In his Essai sur les moeurs, Voltaire characterizes India as a country “de qui toute la terre a besoin, et qui seule n’a besoin de personne [that the whole world needs but is alone in needing no one].”1 Voltaire’s sweeping statement characterizing India as the only country that the entire world needs and simultaneously as the only country that needs no one can strike a modern reader as curious or even unbelievable. Where did Voltaire derive such an elevated impression of India? Did others share his opinion? How could such an eminent philosopher living in what was considered by eighteenth-century Europe as one of the West’s most highly developed and enviable cultures regard a foreign, eastern, non-Christian land with such respect and admiration? In order to begin to answer such questions, we must return not to Voltaire’s eighteenth-century France but rather to a period one hundred years earlier, when France first developed a strong and sustained interest in “les Indes orientales.”
Until relatively recently, much of what we knew of the relationship between France and India from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century was filtered through the nineteenth century’s control of historical knowledge concerning India, especially by the British.2 The past few years have seen a number of historians work to remove this overlay of interpretation in order to explore the encounter between the French and “les Indes orientales.” While we may have a clearer sense of what historical events and actors constituted France’s contact with India, an essential question remains to be explored: What effect did the contact France developed with India primarily from the early to mid-seventeenth century have on the culture of what would become known as France’s “Grand Siècle?” In other words, did the knowledge and perception of India transmitted through traders, missionaries, and intrepid travelers leave any enduring trace on seventeenth-century French culture, in particular on the mindset of this pivotal period?
An intriguing gathering, the salon of Marguerite de la Sablière, can illuminate how knowledge of India resonated with the French public and affected the mindset of classical France. Like the question of India itself, La Sablière’s salon has remained largely in the shadows of history. If anyone has heard of La Sablière, it is most likely as the patron of La Fontaine. Her influence on French culture, however, extends far beyond that of patron to one specific author. La Sablière created one of the most influential salons of the period, and certainly the one with the most eclectic group of individuals, many of whom immediately come to mind when one thinks of Le Grand Siècle, and others who, although less well known today, were considered at the time as essential threads in France’s intellectual and cultural tapestry. This worldly, intellectual community was at the center of France’s contact with India and a conduit through which knowledge of India among the worldly and intellectual public was diffused.
Marguerite de la Sablière was exposed to India from her birth. She was born in 1640 and was the daughter of Gilbert Hessein, an influential bourgeois financier who had immigrated to France from Holland.3 Hessein founded his own bank, which dealt primarily with assets deriving from trade with India, primarily trade in saffron and diamonds. Marguerite learned of India from Dutch travelers who were actively engaged in trade with India at the time, as well as from intrepid early French explorers who likely visited her father, or even from her father himself. She married another Huguenot financier, de la Sablière, but then in 1668 Marguerite filed for separation from her husband. She used her newly found independence to establish her salon, which reached its zenith in the 1670s, a time that saw the construction of Versailles and the publication of masterpieces such as Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. La Sablière was considered by her contemporaries to be one of the most learned women of the century.4 She drew together intellectuals, religious leaders, writers, politicians, and travelers such as Queen Christina of Sweden, Charles Perrault, Pellisson, Conrart, Fontenelle, the marquise de Lambert, and Rapin. La Sablière’s brother, Pierre Hessein, to whom she was very close and who also frequented her salon, was a Huguenot intellectual and friends with La Fontaine, Racine, and Boileau. Their Protestant relatives and friends interacted with a circle of erudite Catholics such as Huet, Testu, and Bouhours. La Sablière’s closest female friends were Lafayette and Sévigné. This milieu was thus extremely diverse, influential, intrigued by new ideas, and prolific.
The central figure of La Sablière’s salon, and her personal mentor and tutor, was François Bernier. Bernier was first known for his role as the disciple of and secretary to the philosopher Gassendi. Upon the philosopher’s death in 1655, Bernier gave into his passion for travel and visited Palestine, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, and finally India. He arrived in Surat, India, at the end of 1658, and remained in India until 1669. He became the doctor for Dara Shikoh, the son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and the brother of Aurangzeb, who would assume the throne in 1658. After Shikoh’s death, Bernier was in the service of Daneshmend Khan, the foreign affairs secretary and eventually the treasurer of the Mughal Empire. Khan was very intellectually curious and paid Bernier to teach him about European discoveries in astronomy, physics, anatomy, chemistry, and logic. In return, Khan remunerated him monetarily, but also intellectually by teaching him about Indian civilization.
Bernier traveled all over India, often with the emperor, and is considered to be the first European to visit Kashmir. Upon returning to France, Bernier rejoined his intellectual group of philosophers and writers. He published on Gassendi’s philosophy, addressing and dedicating one of his works to La Sablière. Bernier’s Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du grand Mogol was published by Barbin in 1670, followed a year later by Suite des mémoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’Empire du grand Mogol, which consists of a series of letters that he had composed during his travels. These were designed to be read aloud and discussed in the salons. The three principal letters are those addressed to Colbert, La Mothe le Vayer, and Chapelain.
