THE LADY AT COURT: CASTIGLIONE AND SAINT-SIMON

“I rule the world today, and a little man like this pays me no respect!”1

So Benvenuto Cellini in his wonderful Autobiography imagines “Madama de Tampes” speaking

to herself about him in 1545. Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Duchess d’Étampes, was the mistress of

his patron, François 1, King of France, and she was an important political player at his court.

Cellini fails to pay her suitable deference: “My evil fortune wished it that I was not alert enough
to play for Madame d’Étampes the same comedy [fare alretanta commedia]” of courtiership that

he had played with the king. François had declared the artist, “Mon ami,” bestowed on him for

home and workshop bestowed on him little castle in Paris, almost as if the artist Cellini were a

gentleman (2.23). In her disdain, Madame d’Étampes plots to foil the Cellini in the exhibition of

his newly finished silver statue of Jupiter, a work that is now lost. She delays the king until night

has fallen at the palace of Fontainebleau; Cellini counters by putting a torch in the statue’s hand

where Jupiter wields his thunderbolt, lighting the statue from above. While Madame d’Étampes

praises pieces of classical sculpture in the gallery, now themselves consigned to the shadows and

background, the impressed François declares that Cellini has not only rivalled, but surpassed the

ancients. Madame d’Étampes counters that Cellini has placed a veil over the statue to hide its

defaults.

1. “Io governo oggi il mondo, e un piccolo uomo, simile a questo, nulla mi stima.” Vita 2.40. Opere di
Benvenuto Cellini ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin: UTET, 1980), 450.

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 This was a very thin veil that I had placed with lovely grace over that Jupiter to increase

its majesty; at those words of hers I took, and raised it from beneath, revealing its beautiful

genital members, and with a bit of evident vexation, I tore it off completely. She thought

that I had uncovered that part to mock her. Seeing her indignation and seeing that I was

overcome by passion, the King wished to begin to speak: the wise King said these precise

words in his language: “Benvenuto I forbid you to say a word: keep quiet, and you will

have more treasure than you desire, a thousand to one.”2 (2.41)

The comic scene tells us much about the sexual politics of court society. In his moment of artistic

triumph, Madame d’Étampes thinks that Cellini has flashed her, an assertion of his masculinity

against her feminine power and influence. François own family jewels are also symbolically at

stake and on display in the splendid genitals of the king of the gods: who is the true power and

ruler of France and of all the world? We have a separate account of this incident from the Ferrarese

ambassador to the court. François is said to have given a great laugh, while the piqued Madame

d’Étampes asked Cellini what he would say if he were accountable to her as well as the king. “If

I were to be accountable to you, I would not stay with his Majesty,” Cellini responded.3 He serves

the king, not the mistress. As his statue shows, neither Cellini nor François are emasculated. But

hyper-masculinity has its liability, nonetheless. Cellini relates that Madame d’Étampes knew how

2
“Questo si era un velo sottilissimo, che io avevo messo con bella grazia addosso al ditto Giove, perché
gli accrescessi maestà: il quale a quelle parole io lo presi, alzandolo per di sotto, scoprendo quei bei membri
genitali, e con un poco di dimostrata istizza tutto lo stracciai. Lei pensò che io gli avessi scoperto quella
parte per proprio ischerno. Avvedutosi il Re, di quello isdegno e io vinito dalla passione, volsi cominciare
a parlare; subito il savior Re disser queste formate parole in sua lingua: – Benvenuto, io ti taglio la parola;
sì che sta cheto, e arai più testoro che tu non desideri, l’un mille.” Cellini, Opere, 455.
3
“quando io havessi a darne conto a uoi non starrei con soa Maesta. Alhora il re disse non piu non piu.”
John Pope-Henessey, Cellini (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 105. The document is printed in L.
Dimier, “Une pièce inédite sur le séjour de Benvenuto Cellini à la cour de France,” Revue Archéologique,
3rd series. 41 (1902): 85-95, 94-95. Dimier shows that Cellini has confused the order of the events in France
in his Autobiography are out of sequence: the episode of the statue came near their end.

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to get her way, “by those means that women can with men, and easily succeeded in her design, for

finding the King in an amorous mood, to which he was much subjected, he complied with Madame

in everything she desired.”4 (2.40) What she desired in this instance was harm to Cellini and a

portion of his Paris property, and her implacable enmity helped to prompt the artist’s break with

François and departure from France a few months later.

A second anecdote in the Autobiography tells a related story. Cellini returned to his native

Florence and to the service of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici. One day, the Duchess, Eleonora of

Toledo, asks Cellini to obtain for her a necklace of pearls, whose value he knows to be much
inferior to the asking price. As the Duchess listens behind the door, he gamely tries to persuade

the Duke to purchase the pearls, but, when the Duke asks him point-blank to tell him the truth as

a man of honor – “uomo dabbene” (2.83) – and further raises his hand and gives Cellini his word

of honor – “onorate parole” (2.84) – not to reveal their conversation to the Duchess. Cellini tells

him that the pearls are not worth the money. The Duke turns around and tells Cellini’s opinion to

the Duchess, and Cellini loses her favor, as he had feared. The Duchess now has recourse to the

Duke’s jewel-broker, one Bernardo Baldini, who pesters the Duke to buy the pearls; the Duchess,

he says, is dying from her wish for the necklace, and cannot live without it.

Becoming incensed, the Duke told him, “Either get out of my sight, or swell up your cheeks

at this instant.” That great wretch knew very well what he was doing, because if, whether

by means of swelling his cheeks or by singing La bella Franceschina, he could get the

Duke to make that buy, he would gain the favor [grazia] of the Duchess and his brokerage

on top of it, which amounted to several hundreds of scudi: and so he swelled up. The Duke

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“per quelle vie che possono le donne innegli uomini, tanto che failmente gli riuscì questo suo siegno, che
trovando il Re in una amorosoa tempera, alla quale lui era molto sottoposto, conpiacque a Madama tanto
quanto lei desiderava.” Cellini, Opere, 450.

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 gave him numerous big slaps [ceffatoni] on his big cheeks, and to get him out of his

presence he gave them a bit more forcefully than he would usually do. At those strong

blows on his cheeks, not only did they turn red, but he started to weep tears. At those, he

began to say, ‘Ah, my Lord, I am your faithful servant, who seeks to do good and who is

content to suffer any kind of hurt, if only that poor lady remains happy.” Having become

disgusted with this beastly man [uomaccio], both because of those slaps and because of

love for/of the Duchess, whom His Excellency always wanted to make happy, the Duke

quickly said: “Get out my sight with the plague that God send you, and go, make the
purchase, for I am content to do all that my lady the Duchess wants.” Now here one sees

the rage of misfortune against a poor man and the abusive fortune that favors a good-for-

nothing: I lost all the favor [grazia] of the Duchess, which almost good enough to deprive

me of that of the Duke as well; and he gained that big commission and their favor [grazia].

It is not enough to be a man of honor and valor [uomo dabbene e virtuoso].5 (2.84)

Cellini has tried to play out the “comedy” of courtiership on behalf of the Duchess before the Duke

calls on him to act as a man of honor. Meanwhile Bernardo Baldini shows just how such low such

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“ed essendo venuto a fastidio al Duca, gli disse: – O tu mi ti lievi d’inanzi, o tu gonfia un tratto. – Questo
ribaldaccio, che sapeva benissimio quello che lui faceva, perché se o per via del gonfiare o per cantare La
bella Franceschina, ei poteva ottnere che’l Duca facessi quella compera, egli si guadagnava la grazia della
Duchessa e di più la sua senseria, la quale montava parecchi centinaia di scudi: e così eli gonfiò. Il Duca
gli dette parecchi ceffatoni in quelle sue gotaccie, e per levarselo d’inanzi ei gli dette un poco più che e’
non soleva fare. A queste percosse forti in quelle sue gotaccie nontanto l’esser diventate troppo rosse, che
e’ ne venne giù le lacrime. Con quelle ei cominciò a dire: – Eh! Signore, un Vostro fidel servitor, il quale
cerca di far bene e si congenta di comportare ogni sorte di dispiacere, pur che quella povera Signora sia
conenta. – Essendo troppos venuto affastidito al Duca queso uomaccio, e per le gotate e per amore della
Duchessa, la quale Sua Eceelenzia sempre volse contentare, subito disse: – Levamiti d’inanzi col malanno
che Dio ti dia, e va, fanne mercato, che io son content di fare tutto quello che vuole la signora Duchessa. –
Or qui si conosce la rabbia della mala fortuna inverso d’un povero uomo e la vituperosa fortuna a favorire
uno sciagurato: io mi persi tutta la grazia della Duchessa, che fu buona causa di tornmi ancora quella del
Duca; e lui di guadagnò quella grossa senseria e la grazia loro: sì che e’ non basta l’esser uomo dabbbene
e virtuoso.” Cellini, Opere, p. 535.

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comedy can sink when he obtains the grazia of the Duchess and of the Duke as well. He takes

literally the Duke’s not-in-earnest command to swell his cheeks like a court buffoon, and the Duke

lets him have it. He is slapped, repeatedly, the most dishonoring of blows. We have the seen the

distinction between punch and slap in the case of the paper duelists Varese and Count Thiene in

the preceding chapter. Cellini himself recounts how as very young man he had been involved in

a street brawl, and naively insisted that he had merely slapped rather than punched his adversary

– “ceffata fu e non pugno” – not realizing, as a sympathetic judge of the case comments, that the

slap is the greater offense (1.16-17). It is still the case in Leonid Andreyev’s twentieth-century
play (1914) and Lon Chaney’s subsequent 1924 silent film, He who Gets Slapped, where the hero,

having been slapped in public, has no recourse except to turn circus clown and be slapped and

humiliated anew at every performance. Baldini plays clown for a day, and he also plays woman

with the woman’s weapon of tears and his wheedling plea of the Duchess’s cause. Duke Cosimo

does not come off much better from this episode. Taken aback by the force of his slaps, which

through the proxy Baldini, seem directed at his wife, the Duke quickly loses his determination and

gives in to her wishes. The Duchess gets her pearls. The Duke has already broken his pledged

word of honor and exposed Cellini to her disfavor. It is not clear which of the ducal couple Cellini

blames more.

Cellini portrays himself as the only uomo dabbene in these court settings. The term has

something of the same ambiguity about class and virtue that “honnȇte homme” was to acquire in

French. It marks personal integrity and honorable behavior, but it also, perhaps primarily, denotes

a nobleman entitled to honor. Cellini was himself an artisan and proud of his humble origins. He

was only aspirationally a gentleman, whom Cellini understood to be a man of arms and associates

with his own ready disposition to violence: we hear this in the second adjective he ascribes to

himself above, “virtuoso.” At the very beginning of the Autobiography, he takes note of the

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eminently noble Cellini family of Ravenna (no relations, but then, who knows?), and recounts how

a certain Tuscan Luca Cellini (also no relation, but…), a beardless youth, had recently killed in

combat a practiced and most valiant soldier, one Francesco di Vicorati who had previously fought

in the duelling lists; from this David and Goliath combat, he concludes, “I glory in having descent

from valiant men [virtuosi].” [1.2.] Cellini himself takes ably and willingly to soldiery, firing off

artillery from the Castel Sant’Angelo against the sackers of Rome in 1527 and, so he claims, hitting

and killing the Prince of Orange. He avenges himself with his dagger on the gunner who had shot

his brother Cecchino, a soldier by profession and a kind of alter-ego. Ceechino died an emblematic
death: wounded by the new weaponry that destroyed chivalry, he breathes his last when in his

deathbed delirium he makes a movement as if to mount a horse (1.49). On the tomb monument of

this valiant brother’s tomb Cellini places a modified version of the coat of arms of the Cellini of

Ravenna, “onoratissimi gentiluomini.” (1.50) Cellini, to repeat, knew who he was socially, and

he had the distance to see through the comedy of his own deference and the worth of royal

professions of friendship. But he liked to show repeatedly in his Autobiography that he could be

more noble in deeds than the great and powerful on whom he depended. This was all the more the

case in a court society governed, as these two anecdotes illustrate, by women, a society where

Cellini’s honorable and aggressively manly behavior could also bring him to grief.

