(Love) Letters: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Epistolary Impulse

Abstract

In the fall of 1653, Madeleine de Scudery had just completed Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus and not yet begun Clelie, histoire romaine. Along with several members of her Paris salon she took advantage of the first ever intra-mural mail system, inaugurated in August 1653: they exchanged letters in which they discussed everything from their feelings for each other to the topics for the next salon, known as “le samedi.” Scudery and Paul Pellisson subsequently collected these letters and had them copied and bound to form a manuscript. The nineteenth-century owner of the manuscript titled it Chroniques des samedis, which has long encouraged scholars to think of it as merely the account of the salon meetings. Chroniques is much more than that, as it portrays in letters Scudery's search for her next novel—its subject and especially its form—as well as displaying her creating fictions in letter form. The new penny post only operated for about three months, yet Scudery's manuscript reveals the understanding that this...