description of dispute, 263–80; Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres completes (1966), 982–84. 93. Beugnot and Zuber, Boileau: Visages, 13; Catherine M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762 (Oxford, UK: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 30–31. 94. Oeuvres de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (Paris, 1713), BNF Réserves Ye 712–13. 95. Bibliothèque choisie (1713), 26:65, 68, 79–82. 96. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1:84–86. 97. Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes: Essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Presses de Science Po, 2002), 37. 98. Descartes, Discourse, 1:80. 99. This makes Van Damme’s qualification, “Une République des Lettres anticartésienne?,” puzzling (102).


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Notes, pp. 164–166

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100. See Dibon, Regards, 599–611, 613–57; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 23–29; C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute, “Le cartésianisme aux Pays-Bas,” Descartes et le cartésianisme hollandais, ed. E. J. Dijksterhuis (Amsterdam: Les Éditions françaises d’Amsterdam, 1951), 183–260; Bouillier, Histoire. 101. See, for example, Meric Causaubon, Treatise on Enthusiasme (1655; reprint, Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970); Michael R. G. Spiller, “Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie”: Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society (The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1980), 60–79. 102. Jean-Lud Marion, ed., La Querelle d’Utrecht (Paris: Les impressions nouvelles, 1988), 182–83, 193. 103. “Ita hodie certamen Philosophicum cernitur, ac ingenia studentium, neglectis literis humanioribus, velut sirenum cantu, ad illos scopulos abripiuntur.” Quoted by Dibon, Regards, 176; for a similar lament from Gronovius, 66. 104. Huet, Mémoires, 32–33. 105. BNF NAFr 6202, fols. 40–42. 106. BNF Fr 15189, fol. 230. 107. Van Damme, Descartes, 96. 108. Tad M. Schaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 220. 109. On Cartesianism, see Arnauld and Nicole, La logique; on the Jansenists, see Roger Ariew, “Damned if You Do”; Henri Gouhier, Cartésianisme et augustinianisme au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1978), 81–122; Steven M. Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); also, François Azouvi, Descartes et la France: Histoire d’une passion nationale (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 19– 28, 38–45; Tad M. Schaltz, “What Has Cartesianism to Do with Jansenism?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 1 (1999): 37–56; Van Damme, Descartes, 117–19. 110. Arnauld and Nicole, La logique, 17. 111. Ariew, “Damned if You Do”; Desmond M. Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989). Schaltz, Radical Cartesianism; Trevor McLaughlin, “Censorship and Defenders of the Cartesian Faith in France (1640–1720),” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 4 (1979): 563–81; Van Damme, Descartes, 87–96. 112. Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 60. 113. Boileau-Despréaux, “Arrêt Burlesque,” in Oeuvres complètes (1966), 327–30, 1066, note for page 325. 114. Charles Jourdain, Histoire de l’Université de Paris (Paris, 1862), 235. 115. Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres complètes, 1066, note for page 325. 116. Bouillier, Histoire, 1:430. 117. Translation by Ariew, “Damned if You Do,” 258–59. 118. Bouillier, Histoire, 1:436–37; Van Damme, Descartes, 48–53. 119. Bossuet, Correspondance, 1:223–28, especially 227–28, n. 11; 4:17–20, especially 18, n. 3; Fred Ablondi, Gerauld de Cordemoy: Atomist, Occasionalist, Cartesian (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005), 12. Huet was quite aware of Bossuet’s views. Huet, Mémoires, 143–44. 120. Quotation from Ablondi, Cordemoy, 15 n. 1 (my translation). 121. Quotation from Van Damme, Descartes, 53; Clarke, Occult Powers, is especially good on this.


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Notes, pp. 166–169

122. Respectively, Van Damme, Descartes, 28; Stuurman, “Social Cartesianism,” 617–40. 123. Pierre Ronzeaud, “The Subject of Modern Discourse,” in Hollier et al., A New History, 284. 124. Geoffrey Sutton, Science . . . Gender, 92. 125. Ibid., 106–9. 126. Van Damme, Descartes, 46, 42. 127. Schiebinger, Mind, 175–78; François Poulain de La Barre, Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch and trans. Vivien Bosley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 128. Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 129. La Barre, On the Education of Ladies, Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, 144–46, 150, 204–5. 130. Ibid., 155, 168, 169–71. 131. For a very comprehensive review of the debates, Lennon, The Battle of the Gods. 132. It became the “house philosophy” of the Dupuys; in Justel’s assemblies, one visitor claimed that “Descartes and Gassend[i] have Proselites enough.” Adam, Histoire, 1:297–300; quotation from Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations, 167. 133. Sutton, Science . . . Gender, 133–37. Huygens had a complicated relationship with Cartesianism, a point Sutton explored in more technical detail in his dissertation than in his book. On Huygens’s problems with Cartesian method and his own ideas about epistemology and method, see Elzinga, “Christiaan Huygens’ Theory of Research,” 147–66 and “Christiaan Huygens and the Concept of Matter,” 105–25. 134. Adam, Histoire, 3:36–37; “Éloge,” Oeuvres de Madame et de Mademoiselle Deshoulières (Paris, 1803), vii–viii; John J. Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 45–74; Grente, Fléchier, 22. 135. Amelia Gere Mason, Women of the French Salons, http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/historical/TheWomenoftheFrenchSalons/chap4.html (accessed December 18, 2006). 136. On les cartésiennes, Harth, Cartesian Women, 64–98. 137. For example, “Sonnet de mademoiselle Dupré, contre l’amour,” in Correspondance de Roger de Rabutin, ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Paris, 1858), 1:223. 138. “L’Ombre de M. Descartes à Mlle de La Vigne,” Recueil de vers choisis, ed. Dominique Bouhours (Paris, 1693), 27–32; for another interpretation, Harth, Cartesian Women, 83–86. 139. Huet, Poésies françaises, 72–79. 140. Quoting from Dictionnaire des précieuses, Duchêne, Précieuses, 457. There has been some disagreement regarding the attribution. Lavalley ascribed the poem to Huet, but Fabre attributed the poem to Fléchier. Huet, Poésies françaises, 58–62; “Correspondance galante de Fléchier,” Revue retrospective (Paris, 1833), 1:245–46; Antonin V. D. Fabre, La jeunesse de Fléchier (Paris, 1882), 47–50, 80. Another candidate is Monsieur de Linière, whom Madame Deshoulières referred to as “Tirsis” in a poem that defended him against charges of irreligion. Conley, Suspicion, 50–51. As “Tirsis” was a popular pseudonym (it is the shepherd’s name in Theocritus’s poetry), this cannot be taken as definitive proof. 141. Technically speaking, Descartes was not an atomist, but his physics was frequently confused with atomism. In contrast, the Cartesian Cordemoy actually