The Cellini in these stories can thus stand in for his aristocratic betters, gentlemen of

acknowledged birth and lineage, who shared similar dilemmas in female-ridden courts. Ladies

dominated the early modern princely court, whether the prince’s mistress(es) sometimes behind

the scenes or in the foreground and thick of things, or the prince’s ruling consort, or when the

prince was herself a woman, as in the cases of Queen Elizabeth 1 of England or the regent Marie

de’ Medici in France. Nobles who came to courts, leaving their estates or the all-male military

6
world of camps and battles, had to adapt new forms of civility to address the court ladies and new

rituals of homage to their prince: these could be, or be felt to be, one and the same. The presence

of ladies refined noblemen’s manners, and contributed to the pacification that the prince sought by

his bringing them to serve him at court. The soldier noble might experience women-pleasing court

entertainments as effeminizing indignities. He literally had to dance attendance on both lady and

prince. “These soft and silken wars are not for me: / The music must be shrill and all confus’d /

That stirs my blood, and then I dance with arms” (1.42-44), complains the old campaigner

Melantius, who declines to dance in a court masque at the beginning of John Fletcher’s The Maid’s
Tragedy (1610-11).

Both the cases that follow in this chapter, drawn from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and

the Mémoires of the Du de Saint-Simon – respectively at the beginnings and at the mature

development of early modern court society – depict the real power and sway that some women

could acquire at historical courts. My focus is on how male courtiers viewed this power. It seemed

to them like the scandalous obverse of their own disempowerment as court servants. They served

ladies out of politeness and for erotic favor; they served the prince as subjects and for material

gain. It is difficult to gauge – as it is hard to choose between Cellini’s critical portraits of the

Duchess and the Duke – just which of these relationships bred more dissatisfactoin, and just where

the resentment and misogyny that wells up in the words of frustrated courtiers are directed: at the

lady (ostensibly) or at the monarch who should not be overtly named.

Fletcher’s fictional Melantius carries the latter resentment to its logical, but impossible

conclusion. He returns from the wars to discover that his sister Evadne has become the secret

mistress of his king. Instead of following the course that any normal early modern aristocrat would

take, Melantius does not try to exploit this erotic connection at court to obtain greater favor and

position for himself and his clan. (Madame d’Étampes’s uncle became a cardinal; three of her

7
brothers became bishops; her complacent husband became a Duke.) He regards it instead as an

affront against his honor and successfully goads Evadne to kill the tyrant-king. And so tragedy

ensues and a stage strewn with corpses. But the good soldier Melantius, as we shall see, is the

exception and a man behind the times. He should have danced.

1. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier

A consensus emerged during the 1980s and 1990s in American feminist criticism of the Book

of the Courtier, particularly concerning the discussions in Book 3 of the court lady – the “donna

di palazzo” – that end with the violent misogynist outburst of Gasparo Pallavicino, a tirade which

for its length and vehemence can barely be contained within the decorum of the court society and

of Castiglione's book. The general lines of this reading go as follows. a) The ladies present at

Urbino have little to say about their identity and role in the court, for these are defined for them by

the male courtiers; and their lack of a voice of their own reflects the more general subordination

of women in the patriarchal culture in Renaissance Italy. b) Insofar as the defenders of women

(Cesare Gonzaga, the Magnifico Giuliano de' Medici) are able to counter their detractors (Gasparo,

Niccolò Frisio, Ottaviano Fregoso) and to assign positive virtues to the court lady beyond

patriarchy's absolute requirement of chastity, these virtues are for the most part passive and

decorative: the lady is ascribed cultural accomplishments in order that she be able to receive and

appreciate those of the courtier; the lady should be beautiful. c) In her subordination to men, in

her transformation into an aesthetic object, the court lady holds up a disturbing mirror to the male

courtier himself, subordinated as he is politically to the prince whom he serves, his own role

8
reduced to being a cultural ornament to the court. As Ottaviano Fregoso ruefully concedes in Book

4, the courtier has himself become effeminate (4.4).6

This reading has the merit of asking us to think about how the discussions of Book 3, too easily

written off by earlier criticism as a mere rehearsal of the tropes of the querelle des femmes, fit into

the larger argument of the Book of the Courtier. It counters Jacob Burckhardt's assertion, to be

sure a vast overstatement of the case, that in the Renaissance women achieved equality with men

– though, in doing so, it may underestimate the innovation of Castiglione's assigning value to

female learning and female beauty.7 It acknowledges, furthermore, the political dimension of the

6. "If the courtier who charms the prince bears the same relation to him as the lady bears to the courtier, it
is because Castiglione understood the relation of the sexes in the same terms that he used to describe the
political relation: i.e., as a relation between servant and lord." This is the formula of Joan Kelly in her
polemical article, "Did Women Have a Renaissance," in Women, History, & Theory: The Essays of Joan
Kelly (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 46; it is cited by Carla Freccero in
her essay, "Politics and Aesthetics in Castiglione's Il Cortegiano: Book III and the Discourse on Women,"
in Creative Imitation: New Essay on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint
et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 259-279. Valeria Finucci
in The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1992) evokes Kelly's argument in her own discussion of how Castiglione's courtiers have to
"cancel. . .the possibilities that they themselves have been feminized in their daily lives" (p. 43). Finucci
criticizes Kelly for having, like Burckhardt, used "rhetorical, literary images of women to draw conclusions
about real women." I would add that the differences that Kelly finds between the medieval courts of love and
Castiglione's court at Urbino masks far greater literary continuities between the two.
Kelly may have known that she was arguing against the grain of the Courtier: she acknowledges, only to deny,
the "likeness of the lady to the prince" in Bembo's exposition of Neoplatonic love (p. 44). In Renaissance
Feminism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), Constance Jordan provides a more subtle
account of the power relations of the Courtier; she seems to echo Kelly when she writes that the courtier's
"status vis-à-vis his lord is similar to that of a wife in relation to her husband" (77-78) but goes on to explore
how Castiglione's courtier is subject to the women of the court of Urbino.
7. See Burckhardt's chapter on "The Position of Women" (V.6) in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
trans. Ludwig Geiger and Walther Götz (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 2:389-395. The question of
whether and to what extent the role that Castiglione assigns to the court lady was emancipatory for real
noblewomen at court is a vexed one. In a distinguished essay, "Osservazioni sul terzo libro del Cortegiano,"
Aevum 66 (1992): 519-537, Claudio Scarpati argues that Castiglione's book does, indeed, affirm the equality
of the court lady to the courtier. Marina Zancan sees the court lady as complementary to the courtier and the
possessor of equal social value, though his and her roles are gendered; see Zancan, "La donna e il cerchio nel
Cortegiano di B. Castiglione. Le funzioni del femminile nell'imagine di corte," in Nel cerchio dell a luna:
Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, ed. Marina Zancan (Venice: Marsilio, 1983), pp. 13-56.
Taking an opposing position, Adriana Chemello contrasts to the court lady defined by the Courtier both the
professional, culturally accomplished courtesan and the protests against the oppression of "real" women voiced

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Courtier, which describes the role of the princely court in the efforts of the early modern state to

tame and control a feudal warrior nobility: the transformation of soldier-aristocrat into polite

courtier, Elias’s "civilizing process."8 But its political alignment of the court lady with the courtier

seriously distorts the way that Castiglione shows women at court participating in this process of

"civilizing" the nobleman – pacifying him and rendering him dependent on princely favor. If the

ladies at the court contribute little to the conversation that spells out what their ideal role should

be, it is ladies who nonetheless have the last say and control the discussions of the Courtier itself.

The Duchess, Elisabetta Gonzaga, attends the evening games at Urbino and appoints her lady-in-
waiting, Emilia Pia, to oversee them.9 It is for women that the male courtiers of the Courtier –

and, by implication, its author, too – perform, an audience that both makes possible and perhaps

sets limits to the book's cultural achievement. The political homology that structures and unifies

the book aligns the court lady not with the disempowered courtier, but with the prince who has

power over him – they are one and the same person in the Duchess.

by a Renaissance woman author, Moderata Fonte, in "Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortigiana: ruoli e funzioni
sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento," in La corte e il "cortegiano": II. Un modello europeo,
ed. Adriano Prosperi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), pp.113-132. Francesco Sberlati, in "Dalla donna di palazzo alla
donna di famiglia, " I Tatti Studies 7 (1997): 119-174, underscores the importance for later sixteenth century
"feminist" writings of Castiglione's insistence on the lady's learning and her literary and artistic education;
however Renaissance women's lives may have been enriched by these new cultural possibilities, he nonetheless
acknowledges that their lives remained regimented in the three traditional stages of virgin, wife and mother,
and widow. José Guidi draws somewhat similar conclusions in "De l'amour courtois à l'amour sacré: la
condition de la femme dans l'oeuvre de B. Castiglione," in Guidi, Marie-FrançoisePiejus, and Adelin-Charles
Fiorato, Images de la femme dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance: Préjugés misogynes et aspirations
nouvelles (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1980), pp. 9-80.
8. See Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott into two volumes,
The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) and Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1982). See also Elias, The Court Society (1969; English trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Pantheon
Books, 1983). For the case of England, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (1965;
abr. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

9. Jordan, in Renaissance Feminism, pp. 76-85, acknowledges this subordination of the courtiers to the ladies
of the court, but understands the discussions of Book III as Castiglione's demonstration of "the power of men
to control even the duchess and Emilia Pia, women who have greater social and political status than they do"
(84).

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 It should come as no surprise that this is so. The discourse of courtly love in the Middle Ages

described the relationship of the male lover to his lady in the terms of service and reward that also

characterized the relationship of the feudal vassal to his overlord: the lady is the lover's lord or

"domina." So Pietro Bembo speaks of "serving" – "io servava" (1.11) – his lady as he and the

courtiers at Urbino propose different games for the evening's entertainment at the beginning of the

book.10 The ensuing discussion of the courtier, in fact, takes the place of the games about the

questions of love that we gather are the usual fare at the palace and that continue to encode the

language of courtly love.11 This language, moreover, is commutable in the Book of the Courtier:
not only does the lover serve the lady he loves, but the courtier is to love the prince he serves.

Federico Fregoso describes the relationship – the "conversazione" – that should obtain between

lord and servant: "I would have the Courtier devote all his thought and strength of spirit to loving

and almost adoring the prince he serves above all else, devoting his every desire and habit and

manner to pleasing him."12 (2.18). In return for their devotion, the courtier and lover expect from

their prince and lady the reward that the Courtier from its very beginning (1.1) calls "grazia." The

term covers the more general favor -- "quella universal grazia" -- of the prince and of other nobles

and ladies (2.17; 4.5)) But it also denotes the specific mercenary and political favors for himself

and for others which courtier may request from the prince. Cellini’s Baldini asking for the pearls

his Duchess cannot live without presents a particularly abased version of such begging for “grazia”

by a social inferior, but such transactions were the an everyday goal of courtiership, what it meant

10. Citations of the Italian text of the Book of the Courtier are taken from the edition of Bruno Maier, Il libro
del Cortegiano con una scelta delle Opere minori (Turin: UTET, 1964). The English translation is that of
Charles Singleton, The Book of the Courtier (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959). Numbers in
parentheses indicate book and section.
11. On these courtly games, see Thomas M. Greene, "Il Cortegiano and the Choice of a Game," Renaissance
Quarterly 32 (1979): 173-86; reprinted in Castiglione. The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 1-15.
12
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 216: "si volti con tutti i pensieri e forze dell'animo suo ad amare e
quasi adorare il principe a chi serve sopra ogni altra cosa; e le voglie sue e costumi e modi tutti indrizzi a
compiacerlo."