Before dying in 1688, Bernier traveled to England where he became part of Hortense Mancini’s circle, along with Saint-Evremond. He also had a lengthy correspondence with Pierre Bayle. Thus Bernier’s knowledge and experience of India circulated through the most important literary, scientific, and philosophical circles of the day, many of which were united throughout the 1670s in La Sablière’s salon. His travel narratives were immensely popular, as were those of fellow travelers. Much of what seventeenth-century France knew, and subsequently imagined, about India can thus be traced back to Bernier in particular given his penchant for travel between the various intellectual circles as well as around Europe. At La Sablière’s salon, Bernier was often joined by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a fellow traveler whom he had met while in India. Tavernier was a diamond merchant who made a series of trips to India in search of precious gems. He was fascinated by India and became a fixture at the Mughal court. Upon his return he, too, composed a lengthy narrative describing all his impressions and experiences in great detail.
What was the India this worldly and intellectual community was encountering through figures such as Bernier and Tavernier? It is important to underscore that this is not the India and the Orient that figure in postcolonial studies. Here India is not the inferior “Other” used by the west to define itself. This is the time of Mughal rule in parts of India, a period that saw the development of palaces that could rival Versailles, when Versailles was itself still just a hunting lodge. The Mughal emperors Akbar (1556–1605), Jahangir (1605–23) and Shah Jahan (1625–58), established a culture in the first half of the seventeenth century that equaled and in some ways surpassed what Europe could envision at the time with respect to wealth and culture. Annemarie Schimmel sums up the European vision of India when she states that “India for seventeenth-century Europe was a vision of riches.”5 They were also known for their intense intellectual curiosity and sought to learn about foreigners arriving on their soil to establish trade. Akbar, for example, invited Portuguese missionaries to his court to explain Christianity to him. Shah Jahan was fascinated by Western art and actually hired a French jeweler, military engineer, and traveler to his court, August Hiriart, to create his famous peacock throne. Until the early eighteenth century, the Golconda mines near Hyderabad were the world’s only source of diamonds. And the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir, created by Shah Jahan, were, like many of the other Mughal gardens, already reputed to be paradise on earth. In the seventeenth century, French travelers and merchants went to India to discover this civilization, not to conquer it. Such an idea would indeed have been quite foreign to them, as well as impossible to execute. Any country wishing to trade with India was required to establish what the French referred to as comptoirs. These were not colonies in the seventeenth century, although some, such as Pondicherry, later became colonies.
The texts establishing France’s state-sanctioned Compagnie des Indes Orientales and encouraging trade with India make it abundantly clear that France viewed India not as a potential colonial conquest but as an intriguing source of luxury goods that could enhance France’s developing conception of itself as Europe’s model for culture and power. In 1664 Colbert, encouraged by traders and financiers like La Sablière’s father, founded La Compagnie des Indes Orientales and convinced Louis XIV to devote resources to this project. By this time Portugal, Spain, Holland, and England had already established fairly extensive ties with India, many of which were not colonial in nature. Colbert astutely realized that France was missing out on what he viewed as an “indispensable necessity” to insert France into the relationships its European neighbors had already established in India. It is clear from the Colbert’s initial documents establishing La Compagnie that the minister’s main interest was financial and cultural, not colonial. He in fact hired the academician François Charpentier to create a kind of publicity campaign to encourage trade with India, resulting in Charpentier’s Discours d’un fidèle sujet du roi touchant l’établissement d’une Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales, adressé à tous les Français. The work gives a good sense of how France was perceiving this foreign land and conceiving of its relationship with it:
Or, entre tous les commerces qui se font dans toutes les parties du monde, il n’y en a point de plus riche, ni de plus considérable, que celui des Indes Orientales. C’est de ces pays féconds . . . qu’on rapporte ce qu’il y a de plus précieux parmi les hommes, et ce qui contribue le plus soit à la douceur de la vie, soit à l’éclat et à la magnificence . . . C’est désormais une nécessité indispensable de faire venir de toutes ces choses . . . Unissez-vous donc, généreux Français, unissez-vous, pour vous ouvrir une route glorieuse . . . qui vous conduira à des biens innombrables, et qui se multiplieront encore entre les mains de vos enfants.6
[Of all the trade that is done all over the world, none is richer nor greater than that with India. It is from this rich country that we bring back what is most precious among men, and what most contributes either to the sweetness of life or to its brilliance and magnificence. Thus it is a necessity to have these things come to us...Unite, generous French, to open a glorious route that will lead you to innumerable good things, that will multiple in the hands of your children.]