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Notes, pp. 169–175

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adopted atomism. Sophie Roux, “Descartes atomiste?,” Atomismo e continuo nel xvii secolo, ed. Egidio Festa, Romano Gatto, and Michel Bitbol (Naples: Vivarium, 2000), 245–73; Ablondi, Cordemoy, 22, 43 n. 47. 142. Quote from Lesaulnier, Port-Royal Insolite, 203; Orcibal, “Descartes et sa philosophie,” 87–103. 143. Baillet, Jugemens, 1:1–3. 144. Baillet, Jugemens, 1:1–31. 145. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1692; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), 1:61–65. Page numbers are for 1692 edition. 146. Ibid., 92–93; on this expanded meaning of criticism within the context of literary debate, DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, chap. 1. 147. Dibon, Regards, 61–62. 148. The total is three if one includes Huet’s anti-Cartesian comments in Foiblesse, though I will not be discussing those comments here. 149. Quotations from Denis Lopez, “Huet pédagogue,” in Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), 214–15; see also Lopez, La plume et l’épée: Montausier (1610–90) (Paris: Biblio 17, 1987); H. Druon, Histoire de l’éducation des princes dans la maison des Bourbons de France (Paris, 1897); on the Ad usum Delphini, see Volphilhac-Auger, Collection. 150. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 217. 151. Huetiana, 94. 152. “. . . revocare literas fugientes, revivificare lumen pene moriturae antiquitatis, et optimis autoribus jam tertiam vitam dare, cum post unius vix seculi decursum redeunte contemtu, alio barbariei genere succedente . . .” Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Philosophischer Briefwechsel (Darmstadt, Germany: Otto Reichl, 1926), 1:235–36. 153. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 10:343–46. 154. University of Leiden, the Netherlands, MsBUR Q 19. 155. On the Censura, Lennon’s preface, Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy; Schaltz, Radical Cartesianism, 215–33. 156. For more detailed discussion, see Shelford, “Thinking Geometrically.” 157. Proclus represented Jansenist-Cartesian idealist epistemological views, while Aristotle represented Huet’s sensationalist epistemological views. 158. Huetiana, 72–73. 159. Letter to Niçaise, BNF Fr 9359, fol. 110. 160. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 198–99. From Gassendi on, a standard method of discrediting Descartes was to argue “the illogicality, insufficiency and impossibility of each part of his physics.” L. W. B. Brockliss, “Aristotle, Descartes and the New Science: Natural Philosophy at the University of Paris, 1600–1740,” Annals of Science 38 (1981): 47–48. 161. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 200. 162. Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 15:298–99. 163. H. J. M. Bos, “Oeuvre et personnalité de Huygens,” Huygens et la France (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 11–12; on Descartes’ empiricism, see Charles Larmore, “Descartes’s Empirical Epistemology,” in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1980), 6–22; Leonard M. Marsak, “Cartesianism in Fontenelle and French Science,” Two Papers on Bernard de Fontenelle (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1959).


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Notes, pp. 175–179

164. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 200. 165. Ibid., 200–202. 166. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1983), 104–5. 167. BNF Lat 11453, fol. 11; for Huet’s copy of Principia, BNF Réserves R. 974; Huet expanded on the point in Foiblesse, 270–71. 168. “In quo tam perverse ratiocinatur, tam inepte se amat, tam arroganter de rationis suae figmentis, tam demisse contra de Fidei decretis sentit, ut idcirco quod opiniones suas certas esse putet, inde sine dubio colligat Fidei non repugnare; cum contra idcirco quod Fidei repugnent, falsas esse colligere debuerit.” Censura, 173–74. Here I offer my translation because it retains Huet’s allusion to self-love. A theologian of Angers made a similar point: “Their boldness is so criminal that it attacks God’s power, enclosing him within the limits and the sphere of things he has made, as if creating from nothing would have exhausted his omnipotence.” Translated by Ariew, “Damned if You Do,” 259. 169. Huetiana, 195–99. 170. Huet, Traité de la situation du paradis terrestre (1691), 4. 171. Huetiana, 1–3. 172. Ibid., 20. 173. Ibid., 21. 174. “Lettre sur le parallèle des anciens et des modernes à M. Perrault,” 256, 258. 175. Huetiana, 6. 176. Huet, Mémoires, 63–64; Huetiana, 63–65. 177. “Lettre . . . à M. Perrault,” 256. 178. Huetiana, 33. 179. Ibid. Huet’s notion of the surpassing genius of the Ancients was related to a general belief in declension. Huet made the point about poetry in “Lettre . . . à M. Perrault,” 256. The trope regarding pigmies and giants goes back at least to the twelfth century, and “it appears to have been used at least once in every generation thereafter right down until the time of the quarrel, its convenient ambiguity making it equally useful to both sides.” Levine, “Ancients,” 76 and note 10 for bibliography on the trope. 180. Réné Rapin, Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité (Amsterdam, 1709), 1:49, 421. 181. BNF Lat 11451, fol. 91. A 1693 letter to Graevius confirms Huet’s intentions to satirize Baillet’s biography. BNF Lat 11433, fols. 452–57. On the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of Baillet’s biography, Gregor Sebba, “Adrien Baillet and the Genesis of His Vie de M. Des-Cartes,” in Problems of Cartesianism, ed. Thomas M. Lennon, John W. Nicholas, John W. Davis (Kingston, Ontario: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1982), 9–60; Rapetti, “Antoine Boschet: La satira contro Descartes,” in Percorsi, 91–109. The Jesuit Boschet’s letter thanking Huet for a copy of Nouveaux mémoires is hilarious (109). 182. Lettres inédites . . . [à] Charsigné, 11. 183. Lettres inédites de Claude Niçaise à Huet et à Bonjour, ed. L.-G. Pelissier (Dijon, France: Imprimerie de L’Union Typographique, 1889), 12–17. 184. As described by Huet in an April 1692 letter to Bossuet, Correspondance, 5:107–11. 185. Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, 32.


