The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (37 page)

Perhaps not every man is a liar, but sadly, Leonora and her friends have no choice but to assume otherwise.

M
ADELEINE DE
S
CUDÉRY
,
THE
S
ALON
,
AND THE
P
LEASANT LIE

There are any number of ways to ruin a conversation. Discussing how to ruin them, it turns out, is not one of them.

Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular author of the seventeenth century and sponsor of the Saturday Society, an influential Parisian salon, stages her conversation about bad conservations as a gathering of amiable and eminently polite men and women, placing it at beginning of her 1680 collection of interlinked set pieces,
Conversations on Various Subjects
. Of course, the point of this conversation is not to dwell on the incompetent, not to ridicule and insult the boorish and dull—that would hardly be polite and amiable. Rather, as Cilenie, one of the women, puts it, “Before we can determine what most contributes to the charm and beauty of conversation, everyone here must recall those annoying conversations that have most bothered them.”
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Focusing on the bad will help to illuminate the good, and the value of good conversation is inestimable according Cilenie, who describes it as the most essential bond of human of society. Good conversation is “the greatest pleasure of well-bred people, the most ordinary way to introduce, not only politeness to the world, but also the purest morals and the love of glory and virtue.”
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When conversation goes wrong, more than boredom is at stake.

Unlike Christine de Pizan, unlike Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, in her
Conversations
Scudéry neither attacks men nor defends women. Instead, she teaches them how to behave and how to converse, hardly a surprising role for an aristocratic woman in seventeenth-century France. Although often connected with the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the salon, from its inception in the waning years of the sixteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, was ultimately a retreat for the rich and aristocratic. Offshoots of the royal and noble courts, places where women had long played a central role in maintaining harmony among potential adversaries through enforcement of the codes of chivalry and gallantry, the salons, too, were places where the rules of courtliness and courtly sociability held sway. And in the salon, just as in the court, it was women who played the role of peace-keepers and civilizers.
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Men must know how to talk and so must women, because friendship and society depend on it. Which, as Scudéry’s conversation about conversations develops, is little different from asserting that friendship and society depend on lies.

Given the seemingly trivial examples of bad conversations the group discusses, it is at first difficult to discern why Cilenie places so much importance on it. Several of the women bemoan the hours lost, as if doing penance, having listened to women who do nothing but complain about their servants, their daily chores, or one who rapturously described “syllable by syllable the first stutterings of her three year old son.” Some women speak incessantly about their clothes, lying about how much they paid for them or the trouble they had procuring them. Others gossip cruelly and insipidly about other women, their loves and losses and lack of looks.
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And the list continues with men coming off little better as they prattle on endlessly about the minutiae of their business affairs, estates, and sunken boats. While one or two of the women present suggest that when men converse they tend to be more rational, albeit more serious, than women, whose discussions too often devolve into nothing but inane triviality, this doesn’t prevent some men from disagreeably talking only of great historical events or others from focusing on nothing but the nonevents of daily life.
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In a later conversational set piece, “On Speaking Too Much or Too Little,” Amilcar pays a visit to Plotina, who makes him promise not to be so boorish as the two men she had met with earlier in the day, the one who spoke so much she was reduced to silence and the other who spoke no more than four words during his entire stay.
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Asked toward the end of dialogue what can be learned from these various examples of conversation gone wrong, Valerie suggests that most any topic is fit for proper conversation, but only if introduced at the right time and only if discussed for the right amount of time. “I believe that there is no topic that cannot be entered into; but it must be free and varied according to the time, the place and the people one is with; and the key is that one always speaks nobly of base things, simply of noble things and gallantly of gallant things, without undo haste or affection.”
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While successful conversation requires both the wit and judgment necessary to be able to fit our words to the moment and to the audience, truly refined conversation must appear effortless. Valerie adds that the sort of person she has in mind, the sort, no doubt, that Scudéry depicts herself and her friends to be, must speak so easily and gracefully that “they don’t seem to reject any of their thoughts, as if saying whatever comes to mind, without any affected design of saying one thing rather than another.”
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Conversation must flow smoothly among all participants, moving seamlessly from one person to the next, back and forth and always forward.

Scudéry had already emphasized the importance of effortless conversation nearly forty years earlier in the introduction to her 1642 work,
Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues
, in which she imagined twenty great speeches delivered by famous women of the past, such as Cleopatra, Agrippina, and Sappho. Although Scudéry was widely known to be the work’s creator, her brother Georges appears in it, as he so often does, as the alleged author. The introductory letter, written in his voice, takes up an objection that some men might make to her depictions of these women. Some men, Scudéry writes, might find it strange “that I have chosen women to express my thoughts because they imagine that the art of oratory”
is unknown to them. If the ancients really did praise women for possessing great oratorical skills, then why doesn’t Scudéry assiduously follow the rules of rhetoric as taught in the schools, organizing her speeches with such key rhetorical elements as exordiums, narrations, exaggerations, metaphors, digressions, antitheses, “and all the other beautiful figures that typically enrich works of this sort?” These figures of speech are present, Scudéry responds, but hidden, for “the most delicate art consists in pretending there is none at all,” just as a woman might carefully set the curls and ringlets of her hair with a negligence so subtle and a nonchalance so agreeable that “anyone would suspect it was the wind, rather than her hands” that had arranged it so beautifully.
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Artifice concealed behind an effortless facade defines Scudéry’s conception of conversation, and she explicitly contrasts it with the rhetoric of the schools, with the language of lawyers at court, merchants at their trading houses, generals before their armies, and kings before their counselors. Amilcar announces the basis for this distinction at the very beginning of “On Conversation,” when he asserts that “all of these people speak expertly of their concerns and affairs, but they lack the agreeable talent of conversation which is the sweetest charm of life and is, perhaps, more rare than is commonly believed.”
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Of course, the distinction between these two types of rhetoric mirrors a social distinction between places where women were allowed to speak and places where they were institutionally and legally barred from speaking. Women were not allowed to participate in such public arenas as the Sorbonne, courts of law, and the military. In opposition to these sites of public speech, Scudéry proposes the salon as a place with its own superior form of rhetorical practice, where both men and women can participate as equals.
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Just as important, Scudéry delimits the field of private rhetoric through a series of exclusions. It is not like public speech. It is not like all those examples of conversation gone wrong. As Amilcar’s comment suggests, self-interest governs these other types of speech. The lawyer wants to win his case, the merchant seeks to maximize his profits, and bad conversationalists insist on imposing their personal obsessions on anyone and everyone who will listen.
Polite conversation bonds together noble society because in the privacy of the salon, removed from the competitive hustle and bustle of the outside world, the participants put personal interest aside in favor of entertaining conversation that has no end beyond itself.