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for the courtier’s own dependents to have a friend at court. Castiglione criticizes courtiers who

“fish for favors openly as many do, who are so avid of them that it seems they would die if they

did not get them” (2.19).13 The astute courtier will rarely, almost never ask, Castiglione

unrealistically concludes (2.18; 2.19). Grazia covers as well the favor, up to and including sexual

favors, that the beloved lady will show her servant (3.4): see, for example, the discussion between

the Unico Aretino and Emilia Pia on how to gain the favor of women – “acquistar la grazia delle

donne" – in 3.61-62. This "grazia" is, furthermore, the recompense awarded to the "grazia" or

grace of the courtier, itself, that winning quality of gracefulness and apparent effortlessness that
accompanies his actions and that Ludovico Canossa in Book 1 derives from the calculated pose of

sprezzatura (1.14; 1.25-28).14

In fact, the court lady and women in general emerge in Book 3 as a rival audience for whom,

as well as for the Prince, the courtier puts on display the exquisite accomplishments that are

outlined for him in Book 1. In Book 2 Federico Fregoso speaks of how the courtier acquires the

favor ("grazia") of the Prince through his good qualities – "to win. . .favor [per acquistar. .

.grazia] from the princes whom he serves, I deem it necessary how to order his whole life and how

to make the most of his own good qualities [sue bone qualità] generally in associating with all

men, without exciting envy" (2.7). In Book 4, in an echoing passage, his brother Ottaviano Fregoso

explains how the courtier should “avail himself of the favor acquired by his good qualities [grazia

acquistata con le sue bone qualità]" (4.5). The same Federico Fregoso acknowledges in Book 3

that these qualities and abilities are aimed as well – or instead – at women: "every gallant cavalier

employs those noble exercises, the elegance of dress, and the fine manners that we have mentioned

13
Castglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 219: “uccellargli cosi scopertamente come fan molti, che tanto avidi
ne sono, che pare che, non conseguendogli, abbiano di perdere la vita.”

14. On the grace of the courtier, see Eduardo Saccone, "Grazia, Sprezzatura, Affettazione in the Courtier,"
Glyph 5 (1979): 34-54, reprinted in Castiglione, pp. 45-67.

12
as a means of gaining the favor [d’acquistar grazia] of women" (3.53).15 The courtiership which

seeks to have an influence on the Prince, either for the courtier's benefit and self-promotion in

Book 2 or, in Ottaviano's more idealistic vision in Book 4, for the goal of good government, can

also become an entertainment for the ladies, an instrument of erotic courtship. It may, at one of

the darkest moments of Castiglione' book, be little more than a means to break down female

chastity: Cesare Gonzaga speaks of the difficulty the lady experiences in defending her honor

under the assault that her lover makes on her through "the fopperies, the inventions, mottoes,

devices, festivals, dances, games, masquerades, jousts, tourneys – all of which she knows are done
for her" (3.50).16 The festive life of the court takes on a sinister hue, and the courtier with all his

art is reduced in this passage to a cynical seducer. Does he behave any better, we are left to wonder,

in his relationship to the Prince that mirrors his relationship to women?

This symmetry between the Prince and the Lady, each the recipient of the courtier's devoted

attention, each the bestower or withholder of "grazia," continues in and shapes the discussions of

Book 4, which Castiglione added to the final rendition of the Courtier. He filled out further and

moved from the earlier three-book version of his book Ottaviano Fregoso's portrait of the courtier

as the educator of his prince in virtue and justice – we have seen in Chapter 1 that Cesare Gonzaga

complains that Ottavinao has made the courtier into a schoolmaster (4.36). The second part of the

book is taken up with Pietro Bembo's Neoplatonic discourse on love, where the courtier is no less

of an educator, this time of his lady. Ottaviano and Bembo use the same horticultural metaphor to

describe bringing the Prince and the Lady to the fruits of virtue. Ottaviano speaks of the need of

a master -- Cesare's schoolmaster -- who can "awaken in us those moral virtues of which we have

the seed enclosed and planted in our souls" ["risvegli in noi quelle virtù morali, delle quali avemo

15
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 414: "ogni gentil cavalliero usa per instrumento d'acquistar grazia di
donne quei nobili esercizi, attillature e bei costumi che avemo nominati"
16
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 408: "Lasso tante attilature, invenzioni, motti, imprese, feste, balli,
giochi, maschere, giostre, torniamenti, le quai cose essa conosce tutte esser fatte per sé."

13
il seme incluso e sepulto nell'anima"] – in order to let them "flower or produce those fair fruits

which alone we should desire to see born in the human heart" [“produr quei felici frutti, che soli

si dovriano desiderar che nascessero nei cori umani"] (4.13). Bembo's lover will so improve his

Lady that, "by sowing virtue in the garden of her fair mind, he will gather fruits of the most

beautiful behavior, and will taste them with wondrous delight" ["così seminando virtù nel giardin

di quel bell'animo, raccorrà ancora frutti di bellissimi costumi e gustaragli con mirabil diletto"]

(4.62). The parallel suggests a common logic of sublimation and an underlying similarity between

the apparently contrasting roles that Ottaviano and Bembo assign the courtier in the active, political
life and in the life of contemplation. Ottaviano tries to teach the Prince to temper his desire for

power – his "libido dominandi" – just as Bembo's lover teaches his lady and himself a love that

transcends the desires of the flesh.17

What both Ottaviano and Bembo would teach, however, is a lesson that the presence of women

at court has already taught the courtier, the lesson of civilization itself: the restraint of aggression

and the cultivation of good manners – that beautiful behavior which Bembo seeks to inculcate.

The role of the court and particularly of its women in reshaping the behavior and identity of the

Renaissance nobleman is nicely epitomized in a comic anecdote that Ludovico da Canossa tells

early in Castiglione's book. Count Ludovico has just begun to outline the qualities that the ideal

courtier should possess and he asserts that "the principal and true profession of the Courtier must

be that of arms" -- the Courtier is first and foremost a soldier. However, Ludovico immediately

17. On Ottaviano's role and the shape of the new fourth book of the Courtier, see Wayne Rebhorn, "Ottaviano's
interruption: Book IV and the problem of unity in Il libro del Cortegiano," Modern Language Notes 87 (1972):
37-69; the essay is incorporated into Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's
"Book of the Courtier" (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 177-204. See also Laurence V.
Ryan, "Book IV of Castiglione's Courtier -- Climax or Afterthought," Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972):
156-79; J. R. Woodhouse, Castiglione (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1978), pp. 137-166; Daniel
Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 40-
49.

14
concedes that there is a situation where it is not appropriate to show off one's martial qualities, and

that is precisely at court:

We do not wish him to make a show of being so fierce that he is forever swaggering in his

speech, declaring that he has wedded his cuirass, and glowering with such dour looks as

we have often see Berto [the court jester] do; for to such as these one may rightly say what

in polite society a worthy lady [una valorosa donna in una nobile compagnia] jestingly

said to a certain man (whom I do not now wish to name) whom she sought to honor by
inviting him to dance, and who not only declined this but would not listen to music or take

any part in the other entertainments offered him, but kept saying that such trifles were not

his business. And when finally the lady said to him: “What then is your business?” he

answered with a scowl: “Fighting.” Whereupon the lady replied at once: “I should think it

a good thing, now that you are not away at war or engaged in fighting, for you to have

yourself greased all over and stowed away in a closet along with your battle harness, so

that you won't grow any rustier than you already are”; and so, amid much laughter from

those present, she ridiculed him in his stupid presumption.18 (1.17)

18
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 110-111: “Il quale non volemo però che si mostri tanto fiero, che
sempre stia in su le brave parole e dica aver tolto la corazza per moglie, e minacci con quelle fiere guardature
che spesso avemo vedute fare a Berto, ché a questi tali meritamente si po dir quello, che una valorosa donna
in una nobile compagnia piacevolmente disse ad uno, ch'io per ora nominar non voglio; il quale essendo da
lei, per onorarlo, invitato a danzare, e rifiutando esso e questo e lo udir musica e molti altri intertenimenti
offertigli, sempre con dir così fatte novelluzze non esser suo mestiero, in ultimo, dicendo la donna, "Qual
è dunque il mestier vostro", rispose con un mal viso: "Il combattere"; allora la donna sùbito: "Crederei",
disse "che or che non siete alla guerra, né in termine de combattere, fosse bona cosa che vi faceste molto
ben untare ed insieme con tutti i vostri arnesi da battaglia riporre in un armario finché bisognasse, per non
ruginire più di quello che siate"; e così, con molte risa de' circunstanti, scornato lasciollo nella sua sciocca
prosunzione.”

15
If the conversations of the Courtier are a game, the game is already up here, even as it is first

getting under way. The anecdote announces the structure and tone of Book 1, which now moves

increasingly away from fighting to the arts of peace that are the other accomplishments of the

courtier, more precisely the accomplishments that define him as courtier. The ensuing definition

of sprezzatura turns discussion from the martial athleticism of the knight on horseback to the grace

of the dancer (compare 1.21-25 with 1.26-27), and subsequently to issues of writing, music, and

painting, and this movement from soldiering to high culture is further thematized in the debate
between arms and letters in sections 45-46.19 But, in effect, the entire Book of the Courtier moves

the courtier away from the battlefield and military life that is supposedly his first profession and

into a polite realm where he had better hang up his armor and fighting ways at the door or risk the

ridicule that befalls the boorish soldier in Ludovico's anecdote: Fletcher’s Melantius, who declines

to dance, should take note. The court and its etiquette become an instrument by which the prince

can pacify, keep an eye on, and control his warlike noble subjects: Castiglione outlines a scenario

that, as Elias and others have documented, would be repeated over and over in early modern

statebuilding.

In Castiglione's scenario, in the story of the scowling soldier who has no time for dancing, it is

the lady who represents the court and stands in for the prince: a lady in whose presence another

kind of behavior is demanded of the nobleman, just as he is required to defer before his prince.

The lady offers to dance in order to honor him; that is, she and the court, and behind them both,

the prince, become an alternate, rival source or dispenser of that honor – a sense of noble selfhood

and place in the larger social world – which the soldier would claim to authenticate for himself

from his lineage and from his fighting. In the very section of the book, in fact, Gaspar Pallavicino

19. On dancing at court, see Stephen Kolsky, "Graceful Performances: The Social and Political Context of
Music and Dance in the Cortegiano," Italian Studies 53 (1998): 1-19.

16
defends the nobleman’s right to boast about his own honor in a passage that has been discussed in

Chapter 1 (1.18), but that, too, smacks of presumption.20 The adjective, "valorosa", that describes

the worthiness of the lady of the anecdote is highly charged, for it suggests an equivalent to the

military valor of the soldier. His refusal to dance is a refusal of court culture and of a whole

political as well as social arrangement that would make him dependent on the prince for his noble

identity. Yet the ease with which the lady rebukes him suggests that this warrior-aristocrat is out

of date, that such identity has already been transformed – that he had better learn how to give up

his aggression and to dance and please ladies or be laughed out of the court and noble society
("nobile compagnia") itself. Arms may still be the first profession of the noble courtier, but he is

now a courtier first, soldier second.

The design and logic of the Book of the Courtier as a whole is thus circular. The princely court

and its ladies tame the aggression of a military aristocracy, turn them into the prince's servants,

and diminish their potential threat to his rule. Taught restraint and polite manners by the court,

Castiglione's courtier (Ottaviano Fregoso, Pietro Bembo) seeks, in turn, in Book 4 to teach

temperate rule to the prince and a sublimated, Neoplatonic love to the lady. Lady and Prince are

consistently paralleled, and the lady – as the object for whom the courtier learns the skills of

civilization and arts of peace – does much of the prince's work for him, creating a more docile and

tractable nobility. If the nobleman comes to court to serve and be near his prince, his main activity

there is to associate and converse with ladies: "most of our time at court is given over to it,"

comments Gasparo Pallavicino (2.31).

20. See also the remarks of Scarpati in "Osservazioni": "La società feudale e cavalleresca, in cui l'onore era
l'unica forma di possesso che i cadetti potevano esibire, trovava nell'autoelogio una via obbligata di
affermazione dell'individuo. La nuova aristocrazia può invece recuperare il valore stoico dell'attenuazione
coniugandolo con quello cristiano della non presunzione. . ." (524). Scarpati argues that the avoidance of
presumption – the ostentation or praise of oneself – is the key virtue that Castiglione prescribes for both the
courtier and the court lady and that lies behind all the modes of behavior his book recommends for them.