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Notes, pp. 179–185

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186. Boileau, Oeuvres complètes, BNF Réserves Y3, 712–13. 187. Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartesianisme (Paris, 1692), aiiiir-v. 188. Ibid., 13–14. 189. Huet deftly ridiculed Descartes’ evening of revelation by combining Descartes’ prose with his own irreverent interpolations. Ibid., 42. 190. Ibid., 55. 191. Ibid., 32. 192. Ibid., 3. 193. Ibid., 32. 194. Huet originally intended to continue the narrative. BNF Lat 11451, fols. 89–90. 195. William R. Shea, “Descartes and the Rosicrucians,” Annali dell’instituto e museo di storia della scienza di Firenze 4, no. 2 (1979): 29–47. 196. Quoting the Fama fraternitatis, Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1972), 238–39. 197. A 1692 letter to Niçaise, BNF Fr 9359, fol. 110. 198. Descartes’ philosophy had been attacked before as a form of “enthusiasm.” Frederic B. Burnham, “The More-Vaughn Controversy: The Revolt against Philosophical Enthusiasm,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 1 (1974): 33–49; on intellectuals’ mistrust for enthusiasm more generally and a brief discussion of Huet’s satire, see Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable, 117–20. 199. Huet, Mémoires, 40. 200. BNF Lat 11432, fols. 39–40. 201. Kurt Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth-Century Sweden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 184–87. 202. John Steffer, The History of Lapland wherein Are Shewed the Original, Manners, Habits, Marriages, Conjurations of that People (Oxford, 1674), 45. 203. Menjot à Huet, n.d., BNF Fr 15189, fols. 193–95. 204. Rapin, Les comparaisons, 357. 205. Years before, Huet inventoried nearly all the failings of Descartes and Cartesianism that he lampooned in Nouveaux mémoires in an assessment of Malebranche, which he inscribed onto the first page of his copy of Recherche de la vérité. Rodis-Lewis, “Huet lecteur de Malebranche,” 170. 206. À travers les papiers de Huet, 59. 207. Clarke, Occult Powers, 38. 208. On Leibniz and Cartesian in-fighting, Clarke, Occult Powers, 188, 80. 209. Quoted and translated by Ablondi, Cordemoy, 44.

Conclusion 1. Paraphrased from Schwab, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xi. 2. Ibid., 60. 3. Ibid., 64–65. 4. Ibid., 66, 93, 36, 63, 64. I have adjusted Schwab’s translation, preferring the use of “Litterateur” over “Poet” for “beau esprit,” and d’Alembert’s own “érudit” and


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Notes, pp. 185–190

“amour-propre” over “scholar” and “self-esteem.” While “litterateur” is not adequate either, it does broaden the range of creative endeavor falling within d’Alembert’s categorization, which I believe he intended. 5. Ibid., 77–80, 85. At midcentury, d’Alembert’s effort was typical when there was a “growing realization that contextualization alone could protect Descartes’ fame and leave him relatively unscathed by comparisons with Newton.” Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 107–9. 6. Published in the fourth edition of his collected poetry (1709), though I consulted the version in Poetarum ex academia gallica . . . carmina (The Hague, 1640), 19–24. 7. Yasmin Haskell and Philip Hardie, Poets and Teachers: Latin Didactic Poetry and the Didactic Authority of the Latin Poet from the Renaissance to the Present (Bari, Italy: Levante, 1999). 8. Vissac, Poésie latine, 77–87; Haskell, Loyola’s Bees. 9. My translation supplements Tolmer’s partial French translation (192–93). 10. Yasmin Haskell, “Renaissance Latin Didactic Poetry on the Stars: Wonder, Myth, and Science,” Renaissance Studies 12, no. 4 (1998), 495–522; Isabelle Pantin, “Res contenta doceri? Renaissance Cosmological Poetry, Classical Models and the Poetics of Didascalica,” in Haskell and Hardie, Poets and Teachers, 21–56. 11. Marcus Manilius, Astronomica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1. 25. 12. The Greek Mythology Link, http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML (accessed June 8, 2006). 13. Gautruche, Philosophiae, 4.258–68; Martha R. Baldwin, “Magnetism and the Anti-Copernican Polemic,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 16 (1985): 155–74; Stephen Pumfrey, “Neo-Aristotelianism and the Magnetic Philosophy,” 177–189. Magnetism figured in another Jesuit didactic poem, La Sante’s “Ferrum.” Haskell, Loyola’s Bees, 133–37. 14. BLA #541, #547; Oldenburg, Correspondence, 6:486–88. 15. Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004); for a more popular, if richly illustrated, account, Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Lost Quest for Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). Quotation from a 1698 letter to Niçaise, BNM 9359, fols. 115–16. 16. The passage on the axis particularly recalls Manilius, 1.275–93. 17. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 72. 18. The Enlightenment’s record on gender, as recent scholars have pointed out, was not the best. 19. Lettres . . . à Charsigné, 330. 20. His less appealing traits became increasingly prominent as he aged. Indeed, Tolmer’s description of Huet’s last years gives the impression of a feeble old man obsessed with money, prickly, and paranoid. Tolmer, Huet, 9.


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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Principal Archival Sources Ashburnham Collection 1866, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, Italy (abbreviated in text as BLA) Manuscripts, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (abbreviated in text as BNF Lat, Fr, NAFr, or NAL)

Works Consulted by Huet À travers les papiers de Huet, edited by Leon Pélissier. Paris, 1889. Alnetanae quaestiones. Venice, 1761. Censura philosophiae cartesianae. Paris, 1689. Translated by Thomas M. Lennon as Against Cartesian Philosophy. New York: Humanity Books, 2003. Commentaria in sacras scripturas. Cologne, 1685. Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus. Venice, 1761. Demonstration evangelica. Amsterdam, 1680. De optimo genere interpretatione libri duo. The Hague, 1683. Translated by James DeLater in “The 1683 De optimo genere interpretandi (On the Best Kind of Translating) of Pierre-Daniel Huet.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1997. Subsequently published as Translation Theory in the Reign of Louis XIV. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002. Diane de Castro, ou le faux Inca. Paris, 1728. Dissertations sur diverses matières de religion et de philologie. Paris, 1712. Huetiana. Paris, 1722. Mémoires de Daniel Huet: Évêque d’Avranches. Translated by Charles Nisard. 1853. Reprint with introduction and notes by Philippe-Joseph Salazar. Paris: Klincksieck, 1993. Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartesianisme. Paris, 1692. Les origines de la ville de Caen. Rouen, 1706. Les poésies françaises de Daniel Huet. Edited by Gaston Lavalley. Caen, n.d. Poemata Latina & Graeca. Utrecht, 1694. Traité de l’origine des romans. 1670. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. Traité philosophique sur la foiblesse de l’esprit humain. London, 1741. Traité sur la situation du paradis. Amsterdam, 1701.

