Madame de Graffigny and Her Salon

Abstract

Madame de Graffigny and Her Salon ENGLISH SHOWALTER, Jr. The salon, which, as every student of French literature learns, was the cradle of classicism and the home of good taste for two centuries, has disappeared not only from French society but apparently from the concerns of eighteenth-century scholars as well. The 1950 edition of the Critical Bibliography of French Literature required one hundred twenty-five entries, almost four per cent of the total for the eighteenth century, to cover the salons and the various salon hostesses; in the 1968 supplement, there are only twenty-three entries, less than one per cent. In recent years such bibliographies as PMLA are barren of titles mentioning the salon, and the recent directory of eighteenthcentury scholars published by the Societe frangaise d’etude du dix-huitieme siecle lists nobody who mentioned the salon as a current interest, except me. Even the famous hostesses, Mme. de Lambert, Mme. de Tencin, Mme. Du Maine, Mme. Du Deffand, Mile, de Lespinasse, Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. Helvetius, appear infrequently and only as letter writers or in relation to someone else like Voltaire. This is all the more remarkable because there is an evident boom in studies on women: women writers, images of Virtually all the material for this study comes from the unpublished Graffigny papers in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, by whose permission they are quoted. 377 378 / ENGLISH SHOWALTER, Jr. women in literature, education of women, feminism, and the like. The reasons for this neglect are, I think, complex and interest­ ing. To simplify greatly, students of literature have tended more and more to favor purely textual analysis, while historians, although social history is enjoying a period of growth and innovation, have not yet moved into this particular void. The salon presents problems of documentation far more difficult than, say, the Encyclopedie, the provincial academies, or the periodical press, to cite three areas where quantitative methods and team research have produced excellent results; and previous histories of the salon, almost all anecdotal and imaginative, do not provide even the starting point for a reassessment. In the special section on “problemes actuels de la recherche” in Dix-huitieme Siecle, 5 (1973), several communications discuss the revolution in the social history of culture; and Eric Walter’s article “Sur 1’intelligentsia des Lumieres” cites the salon among several similar topics remaining to be studied with the new methods. The analysis presented here is an attempt to use the voluminous documentation in Mme. de Graffigny’s unpublished papers to provide the outline for a systematic study of the salon as a phenomenon of social history. A basic definition of a salon states that it is a room, and by extension, a group of people who meet regularly in that room. The first and most obvious requirement for a hostess is then to possess a suitable space. The wealthy and aristocratic families began with an advantage in this respect; Mme. de Lambert, Mme. de Tencin, Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. Du Deffand, Mme. Helvetius, for example, surely never had much worry about where they would receive their guests. For Mme. Geoffrin, indeed, the rooms served as an additional pretext for patronizing her guests, since she decorated them with works of art. There is a second group, however, for whom the meeting place did represent an initial and even continu­ ing problem. Julie de Lespinasse, living on the generosity of Mme. Du Deffand and receiving guests in her chambre before they went down to her protectress’s salon, is a famous example. Mme. de Graffigny risked a great deal in order to get a house, when the prospect of holding a salon was still very remote and had Madame de Graffigny and Her Salon / 379 probably never occurred to her; but the house brought her a small measure of independence. When she first arrived in Paris, in the spring of 1739, she expected to live with the Duchesse de Richelieu as lady-in-waiting; but in August 1740 the Duchesse died, leaving Mme. de Graffigny without resources. For a while it seemed that Mme. de Graffigny would have to retire to a provincial convent, those in Paris being too costly. Ultimately, though...