In fact, during this period India needed or wanted very little from France. The only thing France had that India desired was gold and silver, which led to mumblings among Europeans that all its precious metals were ending up in India. Bernier, for example, describes Hindustan as “un abîme d’une grande partie de l’or et de l’argent du monde, qui trouve plusieurs moyens d’y entrer de tous côtés et presque pas une issue pour en sortir [an abyss for a large quantity of the world’s gold and silver, which finds many ways to enter (India) and almost none to leave it].”7 La Sablière’s salon habitués would have associated India with “ce qu’il y a de plus précieux parmi les hommes.” Bernier’s and Tavernier’s narratives, the two most closely associated with La Sablière’s salon as well as arguably the best-known texts of the period concerning India, offer detailed accounts of these “precious” things. Much of what surfaces in their works is echoed in other accounts, such as in the voluminous and very popular Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a compilation of letters written by the Jesuits and continuously edited and republished throughout the eighteenth century. However, these written accounts contain only part of what their authors were able to transmit to their contemporaries about Les Indes. Equally, if not more important, are the perceptions, descriptions, and stories that became part of the ephemeral web of worldly conversation in the salons and elsewhere, traces of which surface in literary works, correspondences, and classical culture in general throughout the period. We must thus supplement the traces of India we have received from texts with the imagined and speculative voices that can be heard if we are attentive and receptive to their inscription into the cultural fabric of the period.
What struck Bernier and Tavernier as they traversed the Indian subcontinent and lived at the Mughal court? We often associate India with spices, but arguably the most sought-after commodities were Indian fabrics and diamonds, and these garner much more attention in both these accounts. By the seventeenth century, the superiority of Indian textiles was recognized throughout Europe.8 The history of the impact of these Indian fabrics in France is especially intriguing and illuminating, and it provides a revelatory example of the kind of effect contact with India was having on the mentalités of the period. By the 1670s, just as Louis XIV was beginning to develop and impose a “French” style, his subjects were surrounding themselves with painted fabrics coming from India. The historian Edgard Depitre attests to this new taste for foreign fabrics: ‘Seduced by the attractiveness, the usefulness, and the uniqueness of these new fabrics, the public jumped on these painted fabrics [toiles peintes].” He cites one contemporary as saying, “the taste [for these fabrics] has become so widespread that they are ‘not only used for clothing, but for all kinds of interior decorating [meubles] as well.’”9 Sévigné writes of this attraction to Indian fabric. In 1674 she instructs her daughter to bring an “old dressing gown from India. . . . I’ll have a small screen made from it for you.”10 Given how precious these fabrics were, as well as how durable, it was common to recycle them. Women were the main marketing agents and consumers for these Indian toiles peintes. Depitre recounts, for example, how authorities begged women at court not to use these imported fabrics, to no avail. These toiles peintes were far superior to anything France or Europe was able to produce at the time. The production consisted not of printing a design on the fabric but of actually painting the cotton with dyes and even gold. Moreover, toiles peintes from India could be washed without fear of fading. In order to compete with these cottons, French manufacturers also referred to their products as toiles peintes, but in reality these cottons were simply printed, which is why they were more properly called toiles imprimées or printed fabrics. French manufacturers tried to pass their fabrics off as Indian by renaming them toiles peintes, but the designs faded after a few washings. It would be a century until the techniques used by Indians were understood and copied in Europe.
The popularity of Indian toiles peintes proved to be a destabilizing force. Depitre explains that “the new craze for Indian fabrics supplanted the taste for traditional French fabrics such as silk, lace, batiste, and linen.”11 In 1686, Louis decided that these toiles peintes had to be banned. Not only did he ban imports, but he also outlawed the making of imitation toiles peintes by French textile manufacturers. Only plain cottons were to be allowed into the country, and French manufacturers were required to focus their expertise on “French” methods of production and on French fabrics. Clearly Louis felt that this “foreign” taste had to be controlled or even censured. As early as 1670, Molière has his ridiculous Bourgeois Gentilhomme proudly show off “cette indienne-ci [this robe of Indian fabric]” in a play commissioned by Louis himself that was designed to ridicule the fascination with the Orient that was clearly prevalent among his subjects.12 From 1686 to 1746, when the ban was officially lifted, there was constant conflict between worldly taste that continued to covet and even flaunt its attraction to Indian toile peinte and the official degrees of the crown that denounced these unpatriotic acts and desperately sought to secure its borders to keep out the Indian cottons, which were continuously available from the British and the Dutch. It proved impossible to change taste and enforce these laws, even though the number of decrees that were passed to this end illustrates how hard officials tried to do so.