239


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Published Correspondence Arnauld, Antoine. Lettres de M. Arnauld. Lausanne, 1775. Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne. Correspondance. Edited by Charles Urbain and Eugène Levesque. Paris: Hachette, 1909–25. Chapelain, Jean. Lettres inédites de Jean Chapelain à P.-D. Huet. Edited by Léon Pelissier. Paris, 1894. Cuper, Gisbert. Lettres de critique, de littérature, d’histoire écrites à divers savants de l’Europe par G. Cuper. Edited by J. De Beyer. Amsterdam, 1743. D’Orléans, Anne-Marie-Louise (Mlle de Monpensier). Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Demoiselle. Edited and translated by Joan DeJean. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. Gasté, Armand, ed. Lettres inédites de P.-D. Huet, évêque d’Avranches, à son neveu, M. de Charsigné. Caen, France: Delesques, 1901. ———. P.-D. Huet, . . . et le P. François Martin, . . . Correspondance inédite. Excerpted from Revue catholique de Normandie (1895–98). Graindorge, André. “L’Académie de physique de Caen d’après les lettres d’André Graindorge (1666–1675).” Edited by Harcourt Brown. Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Caen, n.s., 9 (1938): 115–208. ———. “Vingt-deux lettres inédites d’André Graindorge à Pierre-Daniel Huet.” Edited by Harcourt Brown. Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Caen, n.s., 10 (1938): 245–337. Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne. Correspondance. Edited by André Beaunier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried. Vol. 2 of Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Philosophischer Briefwechsel. Darmstadt, Germany: Otto Reichl, 1926. Ménage, Gilles. Lettres inédites de Gilles Ménage à Pierre-Daniel Huet (1659–1692). Edited by Lea Caminiti Pennarola. Naples: Liguori Editore, 1993. Niçaise, Claude. Lettres inédites de Claude Niçaise à Huet et à Bonjour. Edited by Léon Pelissier. Dijon, France, 1889. Oldenburg, Henry. Correspondence. Edited by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall. 13 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–86. Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de. Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage (1620– 1637). Edited by Agnès Bresson. Florence: Olschki, 1992. Simon, Richard. Lettres choisies de M. Simon. Rotterdam, 1702. Tamizey de Larroque, Philippe, ed. Collection de documents inédites de l’histoire de France. Paris, 1880–83.

Selected Primary Sources Arnauld, Antoine, and Nicole, Pierre. La logique ou l’art de penser. 1662. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Auzout, Adrien. L’éphéméride du comète (fait à Paris le 2 janvier 1665). Paris, 1665. Baillet, Adrien. Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs. 1685–86. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1967.


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Bochart, Samuel. Geographiae sacrae pars prior phaleg seu de dispersione gentium et terrarum divisione facta in aedificatione turris Babel. Frankfurt, 1681. Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Boyle, Robert. The Works. 6 vols. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1966. Causaubon, Meric. Treatise on Enthusiasme. 1655. Reprint, Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970. Chapelain, Jean. Opuscules critiques. Paris: Droz, 1936. Chauffepié, Jean Georges de. Nouveau dictionnaire historique et critique. Amsterdam, 1750. D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard N. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. D’Olivet, Pierre-Joseph Thoulier, ed. Poetarum ex academia gallica . . . carmina. The Hague, 1640. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. Volume 1 of The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1983. Desmolets, Pierre Nicholas. Memoires de littérature et d’histoire. 2 vols. Paris, 1749. Gassendi, Pierre. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. Edited and translated by Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972. Gautruche, Pierre. Mathematicae totius institutio. London, 1683. ———. Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius clara, brevis, et accurate institutio. Caen, France, 1661. Graindorge, André. Traité de l’origine des macreuses. Caen, France, 1680. ———. Guéret, Gabriel. Le Parnasse réformé. 1668. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1968. Henry, Charles. Un érudit: Homme du monde, homme d’église, homme de cour (1630–1721). Paris, 1879. Huet, P.-D., et al. Divers portraits. Caen, France, 1659. Huygens, Christiaan. Oeuvres complètes. 22 vols. The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1888–1950. ———. Le séjour de Christian Huygens à Paris. Edited by Henri L. Brugmans. Paris: Droz, 1935. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Translated by Allan P. Farrell. http://www.bc.edu/ bc_org/avp/ulib/digi/ratio/rati01599.pdf (accessed June 7, 2006). Jouvancy, Joseph de. De la manière d’apprendre et d’enseigner. Translated by H. Ferté. Paris, 1892. La Rochefoucauld, François de. Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales. Paris, 1665. Lesaulnier, Jean, ed. Port-Royal Insolite: Édition critique du “Recueil de choses diverses.” Paris: Klincksieck, 1992. Marion, Jean-Lud, ed. La querelle d’Utrecht. Paris: Les impressions nouvelles, 1988. Moisant de Brieux, Jacques. “Moisant de Brieux, fondateur de l’Académie de Caen (1614–1674)” and “Oeuvres choisis,” Mémoires de l’Académie nationale des sciences, arts, et belles-lettres de Caen (1872): 1038–58. Nicéron, Jean-Pierre. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres, avec le catalogue raisonné de leurs ouvrages. 1727–38. 6 vols. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971.


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Perrault, Charles. Parallèle des anciens et des modernes. 1692. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971. Possevino, Antonio. Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum, ad disciplinas et ad salutem omnium gentium procurandam. Cologne, 1607. Poulain de La Barre, François. Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Rapin, René. Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité. Amsterdam, 1709. ———. Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ourvrages des poètes anciens et modernes. 1674. Reprint, New York: Georg Olms, 1973. Rohan, Marie-Éléonore de. La morale du sage. Paris, 1667. ———. Poésies d’Anne Rohan-Soubise et lettres d’Eléonore Rohan-Montbazon. Paris, 1862. Scudéry, Madeleine de. Célinte. 1661. Reprint. Paris: Nizet, 1979. ———. “De l’air galant” et autres conversations. Edited by Delphine Denis. Paris: Champion, 1998. ———. Lettres inédites de Madeleine de Scudéry. Edited by Léon-G. Pélissier. Paris: Henri Leclerc, 1902. ———. Mademoiselle de Scudéry, sa vie et sa correspondence. Edited by E. J. B. Rathery and Boutron. 1873. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1971. ———. The Story of Sapho. Translated by Karen Newman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Soarez, Cyprian. De arte rhetorica libri tres, ex Aristotele, Cicerone & Quintiliano praecipue deprompti. Rotterdam, 1605. Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989. Sprat, Thomas. Histoire de l’institution, dessein et progres de la Societé Royale de Londres. Paris, 1670. ———. History of the Royal Society. 1667. Reprint, St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1959. Terence. The Comedies of Terence. Translated by Robert Graves. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968.

