MAROTTE: A valet here is asking if you are at home. He says his master wants to come and see you.

MAGDELON: Fool! Learn to express yourself less vulgularly. Say: “A servitor begs to inquire whether it is convenient for you to receive!”

—The Precious Ladies Ridiculed

If you were to ask any fashionable Parisian of the first half of the seventeenth century which was the most pleasant place in Paris, he would reply without hesitation, “The blue salon of Madame de Rambouillet.”

Daughter of the French ambassador to Rome, born de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet was an exquisitely refined lady. Her refinement dated back to her earliest childhood (there are such natures!). Having married and settled in Paris, the Marquise decided, not without good reason, that Paris society was somewhat crude. She therefore resolved to surround herself with the best that could be found in the capital, and began to assemble in her house the flower of society. She furnished and decorated a number of rooms for her receptions, but the most famous of these was her salon in which everything was upholstered in light blue velvet.

Madame de Rambouillet’s greatest interest was in literature, and her salon therefore became chiefly literary. But, on the whole, the company that flocked to the salon was quite diverse. There was Jean-Louis Balzac, society writer, glittering in his armchair. There was the disenchanted thinker the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who mournfully attempted to persuade Madame de Rambouillet that our virtues are nothing but hidden vices. When the assembled guests were thoroughly depressed by the arguments of the gloomy Duke, their gaiety was restored by the vivacious wit Vincent Voiture. And most fascinating disputations were conducted by the Messieurs Cotin, Chapelain, Gilles Ménage, and many others.

As soon as it became known that the best minds of Paris were gathering at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the salon was invaded by a number of most charming marquises with lace at their knees, by evening wits, frequenters of theatrical premieres, and authors of amorous madrigals and tender sonnets. These were followed by worldly abbes and, naturally, by a bevy of ladies.

Among the guests of the salon there was also Bossuet, who subsequently made himself famous by delivering moving funeral orations at the graveside of virtually every defunct Frenchman of any consequence. Indeed, his very first sermon was delivered (this time, not over a departed celebrity) at Madame Rambouillet’s salon when he was only sixteen years old.

Bossuet declaimed until late into the night, which provided Voiture with an opportunity to comment when the orator had finally discharged himself of every idea he had accumulated in his mind:

“Sir, I have never before heard anyone deliver a sermon at so early an age and so late an hour.”

The ladies who frequented the salon very soon introduced the custom of calling one another “my precious” as they exchanged kisses in greeting. The expression “precious” gained much favor in Paris, and remained as a permanent designation for the ladies who adorned the Rambouillet gatherings.

The scene resounded with verses in honor of the precious Marquise, whom the poets called “the enchanting Arthenice,” transposing the letters of her name, Catherine. In honor of her young daughter, Julie Rambouillet, who glittered in her mother’s salon, the poets composed entire wreaths of madrigals. These madrigals were followed by witticisms, fabricated principally by the marquises. Their witticisms were so elaborate that they required lengthy explanations. There were, however, some rejected individuals outside the walls of the salon who asserted that those witticisms were simply stupid, and their authors utterly devoid of talent.

But all of this would not have been so bad had Catherine de Rambouillet and her suite not turned their attention from madrigals and witticisms to major literature. New works were read aloud and discussed in the blue salon. Opinions were formed, and these opinions became mandatory in Paris.

As time went on, the level of the refinement rose, the ideas voiced at the salon became increasingly cryptic, and the forms in which they were invested more and more ornate.

A simple mirror in which the precious ladies examined their reflections became, in their language, “the counselor of grace.” In reply to some pleasantry uttered by a marquis, a lady would say:

“Marquis, you are adding the wood of flattery to the fire in the hearth of friendship.”

A certain lady, the sister of the playwright Georges de Scudéry, became the virtual lawgiver in the Rambouillet salon, as well as in others started in their homes by imitators of Madame de Rambouillet. Georges de Scudéry won his renown, to begin with, by regarding himself as not simply a playwright, but the leading playwright in France. Secondly, he was noted for the absolute lack of any dramatic talent. Thirdly, he created a furore by attacking Corneille’s greatest play, The Cid, immediately on its appearance, doing his utmost to prove that the play was immoral and, besides, that it was not a play at all, since it violated the Aristotelian laws governing drama, lacking unity of place, time, and action. True enough, Scudéry never succeeded in convincing anyone; no one can ever prove, even with Aristotle’s aid, that a work which is successful, which is written in excellent verse, which has an interesting plot and effective, sharply delineated parts, is not a play. And it’s not for nothing that my hero—upstart, Royal Valet and Upholsterer—was wont to say in later years that all those Aristotelian rules were sheer nonsense, and that there was only one rule: plays should be written with skill and talent.

Well, then, the envious Georges de Scudéry had a sister, Madeleine. At first she had been a guest at the Rambouillet salon, but later she founded a salon of her own, and at a ripe age composed a novel she titled Clélie, A Roman Story. Properly speaking, Rome had nothing to do with the story at all. Under the guise of Romans, the novel depicted eminent Parisians. The novel was elegant, false, and pompous in the extreme. The novel was enormously popular among the Parisians, and to the ladies it became virtually a bible, especially since the first volume included so delectable an appendix as an allegorical Map of Tenderness, containing a River of Propensity, a Lake of Indifference, a village called Love Letters, and so on in the same vein.

A wagonload of nonsense had invaded French literature, and the trash had completely enslaved the precious heads. In addition, the admirers of Madeleine de Scudéry had utterly corrupted the language and even threatened to subvert the orthography. One of these ladies had hatched a remarkable plan: in order to make orthography accessible to women, who were, as usual, lagging considerably behind the men in mastering its intricacies, the lady proposed that words be written as they were pronounced. But before the lips that opened to discuss this project had time to close, disaster struck the precious ladies.