The story of how paisley eventually became Provencal is one illustration of how seventeenth-century French taste was being influenced by Indian culture and how this attraction could potentially undermine the absolutist machine that Louis XIV was developing to standardize his power.13 France was not producing the most desirable fabrics and could not complete with India in this arena. This fact affected not only France’s vision of itself, but also the image that Louis in particular wished to construct as the capital of style for the world. The worldly taste for fabrics can also be viewed as an effort to celebrate diversity as embodied by the toiles themselves with their vibrant colors, chaotic designs, and non-French ancestry. They represent a subtle resistance on the part of the French worldly public to Louis’s imposition of uniformity, standards, and classicism. One has only to think of Louis XIV’s absolutist agenda with respect to clothes and style to appreciate how toiles peintes, and more broadly the notion of diversité, departed from Louis’s program. These toiles peintes that adorned bodies and provided a sumptuous decor served as a constant subtle reminder of France’s inferiority when compared with the luxurious style of the Mughals and the expertise of Indian artists and craftsmen.
The other principal luxury commodity from India, diamonds, also provoked a sense of malaise in the monarch, to judge by Louis’s efforts to control this new precious gem. Until the seventeenth century, pearls were the most highly valued and most visible precious gem in Europe.14 But contact with India changed Western taste and values forever. All European visitors to the Mughal court were amazed by the display of wealth and especially bedazzled by the use of gemstones to display this wealth. Bernier and Tavernier both describe Shah Jahan’s elaborate peacock throne, which he had constructed around 1643 in order to display the imperial collection of gemstones. This throne took seven years to complete, and measured eight feet long by six feet wide by twelve feet high. It was composed of 1,150 kilos of gold. Hiriart, usually identified as the throne’s designer, describes it as “of inestimable value because the king possesses a huge quantity of pearls and has more diamonds than all the princes of the universe put together [il a plus de diamants à lui seul que tous les princes de l’univers réunis].”15 All European visitors to the Mughal court remarked upon this treasure. Travelers such as Bernier and Tavernier also describe visiting Golconda, the source of the world’s diamonds, and a region that was conquered by Shah Jahan’s son, Aurengzeb, as Louis XIV came to power. In 1669, Tavernier sold an immense amount of Indian diamonds to Louis XIV; forty-four large stones and twelve hundred small ones, including one, a blue-tinged diamond, which weighted 112 carats.16 Other of the stones Tavernier sold were over 100 carats, and even the small ones averaged between eight and twelve carats. Louis then started the vogue of wearing as many of these precious stones as possible, and he continued to purchase stones throughout his reign.
But Louis was not content to simply imitate his Mughal counterparts. Encouraged perhaps by an incident that occurred in 1669, Louis sought to impose a French style on diamonds. In 1669 Louis received the Turkish ambassador at his court and decided to impress him by bedecking himself in every diamond he owned. It was reported that the ambassador was not particularly impressed and even remarked that horses at his court wore more jewels than Louis.17 Following this affront, which inspired Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Louis encouraged and in fact demanded more and more that the diamonds he bought from India be cut, or faceted, and French jewelers became the world masters of this craft. Tavernier, among others, was appalled because this diminished the size of the largest diamonds considerably, at a time when size was the greatest attribute of these stones. Historians and critics have interpreted Louis’s fascination with faceting and diamonds to his desire to shine. Joan DeJean expresses the stereotypical vision of Louis as innovator when she states, “Louis XIV was the first to understand that diamonds could convey as nothing else the message that their owner was the richest and the most powerful ruler in the world.”18 As Tavernier, Bernier, and others attest, however, Indian and Mughal rulers, and Shah Jahan in particular, developed and exploited the association between diamonds and power long before Louis XIV. Of course, faceted diamonds were more brilliant than those worn by the Mughal emperors and other Indian rulers. But this cutting down to size can be interpreted differently, especially when it is viewed in light of the crown’s reaction to the toiles peintes. Louis seems to be appropriating an attribute clearly associated with foreign, particularly Indian, power and superiority—a display of power unique to Indian courts given that the world’s diamonds at this point in time emanated from that space—and imposes his own French style.19 Faceting is an effort to control this expression of power and attenuate oriental, specifically Indian, values.
This brief foray into the effect Indian commodities had on the French court attests to the power contact with India was exerting on French society and especially on Louis XIV, a ruler history has had a tendency to portray as a unique phenomenon immune to outside influences. However, when one reads Louis XIV’s France through the accounts of travelers to India, this French cultural superiority and especially innovation is placed into question. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Shah Jahan’s Mughal political ideology reached its peak, an ideology that is remarkably similar to that France’s Sun King later exerted. As Ebba Koch remarks, during Shah Jahan’s reign “pomp and show, architecture and the arts were emphasized as indispensable instruments of rulership.”20 The accounts of visitors to India confirm the power of the Mughal court and the expression of this power through luxury and visual display. In particular, descriptions of the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan to honor his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, were a standard part of any narrative. Shah Jahan supervised the entire project from 1632 to 1643. Bernier often refers to this architectural jewel in order to underscore how Indian architecture, art, and innovation, while different, are at the very least on a par with those of the West and often surpass them. Of the Taj Bernier remarks that it “mériterait mieux d’être mis au nombre des merveilles du monde que ces masses informes de Pyramides d’Egypte” [It is more deserving to be ranked among the world’s marvels than those unformed masses, the Egyptian pyramids].”21 Everyone extols the unique beauty of the Taj as well as its spectacular gardens. The parallel between Louis XIV and Shah Jahan is obvious here. Just as Shah Jahan devotes twelve years to producing an architectural and engineering wonder, so too will Louis XIV erect an edifice, gardens, and fountains designed to stun the world into admiring silence. The difference of course is that Shah Jahan did this to honor a woman, whereas Louis’s Versailles was to embody himself . . . and Louis began his project two decades after the Taj had been completed.