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Academia Briosa. See Moisant de Brieux Académie Putéane. See Dupuy brothers Academies (scientific), 126–29, 128; Académie de physique (Caen), 127, 131–32; Justel Academy, 127; Montmor Academy, 66, 87, 120, 127, 129; Royal Academy of Science, 78, 94, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 141, 175, 184; Royal Society of England, 115, 127–30, 132, 207n74; Thevenot, 125, 127 Academy of Inscriptions, 61, 72 Adolphus, Gustavus, 36 Ad usum Delphini. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works Agricola, Georg, 49 Alembert, Jean le Rond d,’ 10, 184–86, 189 Alexander the Great, 118 Apelles, 118 amour-propre (self-love), 15–16, 18, 19, 45, 90, 110, 133, 156, 170, 171, 175, 177, 187, 194n23 Ancients, 1; on comets, 121; as emotional register, 46; on female rhetoric, 92; Huet as Ancient, 7, 178; in Huet’s Traité sur la foiblesse de l’esprit humain, 143; giants and pygmies, 178, 236n179; in Jesuit pedagogy, 19, 22, 26, 47; and Jesuit science, 120; on salamanders, 124; uses of, 63–64. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: early embrace and rejection of Cartesianism; Rapin, René: Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes; Perrault, Claude

anti-Cartesianism, 4, 14, 115, 165–66, 176–77. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: early embrace and rejection of Cartesianism, anti-Cartesianism; Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works: Censura philosophiae cartesianae, Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme; Graindorge, André: critique of Cartesianism antierudition, 6, 10, 91, 145, 146, 164, 167, 170 Aquinas, Thomas, 136, 137 Aristotle, 142, 144, 155, 164, 167; and Aquinas, 136; Bernier on, 165; Boyle on, 133; female capacities, 82; Gassendi on, 122; in Huet’s Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme, 180, 181, 183; Huygens on, 119; in Jesuit pedagogy, 18; Leibniz compares to Descartes, 183; Poetics, 31; projected Mambrun commentary on, 33; science, 117. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: and Aristotle; Perrault, Charles; Rapin, René: Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité, Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes Arnauld, Angélique, 147 Arnauld, Antoine: anti-pedantry, 170; in Demonstratio evangelica, 154, 173, 176; Graindorge on La logique, 134–35; on Huet’s Censura, 136; on Jesuit pedagogy, 46. See also Jansenism Arnauld, Robert, 147 atomism and atoms, 47, 97, 120, 130, 133, 169, 183. See also Epicureanism

257


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258

Index

Augustine, 13–14, 16–17, 73, 148–49 Auzout, Adrien, 121 Avaux, comte de (Claude de Mesmes), 32, 34 Bacon, Francis, 115, 173, 197 Baillet, Adrien: Jugemens des savans, 51, 58, 60, 62, 86, 93, 144, 152; La vie de M. Descartes, 170, 171, 178, 179 Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, 2, 7, 8, 51, 113; Anne Dacier’s role, 86; Huet’s response to Perrault, 112, 177–78; meeting at Académie Française, 161–62; in Perrault’s writings, 170–71 Basnage, Jacques, 151 Bayle, Pierre, 2, 36, 39, 54, 151 Bellefont, Laurence Gigault de, 80, 81, 88, 146 Bergerac, Cyrano de, 92 Bernard, Edward, 153, 157–58, 173, 177 Bernier, François, 165, 168 Bibliothèque universelle, 152, 162 Bible, 14, 19, 28, 99, 133, 154, 172 Bibliotheca selecta. See Possevino, Antonio Blondel, David, 32, 36 Bochart, Samuel, 74; as gatekeeper, 32, 35–36; biography, 27–28; collapse of relationship with Huet, 15, 39, 201n155; in dispute with Ménage, 63; Mambrun’s objections to, 28, 29–30 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 51, 64, 109, 152, 165; “Fiat lux” dispute, 158–63 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 4, 83, 166, 195n101 Bosc, Jacques du, 92 Bouhours, Dominique, 88, 146, 162 Boulliau, Ismael, 37, 67, 119, 123 Boyle, Robert, 115, 129–31, 133–34, 141, 150–51 Boxhorn, Marcus, 38 Brahe, Tycho, 117, 118, 127 Braun, Johannes, 28 Briet, Philippe, 67 cabinets de curiosités, 124


Cardano, Girolamo, 14 Cartesianism, 2, 114, 119, 124, 127, 165–69. See also anti-Cartesianism; cartésiennes; Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: early embrace and rejection of Cartesianism, anti-Cartesianism; La Barre, François Poulain de cartésiennes, 168 Casaubon, Isaac, 11, 38, 94, 149, 170 Cassini, Giovanni, 127 Castigliogne, Baldassare, 91 Catullus, 19, 20 censorship. See Pirot, Edme Chapelain, Jean, 32, 72, 112, 159; biography, 62; Boileau’s opinion of, 159; on Caen, 52; on friendship, 40, 41; on Huet’s neo-Latin poetry, 56, 66, 75; as intellectual intermediary, 25, 33, 34, 54, 61; nature of correspondence, 123; program of royal gratifications, 60, 68, 69; and science, 121, 127, 128, 129; tutoring Madame de Sevigné, 83 Charron, Pierre, 40 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 29, 35–36, 54, 55, 60, 92, 181 Cicero, 20, 22, 24, 40, 93; De amicitia, 40, 73, 102 Clavius, Christoph, 117, 118 Clerselier, Claude, 166 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 41, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68–70, 72, 129, 159 Commentaria in sacras scripturas. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works Commire, Jean, 34, 49, 51 Conrart, Valentin, 62, 66, 67, 103 Conversation: learned, 94, 143, 149; salon, 94–98, 216n102 Cordemoy, Gerauld de, 166 Cormis, Louis, 120, 142 correspondence. See letter writing cosmology, 117; Ptolemaic-Magini, 117; Copernican, 117, 121; Tychonic, 117 Cossart, Gabriel, 34, 67 Cotin, Charles, 92