17
 Hence the resentment against women that percolates through the Courtier, women who set the

tone of the court society and its culture. In no small part, the misogyny of some of the courtiers

who participate in its conversation can be understood as a response to their situation at court itself,

to their being both the dependent creatures of the prince and the pleasing servants of ladies.

Ottaviano Fregoso, one of the enemies of women in the book, suggests in his opening remarks in

Book 4 that the pacification of the nobility at court has been only too successful. The art of

pleasing women practiced at the courts, he comments, makes the courtier womanish: "these

elegances of dress, devices, mottoes, and other such things as pertain to women and love (although
many will think the contrary), often serve merely to make spirits effeminate"21 -- (4.4) -- and he

sees in this effeminized court culture a cause of Italy's military decline. Turned into women-

serving courtiers, the Italian nobility, Ottaviano suggests, have become womanish and all but

abandoned their principal profession of arms, leaving the peninsula defenseless before its foreign

invaders: "there are but few who dare, I will not say, to die, but even to risk any danger."22 No

wonder, then, that the fighting man of Count Ludovico's anecdote bridles at dancing before the

ladies. Ottaviano, however, mystifies the story of disempowerment he tells, ascribing to the

women at court the transformation of Italy's martial nobility into peaceable courtiers -- rather than

to the prince who brings the nobleman to the women-dominated court in the first place.

We may feel, in fact, that the attacks on women in the Book of the Courtier are partly a

displacement of the resentment that the male courtier feels, but cannot allow himself fully to

express, toward the prince and toward the position of subordination in which he finds himself at

21
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 450: "queste attilature, imprese, motti ed altre tai cose che
appartengono ad intertenimenti di donne e d'amori, ancora che forse a molti paia il contrario, spesso non
fanno altro che effeminar gli animi."
22. In the penultimate, second redaction of the Courtier in three books, these words of Ottaviano are spoken
by Gasparo Pallavicino and placed in the middle of the discussions about the court lady and women more
generally. Gasparo's conclusion is unequivocal: "And women are the cause of all this situation" -- "E di tutto
questo sono causa le donne." See La seconda redazione del "Cortegiano" di Baldassarre Castiglione, ed.
Ghino Ghinassi (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), p. 280. See also Scarpati, "Osservazioni," p. 535.

18
court. Women, already criticized by a long Western tradition of misogny, are an easier, safer target

than the prince; they become a safety-valve that allows the courtier to vent anger that may not be

exclusively directed toward them. They are so, however, because the terms of Castiglione's book

repeatedly align the court lady with the prince, both holding power at court over the courtier, both

the recipients of his love and services. These terms lend Gasparo Pallavicino's outburst against

women at the end of Book 3 (74-75) its particular power and, despite its comic excess, its

poignancy. Castiglione moved the passage to the very end of Book 3 and makes it the climax of

the discussion of the court lady. Gasparo speaks the language of unrequited love, of service gone
unrewarded.

they neither content their lovers, nor reduce them to utter despair, but in order to keep them

continually in worries and in desire, they resort to a certain domineering austerity in the

form of threats mingled with hope, and expect a word of theirs, a look, a nod, to be deemed

the highest happiness.

they lie every night with the vilest men, men whom they scarcely know; and in order to

enjoy the calamities and continual laments of the noble cavaliers whom they love, they

deny themselves those pleasures which they might perhaps be excused for enjoying. .

There are other women who, if they trick many men into thinking themselves loved by

them, keep alive the jealousies among them by showing affection and favor to one in the

presence of the other; and then, when they see that the one they most love is already

confident that he is loved because of the demonstrations shown him, they put him in

19
 suspense by ambigous words and feigned anger, and pierce his heart, pretending to care

nothing for him, and that they mean to gives themselves wholly to another.23 (3.74)

What happens if, given the symmetry the Courtier establishes between the two, we read this

courtier's complaint about his ungrateful lady as a description as well of his relationship to his

prince, if we substitute "prince" for "women" in the charges Gasparo makes against womankind?

The frustration toward the lady he serves parallels the experience of the courtier frustrated by a
prince 1) who keeps his servants in perpetual uncertainty by alternately promising and withholding

his favor, 2) who raises up unworthy men to positions of favor instead of his faithful gentlemen,

3) who plays his courtiers off one against the other, raising one to favor and causing jealousy and

envy among the rest, only to discard him and raise another. Early on the Courtier has criticized

"the judgment of princes who, thinking to work miracles, sometimes decide to show favor to one

who seems to them to deserve disfavor"24 (1.16) – that is, who deliberately raise the basest of men

– "omini vilissimi" – to places of favor and influence in order to demonstrate their own godlike,

miracle-working power over the court and the other courtiers whom he thereby snubs. In Book 2,

23 Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 439: “non contentano né disperano mai gli amanti del
tutto; ma per mantenergli continuamente negli affanni e nel desiderio usano una certa imperiosa
austerità di minacce mescolate con speranza, e vogliono che una loro parola, uno sguardo, un
cenno sia da essi riputato per somma felicità. . .si giaceno tutte le notti con omini vilissimi e da
esse a pena conosciuti, di modo che per godere delle calamità e continui lamenti di qualche nobil
cavaliero e da esse amato, negano a se stesse que' piaceri che forse con qualche escusazione
potrebbono conseguire. . . Alcun'altre sono le quali, se con inganni possono indurre molti a credere
d'essere da loro amati, nutriscono tra essi le gelosie col far carezze e favore all'uno in presenzia
dell'altro; e quando veggon che quello ancor che esse più amano già si confida d'esser amato per
le demostrazioni fattegli, spesso con parole ambigue e sdegni simulati lo suspendeno e gli
traffiggono il core, mostrando non curarlo e volersi in tutto donare all'altro;
24
Ibid., 108: "la ostinazion dei signori, i quali, per voler far miracoli, talor si mettono a dar favore a chi par
loro che meriti disfavore"

20
the god in question whom the Prince imitates is Fortune; in his capriciousness, he can refuse favor

to the man of good character ("ben condizionato") and show his liking for a dullard ("un

ignorantissimo") (2.32).25 The courtier, meanwhile, is cautioned not to behave as some do: "if

they chance to meet with disfavor, or if they see others favored, they suffer such agony that they

are quite unable to conceal their envy" (2.19)26 --. Such envy was perceived to be the particular

vice of the Renaissance court, caused precisely, in the words of one near contemporary writer,

Matteo Bandello, by the changing favor of the Prince that "in one moment lifts him who was low

and lowers him who found himself on high."27 The Courtier at its beginning declares that it will
teach the gentleman how to win favor from the prince "and praise from others" (1.1). The otheres

in question are his fellow courtiers, and the book repeatedly seeks to find "a very great and strong

shield against envy, which we ought to avoid as much as possible" -- "grandissimo e fermissimo

scudo contra la invidia, la qual si dee fuggir quanto più si po" (2.41). The envy the prince's

capricious favor arouses among his courtiers matches the jealousy that Gasparo's lady kindles

among her lovers.

To observe that Gasparo's complaints about the courtship he pays to his lady have their

counterpart in the courtiership he practices before his prince is not to explain away Gasparo's

misogyny, but to explain its place in Castiglione's larger book. To be a Renaissance courtier, the

25. For a discussion of Castiglione's prince as the godlike creator of the courtier and dispenser of grace upon
him -- in analogy with the potentia absoluta that nominalist thought ascribed to the Christian God -- see Ullrich
Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1990), 51-83;
for the analogy with Fortune, see p. 62. Kenneth Burke examines some implications of the relationship between
sovereign and deity in the Courtier in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1969), pp. 221-233.
26
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 219: "e se per sorte hanno qualche disfavore, o vero veggono alri
esser favoriti, restano con tanta angonia, che dissimular per modo alcuno non possono quella invidia."
27. "E ben vero che ne le cose de le corti si può trovare qualche fondamento di ragione di queste mutazioni, e
questo è il pungente e velenoso stimolo de la pestifera invidia, il quale di continuo tien i favori del prencipe su
la bilancia, ed in un momento alza chi era basso e abassa chi in alto si trovava, di maniera che ne le corti non
ci è peste piú nociva né piú dannosa del morbo de l'invidia." (Novella, I.2) Bandello, Tutte le Opere di Matteo
Bandello, ed. Francesco Flora (Verona: Mondadori, 1934-1935), 1:40.

21
Courtier makes clear, means both to serve a prince and to enter into a court society where women

enjoy an unusual position of prominence and have to be pleased and served as well. The first kind

of service may be bad enough for an aristocrat forced to civilize himself and to give up the

traditional aggressiveness and personal independence of his class; on top of it, the second, Gasparo

suggests, is intolerable. The parallel between the two kinds of service, moreover discloses the

element of instinctual repression that is involved in the courtier's accommodation to the codes of

civility.28 He needs to sublimate the pleasures of open aggression, both political and erotic, in the

polite confines of the court culture and in the worshipful stance it takes towards both prince and
beloved lady; Bembo's discourse on love in the following book shows how such sublimation might

become complete. Gasparo's outburst is comic – even his fellow misogynist Ottaviano laughs at

him (3.76) – both in its violation of decorum and in the sexual frustration it manifests. He says

what the courtier-suitor may think about the lady but is not supposed to say, and he thus risks

looking as ridiculous and out of place at court as the soldier in Count Ludovico's anecdote. The

violence of his attack on women responds in kind to the episode at the end of Book 2 that provides

the cue for the discussion of the ideal court lady in Book 3: there, the real court ladies at Urbino,

on signal from the Duchess herself, "rushed laughing upon signor Gasparo as if to assail him with

blows and treat him as the bacchantes treated Orpheus, saying the while: 'Now you shall see

whether we care if we are slandered'"29 -- (2.96). It is mock-violence, of course, but the allusion

to the silencing and death of Orpheus, dismembered at the hands of the maenads, suggests the

extent to which the courtiers at this women-dominated court are subject to an emasculating

28. Northrop Frye comments in an essay on the Courtier: "An extraordinary amount of sexual hostility is
expressed in this book, and again the reason is the same: sexuality is normally aggressive and domineering,
and education is largely a matter of channelling its energy into something more in keeping with civilized life."
Frye, "Il Cortegiano," Quaderni d'italianistica 1 (1980): 1-14, p. 10.
29
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 328: "ridendo tutte corsero verso il signor Gasparo, come per dagli
delle busse, e farne come le Baccanti d'Orfeo, tutavia dicendo: -- Ora vedrete, se ci curiamo che di noi si
dica male"

22
censorship. We sense in Gasparo, the constant, needling figure of dissent in Castiglione's book, a

voice that refuses to censor itself and that, in the very intensity of his outburst at the end of Book

3, attests to how heavy are the restraints and discontents that the process of civilization have

imposed on it. At the end of the Courtier Gasparo is still atacking women (4.72) -- and, by doing

so, attacking the institution and culture of the court itself -- while in the final words of the book,

Emilia Pia tries once again to bring him into line.30

In the Book of the Courtier, the court lady is not, then, represented in the conventional terms of

patriarchal culture that subordinate women to men and that would make the lady subservient to
the male courtier as he is, in turn, subservient to the prince. These are the terms, to be sure, with

which the misogynists of Book 3 would seek to put women back in their traditional social place.