Contact with India had a more profound effect than simply inspiring emulation and envy in Louis XIV. When one reads the wealth of information contained in travelers’ and missionaries’ descriptions of India, and one combines these written texts with what were most likely thousands of conversations and now lost correspondence describing not just the Mughal court but India in general, it becomes clear that contact with India during this period must have shaped French mentalités in a variety of ways. Bernier in particular invited his contemporaries to think differently.
A dominant characteristic of Bernier’s narrative is his acceptance and valorization of the differences he found between France and les Indes, and his desire to transmit this fascination to his readers/listeners and inspire them to come to similar conclusions. Among all the French travelers to India, Bernier was especially able to get a sense of these many different Indias, having lived at the Mughal court, but having also traveled extensively in the south, which was mainly Hindu as opposed to the primarily Muslim Mughal Empire, as well as to Kashmir. Throughout his text, Bernier is a true pedagogue. He wants his reader to understand this culture and its customs, and he thus uses Indian terms and then defines them. He painstakingly describes Hindu and Muslim customs, architecture, political organizations and structure, and everyday life. Bernier wants his readers to understand India as a different but equally valuable culture. Indeed, Bernier often seems to enter into the mindset of his Indian hosts. In his letter to La Mothe le Vayer, he even questions whether his own taste has become “indianized,” a possibility he finds curious but not problematic.22 It is this celebration of pluralism and difference that marks not only Bernier’s text but also those of many of his fellow seventeenth-century French travelers to India.
The diversity of Indian culture itself is one of the qualities most frequently underscored in these accounts. The Mughals only ruled one part of India; there were numerous independent sovereigns, both Hindu and Muslim.23 Indeed, it can be argued that India became a prized example of the diversity that Louis XIV was determined to eliminate from his world. Most of these early intrepid travelers financed their own trips to India, which left them freer to express their impressions. These travelers do not compare themselves or their world to “the Other” in order to extol the advantages of a more civilized France. They use India to reflect philosophically on their own culture. What emerges from even a cursory glance at travel narratives such as those by Bernier and Tavernier is a fascination with and a respect for the diverse aspects of this truly foreign culture and how diversity was valued within the culture itself. In his letter to La Mothe le Vayer, for example, Bernier answers a question posed by many of his contemporaries: Are Delhi and Agra “aussi belles, aussi grandes et aussi peuplées que Paris [as beautiful, as large, and as populated as Paris]”? Instead of extolling Paris’s legendary beauty, Bernier uses this question to reflect on the cultural relativism that should play a role in the answer to such a question.24 He boldly gives his provocative answer in the opening lines of the letter:
Pour ce qui est de la beauté . . . je me suis quelquefois étonné d’entendre ici de nos Européens mépriser les villes des Indes, comme n’approchant pas des nôtres au regard des bâtiments; car aussi ne faut-il pas qu’elles leur ressemblent, et si Paris, Londres ou Amsterdam étaient dans l’endroit où est Delhi, il en faudrait jeter par terre la plus grande partie pour bâtir d’une autre façon.25
[As concerns beauty, I can tell you that I’m often shocked to hear our Europeans disparage Indian cities, (stating) that they don’t approach ours with respect to buildings. Yet they shouldn’t resemble them, and if Paris, London, or Amsterdam were situated where Delhi is, it would be necessary to demolish most of them in order to rebuild in a different way.]
India is a place where London, Paris, and Amsterdam could and indeed would have to be reduced to rubble. In Bernier’s view, given the extreme differences in climate, one must reformulate one’s idea of urban beauty and utility. In his words:
Nos villes, sans contestation, ont de grandes beautés, mais ce sont des beautés qui doivent leur être particulières et accommodées à un climat froid; Delhi de même peut avoir les siennes qui lui soient aussi particulières et qui soient accommodées à un climat très chaud.26
[Without argument, our cities have beautiful things (sights), but these are beautiful things that must be particular to them, and adapted to a cold climate. Delhi also can have its own (beautiful things) that are equally particular to it and that are adapted to a very hot climate.]
One can sense an underlying tension here. Europe and France are not the universal models for beauty, a tension that we have already seen created by the toiles peintes and even diamonds.
