The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (29 page)

Maintaining one’s self-respect and identity in an environment designed to reduce its inhabitants to the level of groveling yes-men was undoubtedly a challenge for the early modern courtier, and it was far from the only one. Walker returns to an age-old theme later in his treatise when he addresses the dangers of flattery, “a disease that
reigns
in the
Courts
of
Kings
.” Walker warns that “
Flattery
fills us with
wind
and
corruption
till we
burst
, and a strong gust of
underserved applause
quite overturns and ruins us,
if we are not well-balast’d.” Suddenly switching metaphors to give full scope to the true horrors of this dread practice, he compares it to a “
subtil poison
[that] steales
insensibly
into the very bones, and drinks up the marrow and yet never breaks the skin, but pleases it with a soft gentle touch.”
¹¹⁵
Stefano Guazzo, who served as a diplomat for the ruling Gonzaga family of Mantua, agreed with Walker and in very similar terms. In his 1574 fictional dialogue
Civil Conversation
, Guazzo has his brother William, who has grown cynical about courtly society, warn his interlocutor, the doctor Anniball Magnocavalli, of flatterers whose words are like an infected breath that “poisons the very souls of those who hearken to them.”
¹¹⁶
If Walker’s advice was to avoid these liars at all costs, Anniball realizes this is much easier said than done. “It is very difficult, not to say impossible,” to distinguish a friend from a flatterer, he replies to William, because “an artful Flatterer puts the garment so artificially on the back of him whom he would disguise with it, that the seams shall not be discerned; and works up his false material so curiously that you can scarce know them from what are real and genuine.”
¹¹⁷
Perhaps we can identify some of the flatterers but certainly not all, and even the ones we identify may have fooled everyone else, secretly assaulting us while successfully maintaining a good reputation.

Left with few good options, many individuals sought to hide in plain sight. At the very beginning of the first chapter of his treatise
On Honest Dissimulation
, for example, Torquato Accetto, a seventeenth-century secretary to the rulers of Andria in Southern Italy, recalls Adam and Eve’s predicament during that fatal moment in the Garden. “From the instant the first man opened his eyes and realized he was naked,” Accetto writes, “he was concerned to hide himself from the view of his Creator, thus the effort to conceal was born with the world itself and the appearance of the first fault.” Adam’s concerns are still our own, Accetto adds, and there are many people who now try to hide themselves “by means of dissimulation.”
¹¹⁸
Accetto, about whom almost nothing is known, who published his book in Naples in 1641 to no critical notice whatsoever, counts himself among the dissimulators. The
secretary, who for all intents and purposes remained invisible until his work was rediscovered in the early twentieth century, could not have intended a more fitting historical and literary legacy. The dissimulator, aware of the dangers and lies that surround him, endeavors to slip from view, to vanish even as he interacts with those around him. Dissimulation, Accetto notes at one point in his brief treatise, is a “trade that consists in not revealing things as they are.” To accomplish this a person must set up “a veil made of honest shadows and violent courtesies” to deflect unwanted attention and to conceal himself from prying and intrusive inquiries until the time is right to respond to them. Nature behaves no differently, Accetto adds, obscuring things at night that it illuminates during the day.
¹¹⁹