But Castiglione's larger book portrays rather the unusual role the court gives the lady in civilizing

the courtier and which makes him her servant much as he is the servant of the prince. The lady

may be a princely servant as well, but she is seen to act in concert with the prince in carrying out

the court's cultural and political project, and she thus acquires a measure of social power. And it

30. This Gasparo is very much the product of Castiglione's final revision of the Courtier. In the second
redaction, the great enemy of women is Ottaviano Fregoso; it is he whom the court ladies attack like bacchantes
at the end of Book 2 (Seconda redazione, p. 179) and whom Emilia Pia cites as a suspect and a fugitive at the
end of the book (p. 324). Furthermore, Gasparo's outburst was placed in the mouth of Niccolò Frisio (pp. 316-
318); the historical Frisio would confirm his antagonism to women by becoming a monk in 1510. Gasparo
thus inherits the speeches and attitudes of these other protagonists and achieves a much greater prominence and
consistency of character in Castiglione's final version. (By the same token, Ottaviano's misogyny is now
somewhat downplayed, and can be more easily dissociated from his political idealism in Book 4.) Gasparo's
outburst at the end of Book 3, moreover, is followed almost immediately by the announcement of his premature
death in the great elegiac opening of Book 4: Gasparo was the first of the company celebrated in the Courtier
to die. The effect of the announcement of his death is at least twofold. It reminds us that Gasparo was young,
and that we are to understand his refractory, iconoclastic energy, and perhaps his misogyny as well, as the
attitudes of youth and immaturity. (See Frye, "Il Cortegiano, p. 10.) It also suggests a final silencing of
Gasparo's dissenting voice: what the court society could not completely contain is put to rest by death. The
further implication may be that, with the death of this voice, court culture twenty years later is less ready to
question its civilized assumptions.

23
is for this reason that the discussions of the status of women in Book 3 take on such importance in

the Book of the Courtier. For the question of the dignity of women, a question still left open at the

end of the book, directly concerns the dignity of court life itself, where the courtier devotes so

much time and energy to pursuits that will please ladies. For would such civilized and polite

activities be worthwhile, if women were the inferior creatures their detractors Gasparo and

Ottaviano make them out to be?31

As a product of this court culture, the Book of the Courtier is itself implicated and has a stake

in this question. In Book 3, Cesare Gonzaga praises women as the recipients and hence the cause
of the courtier's cultural refinements.

Do you not see that the cause of all gracious exercises that give us pleasure is to be assigned

to women alone? Who learns to dance gracefully for any reason except to please women?

Who devotes himself to the sweetness of music for any other reason? Who attempts to

compose verses, at least in the vernacular, unless to express sentiments inspired by women.

. .would it not be a very great loss if messer Francesco Petrarca, who wrote of his loves so

divinely in this language or ours, had cared only for Latin, as would have happened if love

for madonna Laura had not sometimes distracted him?32 (3:52)

31. The same question is asked about the prince, but in a more muted way, in Book 2, where in sections 21
and 22, Vincenzio Calmeta suggests that the princes of the present day love only presumption on the part of
their courtiers. Federico Fregoso tells him he must not say so, "for that would be too plain an argument that
the princes of our day are all corrupt and bad -- which is not true, because there are some who are good" (22).
This answer suggests that most princes are, indeed, bad, and in the next sentence Fregoso advises the courtier
to leave the service of such princes. To serve an unworthy prince would be the same as serving unworthy
ladies: it would make court life itself unworthy. Calmeta responds however that the courtier can only pray to
God to grant him a good master, "for, once we have them, we have to endure them as they are." Castiglione,
the servant of the murderer Francesco Maria della Rovere, knew this only too well.
32
Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 412-413: “Non vedete voi che in tutti gli esercizi graziosi e che
piaceno al mondo a niun altro s'ha da attribuire la causa, se alle donne no? Chi studia di danzare e ballar
leggiadramente per altro, che per compiacere a donne? Chi intende nella dolcezza della musica per altra

24
The references to writing in the Italian vernacular and to Petrarch are especially pointed. The

civilization of the court, directed to a public that includes, and may even be centrally constituted

by, cultured ladies, makes possible a high-culture literature in Italian, rather than in the learned

language of Latin. Such writing cannot become too learned or the ladies -- and men similarly

unversed in philosophy and Latinity -- will not understand it: so Emilia Pia complains at 3.17 when
the debate between Gasparo and the Magnifico Giuliano becomes too technical, a moment that is

as much about the cultural level of the Book of the Courtier as about the conversation at Urbino it

purports to recount. The implied female audience of the court is both a limit upon the writing it

fosters and what enables this writing to carve out a cultural domain for itself: to declare itself to

be what we call "literature" or "polite letters," as opposed to philosophy, theology, and other

learned disciplines. The Courtier would, in fact, join Petrarch's poetry to become a new classic of

this literature; here Castiglione concedes that it, too, like the other cultural endeavors of the court,

depends upon the ladies who preside over the court society and set its tone.33 Like his character

causa, che per questa? Chi a compor versi, almen nella lingua vulgare, se no per esprimere quegli affetti
che dalle donne sono causati?. . .non saria grandissima perdita se messer Francesco Petrarca, il qual così
divinamente scrisse in questa nostra lingua gli amor suoi, avesse volto l'animo solamente alle cose latine,
come aria fatto se l'amor di madonna Laura da ciò non l'avesse talor desviato?”
33. The passage in the second redaction was much longer and included a list of Castiglione's contemporary
writers, among them Sannazaro, Bembo, Ariosto, and Ecquicola, all of whom are said to have written for and
about women (Seconda redazione, pp. 277-278). Gasparo Pallavincino counters with a list of his own --
Sadoleto, Vida, Navagero -- sixteenth century writers who composed largely in Latin and on religious and
historical subjects (p. 281). The passage neatly distinguished a vernacular courtly literature from a learned
humanist one -- perhaps too neatly, Castiglione may have subsequently felt when he deleted it; see Scarpati,
"Osservazioni," pp. 534-535. The prominence of the Courtier in the emerging sixteenth century Italian literary
canon that, in its refined courtly forms of expression, distinguished itself both from the erudite Latin of scholars
and from the localized Italian literature (Florentine, Neapolitan, Ferrarese) of the fifteenth century is the subject
of studies by Giancarlo Mazzacurati; see his Il rinascimento dei moderni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), especially
pp. 149-207, and Conflitti di culture nel cinquecento (Naples: Liguori, 1977).

25
Cesare Gonzaga, Castiglione acknowledges that to defend women is to defend the Courtier who

aims to please them, in this case the book as well as the man.

2. Saint-Simon and the Princesse des Ursins

The Duke of Saint-Simon’s description in his Mémoires of Madame de Maintenon (1635-

1719) reads as the worst-case scenario, nearly two centuries later, of Castiglione’s courtier

Gaspar Pallavicino looking for favor from a court lady. The mistress (and since 1683 the

undeclared, but not-so-secret morganatic wife) of Louis XIV, the most powerful woman in

France carries with her a past of genteel poverty and bourgeois narrowness of spirit. Her favor

was fickle and unpredictable.

The abject poverty and distress in which she had long lived had constricted her mind and

abased her heart and sentiments. She thought and felt so small-mindedly in all things that

she was in effect less than Mrs. Scarron and so she behaved in everything and every

situation.. Nothing was more repellent than this baseness joined to so radiant a position;

also nothing was so impeding an obstacle to all good, as nothing was so dangerous than

the caprice with which she changed friendship and trust. She had, what is more, a guileful

way of setting the bait. On the rare occasion when one could be admitted to her audience

and she found something to her taste, she could be expansive with an openness that

26
 surprised and which opened the greatest hopes; at the second audience she grew tired of

you and became dry and laconic. You racked your brain to disentangle both the grace

and disgrace you had undergone; it was a waste of your time. Fickleness was the only

cause, and her fickleness was such as to be beyond imagination. A few escaped this

vacillation so customary in her; but these persons were only exceptions who all the more

confirmed the rule, for they themselves had experienced plenty of clouds in the favor

shown [faveur] to them, and, such as she had been, that is, after her last marriage, no one

approached her without precaution and in uncertainty.34 (5: 549-550)

The same key term “grace” – now coupled with its opposite, “disgrace” and along with one of its

synonyms, “faveur” – return from Castiglione’s book to describe the courtier’s seeking to

ingratiate himself with the powerful. What was a homology, however, in the Courtier – the

seeking of erotic favor from the capricious and even devious lady as a parallel to the seeking of

concessions for oneself and for one’s client-friends from the prince – has collapsed at Saint-

34
5: 549-550. “L’abjection et la détresse où elle avait si longtemps vécu lui avait rétréci l’esprit, et avili le
coeur et les sentiments. Elle pensait et sentait si fort en petit en toutes choses, qu’elle était toujours en effet
moins que Mme. Scarron, et qu’en tout et partout elle se retrouvait telle. Rien n’était si rebutant que cette
bassesse jointe à une situation si radieuse; rien aussi n’était à tout bien empȇchement si dirimant, comme
rien de si dangereux que cette facilité à changer d’amitié et de confiance. Elle avait un autre appȃt trompeur.
Pour peu qu’on pȗt ȇtre admis à son audience et qu’elle y trouvȃt quelque chose à son gout, elle se repandait
avec une ouverture qui surprenait et qui ouvrait les plus grandes espérances: dès la seconde, elle
s’importunait et devenait sèche et laconique. On se creusait la tȇte pour démȇler de la grȃce et la disgrȃce
si subites toutes les deux; on y perdait son temps. La légèreté en était la seule cause, et cette légèreté était
telle qu’on ne se la pouvait imaginer. Ce n’est pas que quelques-uns n’aient échappé à cette vacillité si
ordinaire; mais ces personnes n’ont été que des exceptions, qui ont d’autant plus confirmé la règle qu’elles-
mȇmes ont éprouvé force nuages dans leur faveur, et quelle qu’elle ait été, c’est-à-dire depuis son dernier
marriage, aucune ne l’a approchée qu’avec precaution et dans l’incertitude.”

27
Simon’s Versailles. For, as Saint-Simon sees her, the exasperating Madame de Maintenon has

combined in herself both court lady and prince. She controls Louis’s policy and governs France

from behind the scenes. The unavoidable barrier and indispensable conduit to royal favor, she is

capricious, and small-minded, leading her suitors on, only to frustrate and bewilder them in the

worst feminine way.

The blue-blood Saint-Simon finds the situation all the more galling because of Madame de

Maitenon’s origins. He snidely remarks that her father was “peut-ȇtre gentilhomme” (5:540).

Her grandfather was, in fact, the great Huguenot poet and warrior-noble, Agrippa d’Aubigné.

Nonetheless, she was impoverished and had married Paul Scarron, the crippled comic playwright

and novelist, a descent into the bourgeoisie. She had begun her court career when she was

entrusted with the upbringing of Louis’s legitimized bastard children by his then mistress

Madame de Montespan, and, she would continue to support those children’s interests after she

had taken Montespan’s place in the king’s affections. In Saint-Simon’s telling – he is our only

evidence for this acusation – it was she who persuaded the dying Louis to raise the Duc de Maine

and the Comte de Toulouse to be Princes of the Blood, and thus to place them in the line of

succession to the French throne itself. They would lose their rank under the regency of the Duke

d’Orléans, Louis’s nephew. Saint-Simon was the Regent’s old ally and right-hand man.

Feminization, bourgeois meanness and vulgarity, bastardy: these have all invaded Versailles in

the person of Madame de Maintenon and made a threatened species of noble manhood and of its

last embattled representatives such as Saint-Simon thought himself to be.35 Saint-Simon writes

35
See Yves Coirault, “Le Duc de Saint-Simon et l’imaginaire de féodalisme, in Coirault, in Dans la forȇt
saint-simonienne (Paris: Universitas, 1992), 181-198; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou,

28
that her exaltation to the highest power in the realm, as radiant as the Sun-king himself, has done

nothing for her character, but only brought out its weaknesses, so that she is less worthy than her

former self as the bourgeoise Madame Scarron.

“Cette fameuse et trop funeste fée” (5: 640) – “that famous and all too fatal evil-fairy” –

Saint-Simon calls Madame de Maintenon in another passage. Born a protestant, but given a

convent education, Madame de Maintenon was deeply pious, something that Saint-Simon

regards in her case as a mixture of superstition and hypocrisy, and as a useful ploy in her playing

hard-to-get with Louis and obtaining her secret marriage. With considerable exaggeration and

inaccuracy Saint-Simon blames her – he also blames the profound religious ignorance and

impressionability of Louis, manipulated by his Jesuit confessors – for what he correctly views as

Louis’s single most disastrous act, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and for the

ensuing mass emigration of France’s Huguenot population: “this horrid conspiracy that

depopulated a fourth of the Realm, which ruined its commerce, which weakened it in all its parts.