Bernier offers a lengthy description of Delhi, and he stresses the need to evaluate this city within its own context, instead of simply comparing this civilization to the French. Regarding Indian urban architecture, for example, Bernier concludes, “Je crois qu’on peut dire, sans faire tort à nos villes, que Delhi n’est pas sans bâtiments qui soient véritablement beaux, quoiqu’ils ne soient pas semblables aux nôtres d’Europe [I think it can be said, without criticizing our cities, that Delhi is not without buildings that are truly beautiful, even though they don’t resemble ours].”27 He goes farther and says “ces bâtiments ne ressemblent point aux nôtres, ni . . . n’y doivent pas ressembler: c’est assez qu’ils aient cette magnificence qui peut s’accommoder au climat [these buildings don’t resemble ours, and they shouldn’t; it’s enough that they have that magnificence that is in accord with the climate].”28 “C’est tout un autre air de grandeur que le nôtre, mais qui néanmoins a quelque chose de royal [It is a completely different kind of grandeur than ours, but which nevertheless has something royal (about it)].” 29
Not surprisingly, the religious diversity found in India figures prominently in these narratives and offers an example of how a culture can flourish when the acceptance, indeed valorization of, diversity is an integral part of a culture. In contrast, by the 1670s Louis’s own court was becoming less and less tolerant of difference, especially religious, culminating in 1684 with the revocation of the Edit de Nantes. Many French travelers, such as Tavernier and Chardin, were, like La Sablière and her family, Huguenots. As a result they were especially sensitive to examples of religious tolerance. Travel narratives contain lengthy descriptions of religious practices and beliefs in India, and accounts often emphasize religious plurality. Early missionaries, for example, were surprised to discover how different religions coexisted at the Mughal court and throughout India, and how Hinduism encouraged individuals to express their own spirituality in whatever ways they desired. The majority of the population of India was Hindu, but there were also Christians, Jews, Parsis, and Jains, even within the Muslim Mughal court. In addition, while the Mughals were Sunnis, many of their advisors were Shias. Emperor Akbar was known for his tolerance.30 Hindus as well as Muslims peopled his government, and those of his successors. And while the Mughal court was Muslim, it was regulated by a firm belief in astrology, which was primarily part of Hindu culture, something that again points to the pluralism of Indian courts at the time. Both Bernier’s and Tavernier’s narratives underscore the place astrology in particular played in Indian society. Bernier, for example, states that nothing can happen without the stars being in agreement. Accounts from India also detail actual beliefs at length. Tavernier discusses reincarnation, for example, and makes no concerted effort to dismiss these other beliefs. Travelers might critique the practices associated with different belief systems, but even many French missionaries were very open to their philosophical content.
In La Sablière’s salon in particular, diversity becomes a value to be prized, diffused, and admired due in large measure, I would argue, to this contact with India. In narratives devoted to India, it is clear that these visitors’ search for difference was also a search for alternate forms of knowledge. Furetière defines “diverse” as “terme qui marque la pluralité et la différence soit des temps, soit des lieux, des personnes, ou des choses. Il faut avoir eu affaire à diverses personnes et en divers temps pour connaître le monde [a term that designates plurality and difference of time, place, people, or things. In order to know the world, one must have experience with diverse people at different times].” Diversité leads to knowledge, and this was clearly a topic of intense interest in La Sablière’s salon. India was viewed as a culture that could add to knowledge in significant ways. In 1684, Bernier composed an essay on the diversity of the human race, doubtless inspired by his travels to India. In this essay, he specifically refers to a thesis he attributes to La Sablière: that the discovery of new cultures and new people necessitates a redefinition of the most important traits of human nature.31 Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, published in 1686, can also be read as a celebration of diversité. The work is a series of dialogues between Fontenelle and a marquise, usually identified as La Sablière’s daughter, and while his “worlds” may be extraterrestrial, they nonetheless resonate with diversité.32
It is within this particular “Indian” ambiance of the early years of Louis XIV’s reign that some of the most celebrated works of French literature were composed, such as La Fontaine’s second book of Fables and Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, which were both published in 1678 when each author was attending La Sablière’s salon. Each bears the imprint of this contact with India. Lafayette inscribes India into some of the most provocative and imaginative scenes of her novel. For example, the princess is first seen by M de Clèves choosing jewels at the home of a merchant: “Le lendemain qu’elle fut arrivée, elle alla pour assortir des pierreries chez un Italien qui en trafiquait par tout le monde. Cet homme était venu de Florence avec la reine, et s’était tellement enrichi dans son trafic que sa maison paraissait plutôt celle d’un grand seigneur que d’un marchand [The day after she arrived, she went to match some stones at the house of an Italian who traded in jewels throughout the world. This man had come from Florence with the Queen and had become so rich through his trade that his house looked more like a lord’s than a merchant’s].”33 This is a strange scene that seems too specific with its references to Italy, especially Florence. Contemporaries even commented upon its exceptionality. The novel’s principal critic, Valincour, criticized the author for having a young girl choose stones alone. Lafayette would seem to be inviting interpretation by creating an exceptional scene. The Italian jeweler resembles the Hessein/Sablière milieu, “more like a lord’s” than that of “a merchant,” because of the traffic in gems. Tavernier, Lafayette’s fellow salon habitué, could be described in similar terms. He was eventually ennobled by Louis XIV. Tavernier is better described as someone who “traded in gems throughout the world” than any Italian in the sixteenth century. Indeed, to be engaged in the commerce of gemstones “throughout the whole world” would have been very rare for anyone in the sixteenth century. As we have seen, Italians were even less of a presence in India than the French, but their art, especially Florentine inlay work, was much admired by the Mughal emperors. Lafayette’s identification of the princess’s jeweler as Florentine perhaps points more to Mughal taste than to Italian commerce. One could speculate that Lafayette is subtly suggesting that India replace Italy as a model and inspiration for France. At the very least, her salon contemporaries could have associated this jeweler with their fellow salonnier, Tavernier.