Accetto steps back from openly claiming to endorse dishonesty, arguing that it is “never licit to abandon the truth.” Drawing on a standard distinction, he contrasts dissimulation with its evil doppelganger, simulation. “One simulates what is not,” Accetto explains, and “one dissimulates what is.”
¹²⁰
This was as much a truism as any other in the early modern period, and even before. Thomas Aquinas had invoked it in the thirteenth century to explain how concealing what is true differs from pretending something false, and biblical exegetes had long found it useful as a way to distinguish the Devil’s simulating serpentine disguise in the Garden from Christ’s dissimulating decision to conceal his divinity within a human body.
¹²¹
Just like these earlier usages, Accetto’s own examples suggest that dissimulation always maintains an uneasy relationship with the morally questionable activity of simulation, of pretending to be something you are not, of deceiving, lying. He asks his readers to consider a scene from the first book of Virgil’s
Aeneid
. A savage storm has destroyed all but seven Trojan ships, which now limp into a natural harbor on the Libyan coast. Aeneas speaks to his men, hoping to rally their sagging spirits. Virgil writes, “His face feigned hope, but his heart hid a profound sadness.” Aeneas conceals and dissimulates his misery with a show of hope, but the show inevitably requires pretending to be something one is not. “This verse,” Accetto explains, “contains the
simulation of hope and the dissimulation of sadness.” It is impossible, it would seem, to dissimulate something without simulating something else in its place, to conceal one thing without pretending another. These two practices become yet more intertwined in Accetto’s second example, this time taken from late in Homer’s
Odyssey
, when Ulysses, disguised beneath rags and pretending to be the great grandson of King Midas, speaks with his unsuspecting wife Penelope, reducing her to tears with an elaborate and fictitious story about her long-lost husband. Accetto quotes Homer: “Ulysses contemplated his wife’s misery; but without a flutter of his lids, his eyes seemed like horn or iron; for his ruse to work, it was necessary that he hide his own tears.”
¹²²
Accetto marvels over the prudence with which Ulysses places a check on his own tears at the very moment they need to be hid, but Accetto pretends to be something he is not as well.

Accetto simulates throughout his treatise. He confesses as much in the prefatory letter when he writes, “A year ago this treatise was three times as large as the one you see today, and many people know this; but if I had wanted to delay still more before handing it over to the printer, it would have been in a way reduced to nothing due to the many wounds which destroyed, rather than enriched it.” Those who remember the original text, he adds, will all to easily recognize the “scars” that mark the places where he has amputated parts of his treatise.
¹²³
Of course, it was the nurse Eurycleia who recognized Ulysses under his disguise of rags when she noticed his childhood scar, and Accetto’s recounting of Ulysses’s meeting with Penelope bears its own scars, excising the very line that describes Homer’s assessment of the kind of words that make up Ulysses’s tear-inducing story: “He made all these lies sound so convincing.”
¹²⁴
Ulysses’s prudence puts over the lie, and without the lie the prudent restraint of tears would have been for nothing. The slippage from dissimulation to simulation appears again in Accetto’s treatise when he contrasts the two practices. He would have happily examined the art of simulation, explaining fully the art of pretending in those cases where it seems to be necessary, but he opts not to, not because it is sinful and tantamount
to lying, but merely because “it has a reputation so horrible, that I judged it best to abstain from such a discussion, although there are any number of people who say, ‘That person does not know how to live, who does not know how to pretend.’ ”
¹²⁵

If Accetto preferred to conceal the potentially mendacious nature of the practices he found necessary to live a safe and happy life, Guazzo’s characters freely admit them, offering advice that has much in common with Christine’s advice to her female readers. Surrounded by flatterers and liars, identified or not, Anniball argues that we must conceal our knowledge and suspicions for fear that acting otherwise will make things worse for us. Even if it “goes against your conscience to keep them company,” he states, do not call them out if their reputation at court is good. The court judges people on their appearances, and to condemn an apparently reputable person will appear rude, utterly uncalled for, and deserving of “public censure.”
¹²⁶
Returning to this predicament a few pages later, he observes that “without doubt that man is mistaken, who thinks he may lawfully despise or ridicule any, besides those that are notedly scandalous and who therefore deserve it.”
¹²⁷
Given the constraints of courtly life, Anniball counsels a practice of strategic feigning in which we “salute those, who, we imagine are our Enemies.” Invoking a variety of military metaphors to justify these deceptions, as had John of Salisbury before him, he compares this tactical dissembling to fencers who pretend to aim at the head in order to wound the leg or to the “Generals of armies who deceive the enemy, when, by making a feint of attacking one way, they fall upon them another.” There is nothing wrong with this sort of mendacity, he argues, and then rather suddenly adds, and “not only among enemies, but among friends and acquaintances, colourable dealings are tolerable, when they are not prejudicial in their consequences.” This is why, for example, it is perfectly acceptable to lie to a friend in order to avoid his invitation to attend a play in which you have little interest.
¹²⁸
Although Anniball condemns liars as “impudent and shameless,” as so many had and would continue to do, he carefully qualifies his disdain. “I readily own, that on some particular occasions, a lie
may be necessary, and even commendable, if it be for some honest purpose.”
¹²⁹
As his own examples demonstrate, honest purposes need hardly be important ones.