. .which authorized the tortures and executions which in fact made so many innocents of both

sexes dies by the thousands. . .which made our manufactures pass to foreigners, and made their

states flourish and fatten at the expense of ours” (5:544).36 The phrases are from a grand, two

page rhetorical set piece, condemning the Revocation, that Saint-Simon includes inside the same

Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago; University of Chicago Press,
2002 [French original, 1997]).
36
“ce complot affreux qui dépeupla un quart du Royaume, qui ruina son commerce, qui l’affaiblit dans
toutes ses parties. . .qui autorisa les tourments et les supplices dans lesquels ils firent réellement mourir tant
d’innocents de tout sexe par milliers. . .qui fit passer nos manufactures aux étrangers, fit fleurir et regorger
leurs États aux dépens du nôtre.”

29
long excursus on the career and character of Madame de Maintenon from which I have drawn the

earlier passage cited above. It was her fault, he says, as was so much else.37

Saint-Simon’s detestation is only qualified by his description of Louis’s selfish, callous

treatment of Madame de Maintenon, who had to be at his sexual will at all times and places,

whatever the state of her own health. It was the price she paid for her power. “Neither her

artifice, not even the most factual reality, had any power to constrain the King in any manner

whatsoever. He was a uniquely self-regarding man, and who took no account of everybody else,

whoever they might be, except in relationship to himself.” ( Ce n’est pas que cet artifice, ni

mȇme la réalité la plus effective, eȗt aucun pouvoir d’ailleurs de contraindre le Roi en quoi que

ce pȗt ȇtre. C’état un homme uniquement personnel, et qui ne comptait tous les autres, quels

qu’il fussent, que par rapport à soi.” (5:570) The king’s bad behavior might even incline one to

feel sorry for Madame de Maintenon, a victim herself of Louis’s whims, like all the rest of his

subjects. So how much really was her fault? Was she the symptom, the memoirist’s easier

target, rather than the cause? As is the case in The Book of the Courtier, the animus Saint-Simon

directs at the powerful court lady attacks court society itself and the absolutist monarch behind it.

Castiglione’s book offered a small-scale blueprint or laboratory case in a little Italian princely

state. Louis XIV imposed the court system on a grand national scale at Versailles. Saint-Simon

wrote the Mémoires sometime after 1739, forty years and more after the events they describe.

37
According to Le Roy Ladurie, Madame de Maintenon had little influence over the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes or over big policy decisions; she exerted control over the filling of state and church offices,
no small matter. See Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, 144. A useful,
popularizing account of Madame de Maintenon’s career can be found in Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis
XIV (New York: Anchor Books, 2007)

30
He wrote at the same time as Montesquieu and the two men met on several occasions, but, aside

from his dislike of Louis’s absolutism and his contempt for religious fanaticism, the Duke shares

little with new Enlightenment political thought.38 His disdain for the Parlements and their

bourgeois robins who wore collars of squirrel fur (“vil petit-gris”) rather than ermine (7: 262),

his ideas about government by a council of high aristocrats hearken back anachronistically to the

Fronde. It is symptomatic that Montesquieu and the young Voltaire were frequent guests at the

Chateau de Sceaux, presided over by the Duchesse de Maine, consort of the royal bastard. (The

Duchess was a princess of the blood royal in her own right as a Condé, and another ambitious

woman whom Saint-Simon sees dominating her husband and leading him into the disastrous

1718 Cellamare conspiracy, whose fallout left the couple to lead a kind of internal exile at

Sceaux).39

Early in the Mémoires, Saint-Simon records his own telling anecdote about the nobleman

dancing at court. In 1693 a young scion from of a jumped-up family that laid claim to the

ancient name of Montbron makes what may be his first appearance at court; he partners in the

ball Mademoiselle de Mareuil, a young lady of honor to Madame la Duchesse, the eldest

legitimized daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan whom Louis married to a Condé

prince of the blood. The young lady of honor to this bastard princess herself comes from a

38
Robert Shackelton, “Saint-Simon et Montesquieu,” Cahiers Saint Simon (actes), n. 3 (1975) Actes du
colloque international “Saint-Simon et son temps” (Paris: Collège de France, 11-12 avril, 1975), 21-25.
39
Voltaire’s father was the notary of Saint-Simon’s father and of Saint-Simon himself; Mémoires 5:888;
6:343. See Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, 44, 285, and on Saint-Simon’s insistence on hierarchy and on the
distinction between the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe, 23-61, especially 41-42.

31
bastard line of the great house of Mareuil, and she, no more than Montbron, Saint-Simon sniffs,

should have been admitted to such a court honor. But breeding would tell on the dancefloor.

On lui avait demandé s’il dansait bien, et il avait répondu avec confiance qui donna envie

de trouver qu’il dansait mal. On eut contentment: dès la première révérence, il se

déconcerta. Plus de cadence dès les premiers pas. Il crut la rattraper et couvrir son

défaut par des airs penchés et un haut port de bras: ce ne fut qu’un ridicule de plus qui

excita une risée qui en vint en éclats, et qui malgré le respect de la presence du Roi qui

avait peine à s’empȇcher de rire, dégénera enfin en véritable huée. Le lendemain, au lieu

de s’enfuir ou de se taire, il s’excusa sur la présence du Roi qui l’avait étourdi, e promit

merveilles pour le bal qui devait suivre. Il était des mes amis, et j’en souffrais. Je

l’aurais mȇme averti si le sort tout different que j’avais eu ne m’eȗt fait craindre que

mon avis n’eȗt pas de grȃce. Dés qu’au second bal on le vit pris á danser, voilà les uns

en pied, les plus reculés à l’escalade, et la huée si forte qu’elle fut poussée au

battemments demains. Chacun, et le Roi mȇme, riait de tout son coeur, et la plupart en

éclats, en telle sorte que je ne crois pas que personne ait jamais essuyé de semblable.

Aussi disparut-il incontinent après, et ne se remontra-t-il de longtemps. Il eut depuis le

regiment Dauphin-infanterie, et mourut tôt après sans avoir été marié. Il avait beaucoup

d’honneur et de valeur, et ce fut dommage. Ce fut le dernier de ces faux entés sur

Montbron, c’est-a-dire son père qui lui survécut. (1:45)

32
One had asked him if he danced well, and he had answered with a confidence that made

one enviously wish to find that he danced badly. One received satisfaction: from the first

bow, he became disconcerted. From the first steps, he lost the beat. He thought to

recover and to conceal his mistake by tilted posture and by holding his arms high: it made

him the more ridiculous and it excited laughter that became bursts, and, in spite of the

presence of the King who could scarcely stop himself from laughing, degenerated at last

into real hooting. The next day, instead of retreating from the court or keeping silent

about it, he excused himself on account of the presence of the King which had dazzled

him, and promised wonders for the ball that was to follow. He was one of my friends,

and I suffered for him. I would have even warned him if the completely different success

that I had enjoyed had not made me fear that my advice would have found little favor.

As soon as one saw him begin to dance at the second ball, those nearby stood up, those

further away climbed on steps or stairs to get a glimpse, and the hooting was so loud that

it extended to the clapping of hands. Everyone, even the King himself, laughed

fullheartedly and most bursting out loud, so that I do not think that anyone ever endured

anything similar. So he disappeared immediately afterwards, and did not show himself

again for a long time. Later he commanded in the regiment of Dauphin-infantry, and

died shortly afterwards without ever having married. He was a man of much honor and

valor, and it was a shame. This was the last of these false descendants of Montbron, that

is, his father who survived him.

33
Montbron bragged about his dancing and then could not come up with the goods. He made a

disgraced laughingstock of himself and had to exile himself from Versailles. His boasting was

already a kind of self-assertion at odds with the presence of the King as well as with a social

world whose every shade of rank and degree of status were carefully mapped out and observed.

He aroused the malice of his fellow courtiers, themselves competing and jostling for favor and

position. One of these was Saint-Simon, eighteen years old at the time and beginning his own

social career. The masterfully constructed passage opposed the impersonal “on” that stands for

the court society with the “je” of Saint-Simon, who claims to feel sorry for his friend even as he

tells us that he had himself danced well on the same occasion. He could not warn and dissuade

Montbron from repeating his performance at the next ball, because Montbron’s would take it the

wrong way, as advice from a perceived rival. Or so Saint-Simon says. He indicates that his “je”

also belongs to the “on” of the passage: he was an insider at court, and joined in the laughter at

Montbron. With friends and real rivals like Saint-Simon, Montbron hardly needed the foreign

enemies against whom he would fight in the king’s service. The praise of the honorable valor of

Montbron at the anecdote’s end suggests that this might be another story, similar to that of

Castiglione’s fighting man who refuses to dance at all, of the nobleman soldier unable to

accommodate himself to the polite and emasculating society of the court. But Saint-Simon

primarily makes it the story of the comeuppance of a social climber and pretender to noble

lineage, a so-called Montbron, however valiant he may be. Saint-Simon himself resigned from

34
the army in 1702, earning Louis’s disfavor, but sitting out and surviving the War of Spanish

Succession, during which his erstwhile friend Montbron died in 1704.40

Saint-Simon chose to be a creature of the court, whose fault lay not in its polite pastimes (and

safety and comfort), but in its inclusion of upstarts and bastardy. To the contrary, his case

proved, court politeness – instead of battlefield prowess – could mark out the true nobleman.

Montbron affectedly flails about, but Saint-Simon does not miss a step, demonstrates a perhaps

innate grace, and wins the dance contest. This early anecdote in the Mémoires sets the tone and

scenario for much of what will follow: the exposure of the illegitimacy introduced into the last

decades of Louis’s reign largely through the cabal of Madame de Maintenon; the (partial)

vindication of the old nobility during the Regency.

All the more striking, then, stands out the admiration, mixed with scandalized criticism, that

Saint-Simon expresses for the Princesse des Ursins (1642-1722), another woman who made

herself a power behind another great royal throne – and who, moreover, did so in close

collaboration with Madame de Maintenon and as a deadly opponent of the future Regent.41 The

Princesse and Saint-Simon’s portrait of her take up the rest of this chapter.

40
Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, 47-48, correct the impression that Norbert Elias may give that the courtiers of
Louis XIV had given up the military calling of their noble caste by listing some illustrious war dead during
the War of Spanish Succession. Louis liked his courtiers to be warriors, so long as they were fighting in
his armies. Their book is strongly revisionary vis-à-vis Elias’s work; see the appendix, 349-352.
41
The outstanding scholarly biography of the Princesse is Marianne Cermakian, La Princesse des Ursins;
Sa vie et ses lettres (Paris: Didier, 1969); a first scholarly study is François Combes, La Princesses des
Ursins: Essai sur sa et son caractère politique (Paris: Didier, 1858); see also the lively account in Diane
Ribardière, La Princesse des Ursins (Paris: Perrin, 1988). For a dated, but useful summary biography in
English, see Constance Hill, Story of the Princesse des Ursins in Spain (London: William Heinemann,
1899).

35
 Marie-Anne de la Trémoille was born of one of the great noble houses of France and was a

friend of Saint-Simon’s mother – these are perhaps reasons enough for Saint-Simon’s attitude.