In another incongruous scene, an astrologer predicts the king’s untimely demise. In his memoirs, Bernier, among others, talks about encountering this firm belief in horoscopes during his time in India. Lafayette’s characters discuss the pros and cons of this belief system, and ultimately dismiss it. But later, the prediction proves to be correct. When one recalls this period’s love of puzzles, enigmas, and à clé references, it is possible to read this scene as paying homage to La Sablière’s salon and as weaving conversations and debates that occurred in the salon into the fabric of the fiction. La Sablière herself was considered an expert in astrology and astronomy. The fact that this horoscope ultimately proves to be correct valorizes the Indian belief systems that Bernier encountered and transmitted to his contemporaries.
The clearest, and most curious inscription of India is to be found in the famous reverie scene when the princess provocatively winds ribbons around a cane while gazing adoringly at the portrait of the duc de Nemours. Lafayette specifies that this is “une canne des Indes fort extraordinaire qu’il [Nemours] avait portée quelque temps et qu’il avait donnée à sa soeur, à qui [Mme de Clèves] l’avait prise sans faire semblant de la reconnaître pour avoir été à M. de Nemours [a very unusual malacca cane which for a while he had carried around with him and which he had then given to his sister; it was from her that Mme de Clèves had taken it without showing that she recognized it as having belonged to M. de Nemours],”34 thus urging her reader to interpret this remarkable object. While the princess’s actions have been the subject of speculation no one has really asked why this is a specifically Indian cane, or how Nemours could possess such a cane in 1559.35 This reference to India is completely anachronistic. In 1558–59, the year in which the novel is set, France was hardly a presence in India. It is seemingly gratuitous. Lafayette, however, is not an author known for such gratuity. Bernier speaks of such canes being used by servants to guide elephants and to control crowds.
The novel has an aura of India that invites deciphering. Lafayette’s novel was one of the most celebrated and controversial works of its time. She completely rewrites the script of what a woman can say or do, as well as challenges the norms governing fiction of the period. Perhaps Lafyette’s inscription of India into her provocative novel is designed to celebrate diversité and the need for the imagination to seek outside its familiar spaces for inspiration. Lafayette’s canne des Indes points to how authors and thinkers of the late seventeenth-century were defining the imagination and how they were relating to “diverse” influences, especially those from a previously little-known culture. Lafayette celebrates the ability of a worldview to stimulate literature and the mind in general.
La Sablière’s salon thus provides us with a window on how classical France was experiencing this contact with India. The body of works created during this period, which succeeding centuries canonized as France’s classical literature, are associated with political and cultural developments that profoundly marked France’s sense of collective identity and its role in the world. India played a role during this critical period. As we have seen, the appreciation of and fascination with India developed in la Sablière’s salon and in other circles is often a subtle refutation of Louis XIV’s nation-building strategies, and a challenge to the sense of cultural supremacy that was crucial to the success of these strategies. Seventeenth-century perceptions of this distant culture, as mediated through worldly contact with the travelers, traders, and philosophers, offer a fascinating glimpse into early modern mentalités in all their diversity.
Notes
1. François Marie Arouet Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et sur l’esprit des nations (1756), ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 1:237. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2. A good example is the preface to a nineteenth-century English translation of François Bernier’s travel narrative, which is specifically designed to justify British rule. Irving Brock, the translator of an 1826 edition of Bernier’s text, states in his preface that after reading Bernier, one understands that “the ruthless domination of the Moguls was succeeded by the mild and beneficent sway of Great Britain.” (Travels in the Mogul Empire [London: Pickering, 1826]), viii.) The history of this text illustrates to an exceptional degree the need to go back to original sources and remove the overlay of colonial and British interpretation and the postcolonial perceptions that were premised upon them.