If Walker’s condemnation of lies and liars at first seems more robust than that of Guazzo’s characters by the time he finishes with his own qualifications, there is little difference between the two authors. The truth, Walker asserts, is the “beginning of Heroical virtue,” whereas lies are as unreasonable and ugly “as the shadows of the night.” They are squalid and deformed, not to mention “a violation of that tacit universal contract of Mankind implied in all their commerce and intercourses.”
¹³⁰
Without missing a beat, he then admits in true courtly fashion that lies have their time and place. “But I would not be thought over rigid,” he continues, “doubtless we may speak untruths in some cases.” We can lie to children for their benefit, as can doctors to their patients. We can commit “pious frauds” on the impious to draw them to the true faith, and we can lie to save lives. Walker justifies these exceptions as consistent with religious virtue. “Charity is better than Truth,” he explains, “and every man is willing to be cozen’d into his own advantage.”
¹³¹
Christine de Pizan would not have disagreed, and suddenly the exclusive requirement for truth in human affairs, in our commerce and intercourses, appears much less certain. Truth might be a heroic virtue, but too much truth can be a dangerous thing, and ignoring the demands of charity might be even worse. In a fallen world, in the world of the court, deception, duplicity, and dishonesty are natural and naturally useful qualities, perfectly fitted to our benefit and the benefit of others.

Walker invokes charity to justify his lies, and Guazzo insistently reiterates the need for the courtier to be a good Christian. Still, something other than, something in addition to, religion seems to be at work in their conception of proper courtly behavior, be it honest or dishonest. Walker refers to it as “refinement,” the thing that delights the “greatest part of mankind” and that requires knowing “what is fit to be done, and also what to be avoided, to render our conversation sweet and gracefull.”
¹³²
For his part, Guazzo, true to the title of his treatise, calls it “civil conversation,” that is, “an honest, virtuous, and sociable kind of living in the
world.”
¹³³
French writers in the seventeenth century would convert this notion of courteous behavior into the ideal of the
honnête homme
. However termed, all these writers believe that the courtier’s actions and words must be “comely and amiable,” and even if they do not “gratify the senses,” at the very least they must not “trouble any of them.”
¹³⁴
Not only must the courtier always imagine himself on display, he must adapt that display, his words and actions, to the expectations of his courtly audience, for only their approval will guarantee that he is refined, civil, and virtuous. Nearly a century later, François duc de La Rochefoucauld would capture this notion of the refined courtier perfectly when he succinctly noted, “To be willing to live continuously under the eyes of gentlemen is to be a gentleman indeed.”
¹³⁵

While medieval courtiers were no less interested in their appearance and in how people responded to them, the early modern emphasis on refinement reflects a repositioning of the role that deceit plays in society. Both Christine and John contend that exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures, and sometimes for our own good and the good of our family and the state we must lie. To hear Christine tell it, princesses and noblewomen might spend much of their lives in such dire straits, carefully orchestrating a litany of daily hypocrisies to keep their enemies at bay. Be that as it may, princesses and noblewomen are, by any estimation, exceptional figures, so it should not be all that surprising that they spend their lives doing exceptional things. In this respect, early modern writers were no different, fully recognizing the just use of lies to stave off threats to oneself, one’s family, even one’s state. But they recognized something else as well—without lies, society could not exist. La Rochefoucauld captured this insight in his collection of maxims: “Social life would not last long if men were not taken in by each other.”
¹³⁶
While lies might occasionally threaten civil society, they also make it possible.