If conversation is the bond of all civil society, then complaisance is the most basic bond of conversation.
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Complaisance names that all-important skill that allows individuals to conceal their own interests and yield to the wishes of others. In “On Complaisance,” Clearque notes that “complaisance yields without weakness, praises without flattery … without affectation and baseness, renders society agreeable, and life easier and more diverting.” Sometimes, for the sake of others, we will pretend happily to discuss topics we don’t much care about, participate eagerly in activities we would rather forgo. Complaisance names the ability to ignore the foibles and eccentricities of others, to cede our own personal pleasures to the pleasures of those we are with, and so with “a thousand other little things, which without offending reason, and going against justice, manage effectively to make mankind better.”
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More than merely ceding to the wishes and desires of others, for complaisance to do its work, we must appear sincere. We must conceal our own wishes and desires behind an effortless facade of agreement so that those we are with can truly believe we mean what we say, otherwise our alleged agreement will reveal a not so hidden self-interest. “There is nothing more insupportable,” announces Clearque, “than those people who adopt a false complaisance and who are willing to do whatever you want to do, so that you will be willing to do what they want.”
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Finally, we mustn’t be overly complaisant, agreeing with everything proposed so that conversation dwindles into the boring silence of automatic agreement. There must be enough disagreement and wit among the participants to lend conversation its needed traction, to allow it to progress and for everyone to come together in a shared act of entertainment, but not so much that it grinds to a halt in strongly held positions, silence, boredom, or anger.
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Scudéry’s conception of conversation as a model of social cohesion depends on the concealment of self-interest beneath a
carefully contrived appearance of nonchalance and naturalness. The most clever bit of carefully planned banter must appear as if it springs immediately and naturally to mind. Even a moment’s hesitation between saying one thing or another betrays the possible hidden presence of a self-interest calculating between its most beneficial options. Conversation succeeds, society forms and bonds, when nothing disturbs these smooth exterior appearances, when nothing gives us cause to worry about what those appearances might hide. In a different conversation, “On the Knowledge of Ourselves and Others,” for example, Cephise claims that in order “to pass one’s life sweetly, it is necessary to remain on the surface of things, for should you penetrate any deeper, a person may find that those same pleasures are bitter.”
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In our dealings with others, we should be satisfied with facades and appearances. Hoping to discover and know something more, something deeper, something real, will only lead us into “a thousand sorrows.”
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When another person complains that Cephise would have us lead our lives potentially deceived about our dearest friends, Cephise simply acknowledges that to “look deeper is to risk those surfaces being proven false.” We can think we have known someone for years only to discover, suddenly and unexpectedly, the most dismaying imperfections in their character. The best we can do is make conjectures about others, knowing full well that more often than not we will be proved wrong.
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Invoking the sort of world-weary truism found in critiques of court life from as early as the eleventh century, Telesile supports Cephise’s favorable assessment of superficial human relations when he adds that it is simply impossible to know when and if people are disguising themselves. Who can tell if anyone is the person he presents himself to be: the courtier before his lord, the lover before his lady, even a friend before his friend? “One cannot know the heart,” he concludes, “through words or actions.”
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Significantly, Scudéry complicates this vision of global uncertainty and latent duplicity with a dose of Jansenist self-loathing. Not only can we never be sure if others are being truthful, worse, we cannot even be sure about ourselves. We continually mask our own
passions and envies, disguising them without realizing it, so charmed by our defects that we believe ourselves noble and caring when we are actually base and cruel. “People love themselves more than all the rest of the world,” Cephise notes, “and though they do not know themselves, they esteem themselves, they praise themselves without knowing why and even as they attempt to deceive others, they deceive themselves as well.”
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Although the bulk of the dialogue consists of a friendly debate between Cephise and Telesile about whether, with work, it is easier to know something of ourselves or others, the final word belongs to a third participant, Timocrates. “I believe that the two of you will agree,” he concludes, “that the greatest difficulty in knowing others well, and even ourselves, derives from the same cause that makes us see distant objects confusedly and makes us unable to discern those things that are too near to us. Similarly, we can say that others are too far from us and we are too close to ourselves in order to know either the one or the other perfectly.”
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Too close to ourselves and too far from others, everything becomes blurred, uncertain, unknown.