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Index Council of Trent, 147 Croiset, Jean, 49 Culture War, 8–9 Dacier, Anne, 80, 81, 86–87, 93, 146 Daillé, Jean, 148 Democritus, 120, 155 Demonstratio evangelica. See Huet, PierreDaniel, works De optimo genere interpretandi. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works Descartes, Catherine, 168–69 Descartes, René, 2, 24, 35, 121, 126, 132, 134, 137, 141, 144, 146, 155, 156, 166; d’Alembert on Descartes, 185–86, 188; Discourse on Method, 14, 142, 163–64, 166; Gautruche’s critique of, 116; Leibniz on Descartes, 173; Thomas Sprat’s critique of, 133. See also Graindorge, André: critique of Descartes; Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: early embrace and rejection of Descartes, anti-Cartesianism Deschamps, Étienne-Agard, 34 Deshoulières, Madame de, 146, 168, 169 Despautère, Jean, 20, 47–48 Dioscorides, 124 disputatio. See Society of Jesus (pedagogy) Dissertations sur diverses matières de religion et de philologie. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works Divers portraits. See Montpensier, duchesse de Duc, Fronton du, 94, 149 Duhamel, Jean-Baptiste, 127, 128, 141–42, 143 Dupré, Maria, 80, 81, 83–84, 86, 168–69, 190 Dupuy brothers, 25, 32, 35, 62, 94 Dupuy, Jacques, 37, 49 education: female, 82–84 education: male. See Society of Jesus (pedagogy) Encyclopédie, 184, 188 Epicureanism, 120, 136; Gassendist-Epicureanism, 114


259

épicuriennes, 146 Epicurus, 47, 120, 155 Erasmus, 1, 11, 14, 24, 26, 40, 83, 94, 148 eruditio, 20, 37 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-, 83, 212n20 Fléchier, Esprit, 51, 59, 234n140 Fleury, Claude, 83 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 168, 170 Fouquet, Nicolas, 66, 84, 159 Francius, Peter, 43, 59 friendship (intellectual). See Republic of Letters friendship (mondain), 101, 103–4 Gale, Thomas, 133 Galileo, 117, 121, 173 Garnier, Jean, 34 Gassendi, Pierre, 64, 120, 126, 136, 165, 168, 183 Gautruche, Pierre, 116–17, 118, 126, 141, 142, 143 Gibbon, Edward, 11 Golius, Jacob, 38, 32 Gournay, Marie de, 82 Graevius, Johannes Georg, 25, 36, 68, 87; friendship with Huet, 44; and Huet’s neo-Latin poetry, 45, 56; nature of correspondence, 120–21, 123, 155, 156; regarding Ad usum Delphini, 138, 173 Graindorge, André, 4, 114, 121, 127, 129, 146, 185; Ad usum Delphini edition of Lucretius, 138–39; admirer of English science, 130, 131, 132; critique of Descartes, 134–36; and scientific academies, 128; scientific attitudes and interests shared with Huet, 122–26, 127; transubstantiation, 137–38 Graindorge, Jacques, 94, 123 Habert de Montmor, Henri-Louis, 32, 66, 67, 75, 120 Halley, Antoine, 51, 52, 53–54, 58, 74, 118

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260

Index

Harvey, Gabriel, 117, 124 Hebrew: Catholic distrust of, 29, 199n101. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: Hebrew studies; Society of Jesus (pedagogy) Heinsius, Daniel, 32, 38, 54 Heinsius, Nicolas, 32, 59 Hercules, 50, 73, 74 Hobbes, Thomas, 155 Homer, 68, 86; Iliad, 110; Odyssey, 31 Hooke, Robert, 131 Horace: allusions to, 44, 48, 64, 120, 163; and Augustus as model of patronage, 64–65, 66, 68, 70; and Boileau, 51, 159; Huet’s poetry compared to, 58, 59, 66, 87, 120, 186; influence on French poetry, 64; Jesuit pedagogy, 19, 20, 47, 48, 84, 110, 186; as model of civilité, 65; Huet on, 52. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life Hôtel de Liancourt, 169 Hôtel de Rambouillet, 32, 54, 60, 91, 95 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: anti-Cartesianism, 174–76, 178–83; and Aristotle, 120, 133; biographical summary, 3–4; on conduct in Republic of Letters, 151; Copernicanism, 121, 122; defense of studia humanitatis, 172–73, 176–77; defense of theses at Caen collège, 118; early embrace and rejection of Cartesianism, 119, 135–36, 226n150; Epicureanism, 120, 133, 222n59; finances, 112–13; French poetry, 105–6; friendships with women, Chapter 3 passim; French poetry, 105–6; Hebrew studies, 28–29; and Horace, 66, 69, 76, 84, 222n54; Huet’s republic, 9; intellectual networking, 32, 33–34, 35, 38–39, 60, 61, 65–66, 67, 118–19, 128; mother, 78; neo-Latin poet, 51–52, 53, 55–58 (see also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works under titles of individual poems); nobility of, 192n9; reader of Thomas Sprat, 132–33; and Richard Simon, 152, 156; Skepticism, 4, 120, 121, 122,


133, 139, 189 (see also Huet-Pierre Daniel, works: Traité philosophique sur la foiblesse de l’esprit humain); and Spinoza, 153–55. See also Bochart, Samuel; Dacier, Anne; Graindorge, André; Huet: Pierre-Daniel, works: Censura philosophiae cartesianae, Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme; Lafayette, comtesse de; Mambrun, Pierre; Rapin, René; Rochechouart, Marie-Élisabeth de; Rohan, Marie-Eléonore de; Scudéry, Madeleine de Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works: “Ad Aegidium Menagium Epistola,” 73–75; “Ad Leydam Urbem,” 57; “Ad Manes Salmasii,” 57; Ad usum Delphini, 86– 87, 138–39, 172–73, 187; Alnetanae quaestiones, 94, 140; Censura philosophiae cartesianae, 135–36, 144, 172–73, 174–76; Commentaria in sacras scripturas, 37–38, 146–49; Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (autobiography), 13–17; “De la grace de Dieu,” 150; Demonstratio evangelica, 4, 28, 36, 114, 126, 140, 141, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153–60, 165, 173–74, 179, 185, 188; De optimo genere interpretandi, 33, 53, 60, 62, 89, 94, 99, 138, 141, 143; Diane de Castro, ou le faux Inca, 77, 108; Dissertation de la nature des comètes, 121; Dissertations sur diverses matières de religion et de philologie, 15, 17, 163; “Elegia de poetis cadomensibus,” 52; “Epiphora,” 57–58; Huetiana, 13, 16, 17, 27, 172, 176–77; “Magnes,” 56, 186–88; Memorial poem for Mambrun, 75–76; “Mimus, sive Speculum,” 99–101; Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme, 144, 178–83; Ode, Athena, 70; Ode, Peace of the Pyrénées, 65–66; Traité de l’origine des romans, 108–12; Traité philosophique sur la foiblesse de l’esprit humain, 10, 135, 140–43, 227n169; “Vitis,” 55–57, 59 Huetiana. See Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works