3. The only in-depth study of La Sablière remains Menjot d’Elbenne’s biography, published in 1923. John Conley has published La Sablière’s religious writings as a chapter in his The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France.
4. Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue, 76–77.
5. Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture, 7.
6. Charpentier, Discours, 6–7, 60.
7. François Bernier, Un libertin dans l’Inde Moghole: Les voyages de François Bernier, 201.
8. For a complete history of this industry and trade, see Edgard Depitre, La toile peinte en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles.
10. Marquise de Sévigné, Correspondance, 1:687.
11. Depitre, La toile peinte, 15.
12. For an analysis of Molière’s play and its relationship to the Orient, see Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama, 109–46.
13. The translation of paisley in French is “cashemire,” thus keeping its Indian connections. Marseille was one of the few cities allowed throughout the period to import toiles peintes, which illustrates how inconsistent these policies were. This fact perhaps explains why Provencal fabrics bear such a resemblance to Indian fabrics.
14. Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style, 163.
15. Cited by Annette Frémont, “Des aventures de quelques Français en Inde au XVIIe siècle,” in L’aventure des Français en Inde XVIIe–XXe siècles, 13.
16. This blue diamond would eventually be known as the Hope diamond when it was purchased by Henry Philip Hope in 1839, after it was stolen from the French crown jewels during the Revolution. DeJean recounts Louis’s relationship to diamonds in Essence of Style, 168–76.
17. DeJean, The Essence of Style, 172.
19. DeJean advances that the French love for diamonds brought the “world he [Louis] had discovered in India to an end” (176). This statement is difficult to substantiate. Diamond production from Golconda did diminish by the end of Louis’s reign. This was not because Louis had bought all the diamonds, as DeJean suggests, but rather due to political instability in the region and the decline of the Mughal Empire itself.
20. Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal, 13. As Kanbo, one of Shah Jahan’s historians, emphasized, “[the arts] may belong to the category of the beautiful . . . but [they] are essential to give full distinction and spectacular display” to the power of the ruler (83). Koch makes a subtle link between Shah Jahan and Louis XIV: “A counterpoint, if not a follower, in the west would be Louis XIV” (84).
21. Bernier, Un indien, 300. Elsewhere Bernier shows more clearly his disdain for the pyramids, calling them “ces masses informes et ces morceaux de pierre d’Egypte [these unformed masses and pieces of rock in Egypt].”
22. Bernier prefaces his comparison of the Taj with Egypt’s pyramids with: “Pour moi, je ne sais pas bien encore si je n’aurais point le goût un peu trop indien [As for me, I’m not sure if I my taste has become a bit too ‘indien’]” (300).
23. As Bernier explains to Colbert, “dans cette même étendue de pays, il y a quantité de nations dont le Mogol n’est pas trop le maître, ayant encore la plupart leurs chefs et souverains particuliers, qui ne lui obéissent et ne lui paient tribut que par contrainte, plusieurs que fort peu de chose, quelques-uns rien du tout, et quelques-uns même qui en reçoivent de lui [in this same territory, there are many nations that the Mogol doesn’t quite control, each one still having its own ruler, (nations) that don’t obey him (the Mughal emperor) and pay him only if forced, some who give almost nothing, and others nothing at all, and even some that receive money from him]” (202).
24. Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, the editors of Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700, also comment upon this sense of cultural relativism that pervades many of these early travel narratives: “Thus, a developing cultural relativism is perhaps the most vital thread that runs through all of these books, as each author came to appreciate that difference a priori did not constitute inferiority or superiority” (xvii).
25. Bernier, Un Indien, 235.
29. Ibid., 277. Even when Bernier turns to food, he seeks to understand Indian eating habits and food preferences in their own context. For instance, when he has difficulty finding good wine, he explains that this is because Indians are not inclined to drink wine because of the heat, and that this results in better health. He ultimately concludes, “on vit ici ordinairement bien plus sainement qu’on ne fait chez nous [people live in a more healthy fashion here than we do],” 249–50.
30. This tolerance of difference is a characteristic of Indian society that is frequently underscored by historians and continues to characterize this society today. Jacques Weber states: “l’un des traits dominants de cette vénérable civilisation, [est] la tolérance [one of the dominant traits of this venerable civilization is tolerance],” in “Contre l’oublie de l’Inde,” introduction to Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber, 9.
31. John Conley refers to Bernier’s essay in The Suspicion of Virtue, 77.
32. It is possible to view La Fontaine’s “Discours à Mme de la Sablière,” in which La Fontaine advances that animals have souls, as inspired in part by salon discussions about Hinduism and reincarnation.
33. Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, 248; English translation, 10.
35. The bodyguards of Indian rulers used bamboo canes to clear paths through crowds. Such canes often figured in the paintings and miniatures depicting the dress of these guards.