In November, 1659, a rumor spread abroad that Monsieur de Molière was about to produce a new one-act comedy at the Petit Bourbon. Its title intrigued the public: the play was called The Precious Ladies Ridiculed. On October 18, together with Corneille’s Cinna, Molière presented his new play.

Its very first words electrified the audience. During the fifth scene (according to the text that survives today) the ladies’ eyes bulged. The eighth scene struck at the marquises who sat, as was the custom at the time, along the sides of the stage. And the parterre burst into laughter and laughed until the end of the play.

The contents of the play were as follows: two silly damsels, Cathos and Magdelon, who had stuffed their heads with Scudéry, rejected their suitors because they were not, by the ladies’ standards, sufficiently refined. The suitors avenged themselves upon the precious ladies. They dressed up their valets as marquises, and these impostors paid the silly girls a visit. The girls received the two rogues with open arms. The impudent Mascarille held the ladies spellbound with preposterous tales, and the other impostor, Jodelet, enchanted them with lies about his military career. Mascarille, a brazenfaced scoundrel, not only declaimed, but even sang a poem of his own composition, which went approximately as follows:

While in a heedless moment brief,

Oh, oh! I gazed at you today,

Your eye had slyly spirited my heart away.

Stop thief, stop thief, stop thief, stop thief!

“Stop thief, stop thief,” howled the valet to the roaring of the parterre.

Everything had been demolished by ridicule: the Maps of Tenderness, the salons in which such verses were read, the authors of these verses, and the guests of the salons. And yet it was impossible for the latter to protest, since the comedy involved only valets disguised as marquises rather than real marquises.

The farce presented on the stage was riotous and by no means innocent. It mocked the manners and customs of contemporary Paris, while the originators of these customs were right there, in the loges and on the stage. The parterre roared with laughter and pointed its fingers at them. It recognized the gentry of the salons, whom the former upholsterer held up to scorn in the eyes of all. Anxious whispers were exchanged in the loges. A rumor spread instantly throughout the hall that Cathos was unquestionably Catherine de Rambouillet, and Magdelon, Madeleine de Scudéry.

The marquises sitting on the stage turned purple. The bearers brought in Mascarille-Molière. His idiotic peruke was so huge that its ends swept the floor as he bowed, and it was topped by a hat as tiny as a fist. A monstrous mass of lace adorned his breeches at the knees. The would-be marquis Jodelet was played by old Jodelet. And the two comedians Molière and Jodelet did everything but walk on their heads to amuse the public, indulging in a series of ambiguous and most suggestive antics. The other performers, including Mademoiselle de Brie, who played Magdelon, the daughter of Gorgibus, held up their ends with appropriate zest.

Just look, the comedy seemed to say, at our charming marquises and our precious young ladies! But, pardon me, these are only lackeys? They are lackeys, certainly, but from whom did they take over such manners? Everything was mocked, ridiculed, held up to derision! The dress, to its last ribbon, the verses, the pomposity, the falseness, the rudeness toward inferiors!

When Molière glanced at the public through the slits in his mask he caught sight of the esteemed Madame de Rambouillet sitting in front of her stall with her suite behind her. The precious old lady, as everyone had noticed, was green with rage. She had clearly grasped the import of the play. Nor was she alone in this! An old man in the parterre called out in the midst of the action:

“Bravo, Molière! This is real comedy!”

The bolt had struck so near the ranks of the precious ones themselves that they were thrown into immediate panic. The first to abandon Madame de Rambouillet’s army was one of her staunchest admirers and banner-bearers, who threw the banner entrusted to him straight into the mud. This deserter was none other than the poet Monsieur de Ménage.

Leaving the theater after the performance, Ménage took Monsieur Chapelain under the arm and whispered:

“My dear, we shall have to burn the idols we adored…. I must confess, we indulged in a good deal of nonsense in the salons!”

To this, Ménage added that the play, in his opinion, was caustic and effective, and that, generally, he had foreseen all this….

But what Ménage had foreseen we do not know, since his subsequent words were lost in the clatter of the carriages before the theater.

The lights in the hall went out. The streets were now completely dark. Molière, wrapped in his cloak, with a lantern in his hand, hurried to Madeleine’s, coughing a little in the November damp. He was drawn by the fire in the hearth, but even more by something else. He hurried to see Madeleine’s sister and ward, Armande Béjart, the same Menou who had played Éphyre in Lyons six years before. She was now a young lady of sixteen. Molière hurried to see Armande, but he cringed painfully at the thought of Madeleine’s eyes. Those eyes became unpleasant every time Molière would enter into a lively exchange with the vivacious and coquettish Armande.

Madeleine had forgiven everything. She had forgiven the Lyons incident with du Parc; she had forgiven and made peace with Madame de Brie. But now it was as though a demon had taken possession of her.

A lantern is speeding along the embankment through the dank fog of the November night. Monsieur de Molière! Tell us, whisper it, no one can hear us now, how old are you? Thirty-eight, and she is sixteen? Besides, who are her father and her mother? Are you certain that she is Madeleine’s sister?

He does not want to answer. It may well be that he does not know. Why, then, waste words on the subject? We might talk of something else. Of the mistake, for example, which Molière had committed in his The Precious Ladies when he shot a dart at the Bourgogne players:

“Which actors will you give your play to?”

“The King’s Players, naturally,” the scoundrel Mascarille replies caustically. “They are the only ones who know how to recite verse!”

Monsieur de Molière should not have struck out at the Bourgogne. To discerning people it is clear that he is a man of another school and is creating this school, while Montfleury is by no means as bad an actor as Bergerac asserted. The paths of the Bourgogne and of Molière are different, and the Bourgogne should not be attacked, especially since such thrusts do not prove anything, and it is dangerous to offend everyone!