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Index Huguenots, 55, 146, 152; HuguenotCatholic relations, 198n90. See also Bochart, Samuel Humanism (and humanities): 3, 31, 165; philology, 2, 36, 163, 164; criticism and scholarly editing, 37–38. See also Society of Jesus (pedagogy) Hume, David, 10 Huygens, Christiaan, 66, 67, 119, 121, 127, 128, 129, 168, 175, 183 imitatio, 48, 53, 204n15 Isarn, Samuel, 67, 103, 107 Israel, Menasseh Ben, 36, 153 Jansen, Cornelius, 146–49 Jansenism, 34, 40, 60, 146–49, 161–62 Jerome, 37 Josephus, Flavius, 35; Testimonium flavianum, 157 Jouvancy, Joseph de, 21, 21, 23, 24, 47, 50, 64 Jugemens des savans. See Baillet, Adrien Julius Caesar, 20 Justel, Henri, 127, 128, 129, 130–32, 156 Kepler, Johannes, 119 Kircher, Athanasius, 187 La Barre, François Poulain de, 8, 167–68 Labbé, Philippe, 34 La Bruyère, Jean de, 99 Laertes, Diogenes, 60 Lafayette, comtesse de (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne), 60, 80, 81, 102, 103, 106, 112, 113, 190; assessment of Huet, 98, 106, 107; attitude toward correspondence, 104; composition of Zaïde, 107, 109; education of, 84–86; Lambert’s assessment of, 77; reticence as an author, 87–88, 98 La Fontaine, Jean de, 74 Lambecius, Peter, 36 Lambert, marquise de (Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles), 77, 81, 82, 108


261

Lamoignon, Guillaume de, 33, 51, 62, 65, 66, 94; Academy, 61, 62, 67 La Peyrère, Isaac, 155 Laplanders, 179, 180, 181, 182 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 16, 19, 90, 99, 184, 188 La Rue, Charles de, 43, 50, 51, 140–41, 227n169 La Sablière, Marguerite de, 168 La Vigne, Anne de, 168 La vie de M. Descartes. See Baillet, Adrien Le Clerc, Jean, 150, 162 Le Fèvre, Anne. See Anne Dacier Le Fèvre, Tanneguy, 43, 86, 157, 203n187 Learned women, 86–89 Leibniz, Gottfried, 14, 173, 174, 183 Leiden (city and university), 28, 36, 38, 44, 54, 56, 57, 157, 165 Le Moyne, Étienne, 156, 165 Letter writing (learned), 24–27, 34 Letter writing (mondain), 79, 101–5 Lipsius, Justus, 11, 24, 36 Livy, 20 Loménie, Henri-Auguste de, 67 Longinus, 153, 159–61, 162 Longueville, duc de, 53 Loret, Jean, 49, 50 Louis XIV, 49, 65, 68, 70–71, 72, 98, 147, 170; royal gratifications, 68–70 Loyola, Ignatius, 26, 30, 116, 147 Lucan, 28 Lucretius, 30, 44, 45, 47, 57, 138–39; Ad usum Delphini edition of Luther, Martin, 148 Luynes, duc de, 166 Macé, Gilles, 118, 119 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigne, 83 Malebranche, Nicolas, 93 Mambrun, Pierre, 17, 23, 24–27, 28–34, 32, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 50, 55, 56, 58– 59, 60, 61, 62, 70, 73, 75–76, 84, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123, 127, 133, 147, 182 Manilius, 187 Mazarin, Jules (Cardinal), 35, 36, 38, 51, 65

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262

Index

Menáge, Gilles, 32, 33, 34, 61, 67, 68, 70, 87, 91, 123; and Anne Dacier, 86; biography, 60; critic and distributor of Huet’s neo-Latin poetry, 62–64, 65, 66, 70, 75, 84; opinion of Mambrun, 58; relationship with Huet, 25, 26, 37, 38, 42, 43–44, 75, 102, 103, 106; tutoring Madame de Lafayette, 85–86; tutoring Madame de Sevigné, 83 Menjot, Antoine, 182 Mentel, Jacques, 67 Mémoires de Trevoux, 162 Mercure de France, 49 Mercure galant, 49, 51, 64 Méré, chevalier de (Antoine Gombaud), 97 Mersenne, Marin, 144 Milton, John, 38, 56 Moderns. See Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns; Perrault, Charles Moisant de Brieux, Jacques: as gatekeeper, 32, 33, 45, 51, 53, 54, 56, 60, 66, 74, 94; Academia Briosa, 55, 62–64 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 2, 60, 92, 159 Montaigne, Michel de, 16, 17, 18, 94, 121, 216n98 Montausier, duc de (Charles de SainteMaure), 32, 33, 53, 54, 112, 159, 161, 162, 163, 187, 190; Ad usum Delphini, 87, 139, 172 Montespan, marquise de (FrançoiseAthénaïs de Rochechouart-Mortemart), 80, 81, 98, 104, 105, 106 Montpensier, duchesse de (Anne-Louise d’Orléans), 81, 106, 108 Morus, Alexander, 25, 32, 38–39, 43, 44, 45, 57–58 Naudé, Gabriel, 32, 35 Neuré, Michel, 120, 122 neo-Aristotelian science, 114, 116, 164, 189. See also Gautruche, Pierre Niçaise, Claude, 153, 179 Nicéron, Jean-Pierre, 17


Nicole, Pierre, 134, 147, 154, 165, 170, 173, 176 Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 152 novels, 87, 92, 95. See also Huet, PierreDaniel, works: Diane de Castro, ou le faux Inca, Traité de l’origine des romans; Lafayette, comtesse de: composition of Zaïde Oldenburg, Henry, 86, 115, 130–32, 173, 187 On the Sublime. See Longinus Origen, 4, 10, 30, 156. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works: Commentaria in sacras scripturas Ovid, 20, 41, 52, 56, 59, 85 Parker, Samuel, 121, 133 Parnasse reformé, Le, 22, 68 Pascal, Blaise, 2, 14, 16, 147, 162 Pelagianism and Pelagius, 148–48 Pellisson, Paul, 65, 67, 84, 95, 104, 159 peregrinatio academica, 35–39, 182 Périer, Charles du, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 208n102 Perrault, Charles, 1, 4, 171; Parallèles des anciens et moderns, 112, 170, 173, 177, 178, 179; “Le Siècle de Louis le Grand,” 161, 170, 173 Petau, Denis, 32, 33, 36, 50, 51, 64 Petrarch, 13, 73 Phaedrus, 21, 34, 74 Philosophical Transactions. See Academies, scientific: Royal Society of England Pirot, Edme, 141, 144, 152, 165, 227n169 Pléiade latine, 2, 51, 62 Pliny, 124 Plutarch, 28, 151 Poetry, neo-Latin: 38; Chapter 2 passim; circulation, 61, 67; competitions, 53; critiques by Huet’s friends, 62–64, 65, 70; as gifts, 45, 54, 59, 66; patronage received for, 51, 68–69; publication, 55–56, 65–66; in Republic of Letters, 55–56; and rise of humanism, 203n4; and women, 46, 204n5, 207n8. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel,

