Twilight Approaches
David A. Bell
- The Age of Conversation by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh
NYRB, 488 pp, £17.99, October 2005, ISBN 1 59017 141 1
There is a fable about the French past that goes as follows. Sometime in the 17th century, the country’s proud noble caste was humbled and tamed by imperious ministers and kings. Where once it had swayed the destinies of Europe, it was now confined to the gilded cage of the royal court, and the elegant salons of Paris. Others might have raged against this fate, but the French nobility adapted to it. Its members developed exquisite manners. They made beauty their grail, and cultivated sophisticated, graceful pleasures. Guided by refined salonnières, they revelled in wit, savoured the joys of idleness, and raised polished conversation to the level of fine art. Sometimes their delights devolved into debauch, but even the debauch retained a certain indefinable elegance. The nobles never forgot who they were. And when the supreme test came, in the French Revolution, they did their duty with a gallantry that shamed their coarse, plebeian tormentors. In the killing fields of the Vendée, noblemen and noblewomen alike rediscovered the heroism of their chivalric ancestors. In the Jacobin prisons, they retained their dignity and savoir-vivre. According to Hippolyte Taine, ‘women particularly went to the scaffold with the ease and serenity with which they attended a soirée.’
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[*] Fayard, 572 pp., £30, October 2005, 2 213 62292 2.
Letters
Vol. 28 No. 13 · 6 July 2006
From Benedetta Craveri
David A. Bell implies that I intended The Age of Conversation to be a comprehensive history of French salons in the 17th and 18th centuries (LRB, 11 May). Rather, as I state in the book, my purpose was to trace the development of sociabilité – the ‘art of living in society’. This concept was already considered to be what I describe as a ‘characteristic of French identity’ in the age of Montesquieu and Hume, and the salons were only one of its many expressions. I explore how the protagonists themselves reflected and wrote about their inherited codes of conduct; and how they perceived the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of their own public image. My account was informed by close analysis of historical sources; it was not, as Bell argues, a retrospective projection of an idealised vision of my own.
Bell accuses me of ignoring themes and problems that have preoccupied scholars, although I make explicit reference to this research in my 109-page bibliographic essay, which he does not appear to have read. He writes, for example, that my book resembles a ‘fable’ about France’s ‘proud noble caste’, and goes on to declare that ‘the French nobility was never a caste.’ It is true that I occasionally used, for want of a better term, the word ‘caste’, alternating it with the (equally imperfect) word ‘class’. But I also made clear in my bibliographic essay, that ‘if the word “class” is used, it is because social mobility existed within the society of the three orders, making the use of the word “caste” unsuitable for the nobility.’
He also suggests that I ignore the king’s constant bestowal of new titles, which had ‘the result that by 1789 a large majority of title-holders could not trace their noble ancestry back beyond 1600’, although I explicitly discuss ‘the process of integration between the nobility and the bourgeoisie’, citing, among others, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La Noblesse au XVIIIe siècle. Bell also claims that my ‘fable’ does not address the nobility’s ‘almost bourgeois dedication to profit’, although I refer to Daniel Dessert’s 1984 study, Argent, pouvoir et société au grand siècle, ‘which records the intense financial activity in the highest reaches of society … and points out a “congenital” contradiction between the financial organisation under the Ancien Régime and caste morality.’ Bell objects too that ‘the word “salon” was not used to describe gatherings like Madame de Rambouillet’s until 1794’; a point I made both in my introduction and in the entry on the salon in my bibliographic essay. Before criticising my use of sources, he should have read my footnotes. The description of Madame de Rambouillet’s Blue Room, which Bell deems ‘perilously close to the style of Mills and Boon’, is not in my own ‘narrative mode’. The passage paraphrases ‘Emile Magne’s scholarly imagination’, as I make clear both in the paragraph concerned and in an accompanying footnote.
Bell is entitled to criticise writers such as Hippolyte Taine, but Taine’s account of the Ancien Régime remains one of the most interesting and authoritative. To attribute to one of the great writers of the 19th century ‘prose worthy of The Scarlet Pimpernel’ is troubling. As for the unflattering comments he reserves for my own prose, I am somewhat consoled by his comments about Taine.
Benedetta Craveri
Rome
Vol. 28 No. 15 · 3 August 2006
From David A. Bell
Benedetta Craveri says that I accuse her of an ignorance of basic social history, and that I failed to read her footnotes (Letters, 6 July). In fact, in my review I paid tribute to her ‘serious research’. What I claimed, and stand by, is that her book ends up resembling traditional fables about the French nobility despite this research. I did not, as she seems to think, argue that her book adheres to the fables in every particular; had it done so, it would hardly have been worth reviewing. As to the word salon, the point is not that Craveri knows it came into common usage only after 1794 (I did not deny that she knows this), but that she does not take this fact seriously. Curiously, Craveri tries to deflect my criticism of her prose style by insisting that one of the several passages I cited as illustration is nothing but a ‘paraphrase’ of Emile Magne. Happy as I am to learn that she now wishes to disclaim the passage in question, it is not, contrary to what she says in her letter, at all an obvious paraphrase. Nor does she seem entirely aware that ‘paraphrase’ means to render something in one’s own words.
David A. Bell
Baltimore, Maryland