She had married the Prince de Chalais from the House of Talleyrand. Louis sent Chalais into

exile in 1662 after he had instigated and taken part in a duel of honor: it was an emblematic

instance of the crown’s attempt to tame noble agression and independence that we have

discussed in chapter 2. Chalais subsequently fought for the Spanish army, and his wife joined

him in Spain, learning the language and making contacts that would be useful to her in later

years; they were in Venice when Chalais died in 1670. Instead of returning to France, the

independent-minded widow remained in Italy. She eventually settled in Rome where she mixed

in political circles, played the House of Austria against her own French king, and then made a

political choice for the latter by marrying Flavio Orsini, the Duke of Bracciano, head of the pro-

French Orsini clan. For much of her marriage (1677-1683; 1688-1695), however, she was in

Paris and Versailles, cultivating court connections. Bracciano died in 1698, leaving his title and

estates to a papal nephew. Struggling to gain her share of the inheritance, the Duchess of

Bracciano hereafter titled herself the Princesse des Ursins (Princess Orsini) – though Saint-

Simon, meticulous snob when it comes to rank, refuses to refer to her as anything but Madame

des Ursins. She was fifty-nine years old when Louis asked her in 1701 to accompany the

thirteen-year old Marie-Louise of Savoy to marry Louis’s second grandson, who had been

declared Philip V, King of Spain, by the will of Charles II, a claim to the throne soon contested

by the Archduke Charles of Austria. Philip was himself seventeen years old at the time of the

marriage. As the camerara mayor – in charge of the royal household, the royal bedroom in

particular – the Princesse des Ursins enjoyed a parental role over the young regal couple,

36
especially over the bright and able queen, who quickly gained ascendancy over her passive

Bourbon husband. While changing the sheets, emptying chamber pots, and holding up the king’s

breeches, the Princesse acted as Louis’s intermediary. She became the de facto ruler of Spain

during the tumultuous years of the War of Spanish succession.

Saint-Simon depicts the Princesse des Ursins acting in concert with Madame de Maintenon to

create a behind-the-scenes channel by which French interests and policies could shape the

Spanish government They worked around and marginalized the official French ambassador, the

Cardinal d’Estrées, as well as Cardinal Portocarrero, the head Spanish minister and leader of the

pro-French faction that had upheld the will of Charles II. Each of them had been old friends and

one time supporters of the Princesse, who now saw them removed: D’Estrées recalled by Louis,

Portocarrero going into retirement.

Madame de Maintenon dont la passion était de savoir tout, de se mȇler de tout et de

gouverner tout, se trouva enchantée par la sirène. Cette voie de gouverner l’Espagne sans

moyen de ministers, lui parut un coup de partie. Elle l’embrassa avec avidité, sans

comprendre qu’elle ne gouvernait qu’en apparence, et ferait gouverner Mme des Ursins

en eftet, puisqu’elle ne pourrait savoir rien que par elle, ni rien voit que du côté qu’elle

lui présenterait. . . Telle fut son addresse, et telle la faiblesse du Roi, qui aima mieux

gouverner son petit-fils par la reine, que de le conduire directement par ses volontés et ses

conseil en se servant du canal naturel de ses ministres. (2:367)

37
 Madame de Maintenon, whose passion was to know all, to meddle with all, to govern all,

found herself enchanted by this siren. This way of governing Spain without the means of

ministers seemed to her a stroke of genius. She avidly embraced it without realizing that

she governed only in appearence, and would make Madame des Ursins govern in

actuality, since she would not to be able to know anything except through her, nor see

anything except from the side that she would present it to her. .. Such was the skill of the

Princesse des Ursins and such was the weakness of the King, who preferred to govern his

grandson through the queen than to guide him directly through his wishes and counsel by

using the natural channel of his ministers.

Saint-Simon does not grasp – or chooses not to grasp – what Louis and Madame de Maintenon

probably understood to lie behind the strategy of the Princesse. If Louis’s grandson wished to

bring in French agents to impose badly needed reforms on Spain, particularly on its finances, he

needed some level of cooperation and consent of his Spanish subjects. The Princesse wrote

about the Cardinal d’Estrées in a letter of 1702 that she feared that the natural pride of the

Spanish nation would take it as “sign of disdain on the part of France that it sends of of the

greatest minds that there this, not to counsel, but to govern them, and that would only add to the

alienation that they feel for the French” (“marque de mépris du côté de la France qu’on lui

envoie un des plus grands génies qui y soit, non pas pour les conseiller, mais pour les gouverner,

et que cela n’augmente encore l’éloignement qu’ils ont pour les François.”) 42 Behind her

42
Geffroy, M. A. ed. Lettres inédites de la Princesse des Ursins (Paris: Didier, 1859, 127; cited by
Cermakian, 271.

38
fulsome praise of the Cardinal’s abilities, the Princesse warns that his high-handed intervention

into Spain’s affairs would get the Spaniards’ backs up. The Princesse offered a more tactful,

oblique means of achieving French objectives and to open bridges to the Spanish nobility. Saint-

Simon sees little of this, and he depicts Louis falling in line with the cabal as a further instance of

the effeminate nature of absolutism. Louis prefers to employ in Spain the womanly indirection

that Madame de Maintenon is employing on him at Versailles and to circumvent through such

personal rule the work of his own ministers. In doing so, Saint-Simon points out, he and

Madame de Maintenon made the Princesse des Ursins the mistress and actual ruler of the

situation in Madrid. She controlled the information that reached them at Versailles. Who is the

tool of whom?

The situation came to a crisis in 1704 precisely over the flow of information. A letter of the

Abbé d’Estrées, who had succeeded his uncle as French ambassador to Spain, was intercepted,

almost surely on the authority of Philip V. In it the Abbé accused the Princesse of having taken

her longtime secretary and protegé, Jean Boutroue d’Aubigny, as a lover and even as a husband.

Saint-Simon’s account has made the episode famous.

Outrée de rage et de dépit, elle mit en marge à côté, de sa main: Pour mariée non! montra

la lettre en cet état au roi et à la reine d’Espagne et à beaucoup de gens de cette court avec

des clameurs étranges, et ajouta à cette folie celle d’envoyer cette mȇme lettre, ainsi

apostillée au Roi, avec des plaintes plus emportées contre l’abbé d’Estrées d’avoir écrit

sans lui montrer sa lettre, comme ils en étaitent convenus, et de l’injure atroce qu’il lui

faisait sur ce prétendu marriage. L’abbé d’Estrées, de son côté, ne cria pas moins haut de

39
 la violation de la poste, de son caractère, et du respect dȗ au Roi, méprisé au point

d’intercepter, ouvrir, apostiller, et rendre publique une lettre de l’ambassadeur du Roi a

S[a} M[ajesté]. (2:443)

Incensed with rage and spite, she put in the margin, in her own hand, “As for married,

no!”, showed the letter in this condition to the king and queen of Spain and to many

persons of that court, making an extraordinary commotion, and she added to this folly

that of sending this same letter, so annotated, to the King [Louis], with passionate

complaints against the Abbé d’Estrées for his having written without having shown her

the letter, as they had agreed upon, and of the dreadful injury he had done her about this

pretend marriage. The Abbé d’Estrées, for his part, protested no less loudly about the

violation of the mail, of his character, and of respect for the King, who has been

disdained to the point of intercepting, opening, writing a comment on, and making public

a letter of the ambassador of the King to His Majesty.

The interception of diplomatic correspondence was normal enough, whatever indignation the

Abbé and Louis might pretend. But the public humiliation of the ambassador, the revelation of

the agreement that the Princesse could vet all his letters to Versailles and curb his independence,

the effrontery of denying any marriage while seeming to admit that some kind of liaison might

be going on between the aged Princesse and her younger assistant: these were all insulting and

assertions of the sweeping power that she enjoyed at the Spanish court. Her marginal comment

in the letter most sharply stung Louis himself and his marriage to Madame de Maintenon, a

40
marriage that neither ever admitted to in public – I am accused falsely of marriage to a lover-

inferior, says the Princesse, but we all know that somebody has secretly married somebody.

Saint-Simon drives the point home a few pages later when he has occasion to tell the story of the

Duc de Gramont, the new French ambassador to Madrid. The Duc foolishly made public his

secret marriage to a socially inferior woman: “he got into his head to court the King by the most

delicate form of approval, that of imitation, and even more to please Madame de Maintenon,

since he himself declared his marriage” (“il se mit dans le tȇte d’en fair sa cour au Roi par la

plus délicate de toutes les approbations, qui est l’imitation, et plus encore à Madame de

Maintenon, puisque lui-mȇme avait déclaré son mariage.”) (2.430) The monarch and his consort

were enraged by this appeal to their supposed example.

Louis now demanded and, against the continuing protests of the Marie-Louise, obtained the

dismissal of the Princesse from her duties as camerera mayor and her banishment from Madrid

to Italy. The Princesse temporized, arranged the support of her allies – including Madame de

Maintenon – and obtained permission to settle in Toulouse, then to come to Versailles in 1705 to

plead her case. Saint-Simon claims that Louis, “to whom the truth never came in the confines in

which he was imprisoned” – “dont la verité n’approcha jamais dans la clôture où il s’était

emprisonné” – was the only person in the two monarchies of France and Spain who did not

realize that the arrival of the Princesse at his court guaranteed that she would return to Spain, and

with greater power than ever (2:561). Louis probably realized the situation perfectly well. He

decided that he needed the support of the Spanish queen to control his grandson, and swallowed

his anger. A diplomatic comedy ensued, with all the court toadying around the recently disgraced

41
Princesse, now treated by Louis himself as if she were a little foreign queen – “un diminutive de

reine étrangère” (2.576). It culminated in another ballroom scene.

Ce qui parut extrèmement singulier, ce fut de voir celle-ci paraȋtre dans le salon avec un

petit espagneul sous les bras comme si elle eȗt été chez elle. On ne revenait point

d’étonnement d’une familiarité que Mme la duchesse de Bourgogne n’eȗt osé hazarder;

encore moins à ces bals de voir le Roi caresser le petit chien, et a plusieurs reprises. . .Il

n’était plus douteux alors qu’elle ne retournat en Espagne. (2:580)

What appeared most extraordinary was to watch the Princesse appear in the salon with a

little spaniel in her arms as if she were at her own home. One did not get over the

astonishment of a familiarity which even Madame the Duchess of Bourgogne [the young,

much favored, wife of Louis’s grandson and heir, and, incidentally, a princess of Savoy

and sister of Queen Marie-Louise of Spain] would not have dared to risk; still less at

these balls to see the King pet the little dog, and over and over again. . .There was no

longer any doubt then that she would return to Spain.

Saint-Simon is our only witness to this episode, but there is little reason to doubt it. Both he and

its protagonists, the Princesse and Louis, turn this violation of court etiquette into a little

allegorical performance for the benefit of the public. The Princesse carries the spaniel in her

arms as she has taken Spain itself into her personal power. The King expresses his fondness for

42
the allied Spanish crown and its mighty empire, a French pet with a Bourbon king of his own

blood. He compliments the Princesse for keeping it in such good hands.

Saint-Simon congratulates the Princesse des Ursins for having gotten the better of Louis, and

perhaps of Madame de Maintenon as well. In addition to moneys for herself, she obtained a

dukeship for one brother, the advancement of a second brother to cardinal. She hated the first,

cared little for the other, Saint-Simon nastily notes, and had them elevated to show that she

could. (2:612) “Voilà cette femme dont le Roi avait si ardemment procuré la chute” (2:613),

this was the formidable woman whose fall Louis had so eagerly engineered and failed to bring

about.

But Saint-Simon lets slip a different, less admiring sentiment about the Princesse, if

expressed from the lips of another. The War of Spanish Succession did not go well, for France

and for the Spanish Bourbons as the decade continued. When Louis sent the Duke d’Orléans to

lead the French troops in Spain in 1708, the Duke was dismayed at the lack of preparedness and

resources at his disposal. Drinking at dinner with some Spaniards and French gentlemen of his

company, he let his guard down.

tout occupé de son dépit, qui tombait sur Mme des Ursins qui gouvernait tout, et qui

n’avait songé à la moindre des choses concernant la campagne, le souper s’égaya, et un

peu trop. M, le duc d’Orléans, un peu en pointe de vin et toujours plein de son d’épit, prit

un verre, et regardant la compagnie (je fais excuse d’ȇtre si littéral, mais le mot ne peut se

masque): “Messieurs, leur dit-il, je vous porte la santé du con capitaine et du con

lieutenant.” Le propos saisit l’imagination des conviés. (3:182-183)

43
 full of indignation, which fell on Madame des Ursins, who governed everything, and who

had not thought about the most basis things necessary for the campaign, the dinner made

him merry and a bit too much. Monsieur the Duke of Orleans, a little too much wine in

him and always full of dudgeon, took a glass and looking at the company aid (I beg

pardon for being so literal, but the word can’t be disguised): “Gentlemen, I give you

health of Captain-cunt and Lieutenant Cunt.” The toast seized the minds of the

assembled party.