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Index works; Mambrun, Pierre; Moisant de Brieux, Jacques; Rapin, René; Society of Jesus (pedagogy): neo-Latin poetry, theatre Poetry, French: 105. See Huet, PierreDaniel, life: French poetry Pontanus, Jacob, 19, 48, 57 Porée, Charles, 50 Possevino, Antonio, 19, 24, 47 Poussines, Pierre, 151 précieuse, 168, 169, 215n82 prisca theologia, 28 Propertius, 20 Quarrel of the Inscriptions, 72, 113, 145 querelle des femmes, 82–83 Quintilian, 20, 46, 151 Rapin, René, 13, 32, 61, 68, 82, 84, 87, 112, 146, 161; anti-Jansenism, 147; biography, 61–62; critique of Huet’s neo-Latin poetry, 68, 75; intermediary with Colbert, 69–70; Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité, 178; nature of correspondence, 123; as neo-Latin poet, 34, 51, 62, 63, 67, 172; Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes, 65, 71–72, 111, 145, 162; relationship with Huet, 33, 41, 66, 75, 134, 153 Ratio discendi et docendi. See Joseph de Jouvancy Ratio studiorum. See Society of Jesus (pedagogy) Régis, Pierre-Sylvain, 166, 179 Regius, Henricus, 165, 181 Renaudot, Eusèbe, 162–63 Renaudot, Théophraste, 94 Republic of Letters: Bayle and Boyle on conduct in, 150–51; confessional difference, 5, 22, 192n16; conflict, 38; Descartes, René: Discourse on Method; salons; “Enlightenment,” 3, 189–90; Erasmus on, 1; gatekeepers, 32, 33–34; Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works: Traité de l’origine des romans; Huet’s


263

republic, 9; intellectual friendship, 39–44; La Barre, François Poulain de; neo-Latin poetry, 56–58; “old,” 2, 3, 5–6, 145, 191n3; threats to (see antierudition; Cartesianism; cartésiennes); Vigneul-Marville defines, 171 rhetoric: Moses. See Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas: “Fiat lux” dispute; friendship (intellectual); Society of Jesus (pedagogy): rhetoric Riccioli, Giambattista, 115 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal, 38, 51 Richeome, Louis, 19, 20 Richesource, Jean de Soudier de, 127 Ripa, Cesare, 100–101 Rochechouart, Marie-Élisabeth de, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 100–101, 104 Rohan, Marie-Eléonore de, 14, 80, 81, 93, 98, 101, 103, 105, 106–8, 109, 112, 190; La morale du sage, 88–91 Rohault, Jacques, 127, 166, 168 Rosicrucianism, 180, 181 Ross, Alexander, 59 Saint-Cyran, Abbé de, 147 salons, 78–79, 89, 91–93, 106, 111–12; in Caen, 54, 91. See also conversation; Hôtel de Rambouillet Sandius, Christophe, 36, 153, 155, 156–57, 158 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 54 Santeuil, Jean-Baptiste, 1–2, 51, 62, 63 Saumaise, Claude, 32, 36, 38–39, 56–57, 59, 72, 86 Scaliger: father and son, 14, 35, 86; Joseph, 36, 38 Schurman, Anna Maria van, 82, 83 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 32, 60, 61, 66, 80, 85, 91, 93, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112; Artamène, 109; Carte du Tendre, 79; Célinte, 95–96; Clélie, 79; “De la conversation,” 94–95; “De l’incertitude,” 96–98 Segrais, Jean Renaud de, 59, 90, 91, 109, 130 Séguier, Pierre, 53

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264

Index

Selden, John, 37 self-fashioning, 25, 40 self-love. See amour-propre Seneca, 48 Sevigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (Madame de), 52, 83, 103 Simon, Richard, 28, 152, 156, 165, 229n18 Sirmond, Jacques, 32, 33–34 Skepticism, 10, 97, 115, 120, 121. See also Huet, Pierre-Daniel, life: Skepticism; Huet, Pierre-Daniel, works: Traité de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain Soarez, Cyprian, 20 Socinianism, 156 Society of Jesus: anti-Jansenism, 147. See also Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas: “Fiat lux” dispute Society of Jesus (pedagogy): 18–23; disputatio, 21, 33, 116–17, 118; grades, 22; and humanism, 19–20; neo-Latin poetry, 46–49; Parisian method, 20; prelectio, 20–21; Ratio studiorum, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 50, 117; rhetoric, 20, 49; science instruction, 115–18; scholastic logic, 19, 116; 47, 116; teacher-student relations, 23–24; textbooks, 20; theatre, 49–51 Spinoza, Baruch, 153–55, 156, 158, 160, 161


Sprat, Thomas, 115, 131, 132–33 Stensen, Niels, 125, 129 studia humanitatis, 18, 22, 184. See also Society of Jesus (pedagogy): humanism Terence, 26–27; Adelphi, 27; The Brothers, 27; The Mother-In-Law, 26 Thistlewood, Thomas, 10 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, 94, 149 Tibullius, 20 Tilladet, Lamarque de, 15 Tilly, Madame de, 54, 80, 91, 108 transubstantiation, 136–37, 139 Urfé, Honoré d,’ 95, 109 Valois, Henri and Adrien, 67 Vavasseur, François, 32, 34, 51, 64, 68 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 59 Vienne, Philibert de, 101 Vigneul-Marville, 171 Virgil, 2, 23, 52, 56, 58, 59, 62, 85, 114, 140; Aeneas and Dido, 114; Aeneas and Gates of Horn and Ivory, 114 Vives, Juan Luis, 25 Vossius, father and son, 32, 33, 54; Gerard, 28, 36; Isaac, 36, 54, 119, 165, 187 Ysarn, Samuel. See Isarn, Samuel

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