In vino veritas. With blunt, soldierly obscenity the Duke spells out how matters stand. He

speaks among fellow military men, but their place, he lets them know, has been taken by women,

captain and lieutenant further up the chain of command. Madame de Maintenon calls the shots,

and the Princesse des Ursins carries them out. Saint-Simon apologizes for, but relishes the

opportunity to repeat the Duke’s brutal language, its assertion of a masculinity that chafes

against female-dominated court society and its decorum. The memoirist reverts to misogynist

type. He also confirms his allegiance to the Duke, on whom the episode would recoil.

Within a half-hour, Saint-Simon records,the Duke’s words had reached the ears of the Princesse

des Ursins, and then to Madame de Maintenon; they became implacable enemies of the Duke,

and incriminated him when two of his agents were arrested in Spain in 1709 and it came out that

the Duke had entertained offers from the enemy to put himself on the Spanish throne in place of

nephew Phlip. Louis may himself have floated this plan, and he quieted the affair down,

44
although the Duke and his faction fell out of favor and were steered clear of until the last years of

the king’s reign.

From 1706 onward, Louis was willing to sacrifice Philip V for a peace deal, suggesting that

his grandson give up rulership over Spain and its vast American colonies in exchange for her

Italian dominions. In 1709, the year of a terrible winter that left France starving, the allies

demanded that Philip give up all of Spain’s possessions, and Louis appeared to capitulate. He

wrote to Philip in April of that year and urged him to abdicate, though he probably counted on

his Philip’s refusal. The enemy allies made an excessive set of terms and demanded that Louis

use French troops to dethrone his grandson. In June Louis did an about-face and determined to

continue the war, appealing openly to the patriotism of his people. Nonetheless, France

withdrew most of her troops from Spain, and removed French ministers from the Spanish

despacho, its governing body. Louis left the Princesse des Ursins in the difficult position of

continuing to act as his agent while she stood with the defiant Spanish monarchs.43 She was

accused of defending her own self-interest as mistress of Spain instead of furthering French

policy.

At this point one has to step outside of Saint-Simon’s increasingly critical portrait to take her

measure and to read her own words reflecting on the two sexes in politics. In November of

1709, Madame de Maintenon was openly defeatist in her letters to the Princesse, piously seeing

God’s hand in the great chill and famine, and in French losses on the battlefield, despairing for

the Bourbon kings. She refused to show to others a letter of the Princesse that outlined a scheme

43
Cermakian, 394-396.

45
for raising revenues for the war, because it was well beyond her competence (“si fort au-dessus

de mes lumières”) and because – as she puts it in a consummate piece of hypocrisy – one does

not like to hear ladies talk about politics at Versailles (“on n’aime pas ici que les dames parlent

d’affaires.) In her return letter of December 16, the Princesse writes that Madame de Maintenon

should not worry about showing the proposal.

je ne l’ai risqée que pour vous persuader qu’en solicitant la guerre, je suis peut-ȇtre

encore meilleure Française qu’aucune autre: dès qu’elle n’a pas produit cet effet, elle

n’est plus d’aucune mérite.

Tant mieux si on n’aime pas en France que les femmes parlent d’affaires, nous aurons

bien des choses à reprocher aux hommes, puisque nous n’aurons point eu de part. Le mal

est que certaines femmes ont plus d’honneur qu’eux, et que leurs fautes nous rendent

martyrs en ce monde. Je trouve cependant que l’esprit de la cour a bien change depuis

que je suis sortie de Frnace, car le roi ne me paraissait point de ce sentiment lorsque

j’avais l’honneur de l’entretenir. Ne serait-ce pas cela la cause de tous nos malheurs?

Passez-moi s’il vous plaȋt cette mauvaise plaisanterie.

Vous seriez bien étonnée, madame, si je vous disais que c’est uniquement par la faute

des hommes que le pain s’est vendu plus de quatre sous la livre du plus beau à Paris, et

plus de deux sous et demi dans le reste du royaume.44

44
Loyau, Marcel,, ed. Madame de Maitnenon et madame la princesse des Ursins, Correpondance 1707-
1709. (Paris: Mercure de France, 2014), 625,

46
 I only ventured it to persuade you that, in arguing for war, I am perhaps an even better

Frenchwoman than any other; since it didn’t produce that effect, it no longer has any

merit.

So much the better that in France one does not like that women speak of political

matters: we will have so many things to reproach men for, since we will not have had any

part in them. It is too bad that certain women have more honor than they have, and that

their faults make us martyrs in this world. I find nonetheless that the spirit of the court

must have changed a lot since I left France, for the King did not seem to share this

sentiment at all when I had the honor to speak with him. Could that be the cause of all

our misfortunes? Allow me, if you please, this bad joke.

You would be truly astonished, madame, if I were to say to you that it is uniquely by

the fault of men that bread sells at the best for four sous a pound in Paris, and a bit more

than two and half sous in the rest of the kingdom.

By arguing for the continuation of the war and resistance to the allies, the Princesse claims to be

more French than most Frenchwomen – and more than most Frenchmen, too. To Madame de

Maintenon’s protestation that she is herself just a little old women who doesn’t understand these

matters and whose opinion is not welcome, the Princesse asks, “Since when?” If it is indeed

true, then women cannot be blamed for the course of events, for some women have a sense of

honor – the honor of a warrior-aristocrat– that men these days seem to lack. These men, as she

describes it a few months earlier in a September letter to the Duke de Noailles, the head of

French troops in Spain, are willing “to sacrifice all for a peace as damaging as dishonoring and

47
which would plainly be of short duration.”45 Perhaps, if you will allow me this bitter joke, the

Princesse says to Madame de Maintenon, the problem is that women are not running the show:

they would not have let things get to the point they have reached.

Some women: the addressee may not be included, unpersuaded as Madame de Maintenon is to

join the war party. The most outspoken letter of the Princesse to Madame de Maintenon had

come several months before, at the same time as her letter to the Duke de Noailles, in the

aftermath of the battle of Malplaquet (September 11, 1709), an exceptionally bloody pyrrhic

victory for the allies. Madame de Maintenon saw in the battle in Flanders a sign of divine

disfavor and of the necessity of making peace.46 The Princesse had written back that Madrid

had rather interpreted Malplaquet – correctly as it would transpire – as a change in fortune and a

cause for celebration and fireworks. She went on ironically to compliment her friend at court

for the mildness with which she received her own “letters of fire and blood” (so Madame de

Maintenon had termed them47) “about which you reproach me with a sweetness that makes me

break off, even if it heats my bile so much the more. I know by this moderation that you feel

guilty about wishing to slit out throats” – “lettres à feu et à sang, que vous me reprochez avec

une douceur qui me faire taire, quoi qu’elle échauffe ma bile encore advantage. Je connais par

cette modération que vous vous sentez coupable de vouloir nous couper la gorge.” 48 Madame

de Maintenon shot back that she understood the Princesse’s attachment to the Spanish King and

45
La Trémoïlle, Louis de, ed., Madame des Ursins et la Succession d’Espagne: Fragments de
Correspondance (Paris; Honore Campoin, 1903) 5 vols. 5:39. “on veut tout sacrifier pour faire une paix
aussy préjudiciable que dishonnorante, e qui ne sera pas apparemment de longue durée.”
46
Loyau, 560.
47
Loyau, 558
48
Loyau, 570.

48
Queen, but would she wish France lost and see the English in Paris – “mais voulez-vous perdre

la France et voir les Anglais dans Paris?”49 The Princesse des Ursins, it appeared, had chosen

sides. The two women play to type: the fight-to-the-end Princesse, proud descendant of one of

the great noble houses of France, Madame de Maintenon, mild-mannered and pious little

bourgeoise. Saint-Simon was an audience to their performances, and they may both have taken

him in.

The tides of war and politics changed. By the end of 1710 Philip and Marie-Louise were

secure on their thrones, founders of the Bourbon dynasty that persists in Spain to this day.

Behind the royal couple, the Princesse des Ursins became more powerful and – as the events of

the war and peace process separated French and Spanish interests – increasingly independent of

Louis. She obtained for herself the title of Highness in Spain. As part of the peace terms of

Utrecht, she demanded, backed by Philip V, that a small principality be carved out of the Spanish

Netherlands for her personal rule and income, something to call her own. The proposal, Saint-

Simon tells us, irked Louis because it slowed down the negotiations, but it offended Madame de

Maintenon even more.

Cette extrȇme difference offensa son orgueil en lui faisant sentir la distance des rangs et

des naissances, qui étaient la base d’un si grand essor. Elle senti avec jalousie que le

crédit sans mesur qui portait Mme des Ursins si haut, n’était que l’effet de la protection

qu’elle lui avait donnée; elle ne put souffir qu’elle n’en abusȃt au point de s’élever si fort

49
Loyau, 572.

49
 au-dessus d’elle, et que cette souveraineté, elle l’établit et en jouit sous ses yeux. . .Telle

fut la pierre d’achoppment entre les deux modératrices suprȇmes de la France et de

l’Espagne. (4.749-750.)

This extreme distinction injured her pride in making her feel the distance between their

ranks and birth, which gave some basis to so great an elevation. With jealousy, she felt

that the immeasurable credit that bore Madame des Ursins so high was nothing but the

effect of the protection she had given her; she could not endure that she abused it to the

point of elevating herself so greatly above her, and that she would enjoy this sovereignty

she established before her eyes. . .This was the stumbling block between the two supreme

arbiters of France and of Spain.

Madame de Maintenon could not become queen, and she could not bear to see her counterpart in

Spain become an independent ruler, no matter how small her realm. The peace that Louis made

at Utrecht (1713) and Rastattt (1714) omitted this article, which would have allowed the

Princesse to leave Spain on her own terms. From here on, Saint-Simon writes, the relationship

between two women behind their respective thrones cooled, and the memoirist detects Louis’s

fine hand behind the fall of the Princesse des Ursins in late 1714.

It came about at the hands of a different powerful woman. Marie-Louise, beloved by

her husband and by her Spanish subjects, had died in February. Saint-Simon maliciously

describes the rumors that floated around the Spanish and French courts that the Princesse, now

72, sought to marry the 29 year old Philip herself and become queen. When Philip’s (French)

50
confessor supposedly informed the king of what was being bruited, the king blushed and

answered “Oh, as for that, no” – “Oh! Pour cela non.” (4.712) Saint-Simon tells the amusing,

but improbable story to reinforce the parallels between the Princesse and the still more elderly

Madame de Maintenon, who, he tells us, having twice felt herself on the verge of being declared

queen, was pushed by these rumors to the extreme limits of jealousy. Perhaps he wants to remind

us of the Princesse’s own offensive marginalia: “Pour mariés, non.” Philip did need a new

queen: he was not his grandfather, and the very idea of a mistress frightened his piety: “ce mot de

maȋtresse effaroucha la piété du roi.” (4:358), Saint-Simon drily writes. The Princesse now made

a fatal misstep. Trusting in an Italian schemer, the Abbé Alberoni, and without consulting Louis,

she chose Isabella Farnese from Alberoni’s native Duchy of Parma. She presumably thought,

and had been led to believe, that she could mold the young consort as she had Marie-Louise. But

when she went to greet the new queen at the town of Jadraqué, Isabella turned on her and

commanded that this madwoman in her presence be forcibly removed. The Princesse was

immediately arrested and sent in a closed carriage on a three week journey through the cold of

December and January – it would have killed a weaker constitution than this elderly lady

possessed, and Saint Simon relates that the coachman lost his hand from frostbite – and she was

only set free at the French border. Isabella Farnese went on to dominate the sexually dependent

Philip to an even greater extent than Marie-Louise had done. Alberoni acted as her prime

minister in place of the Princesse des Ursins “with the difference of sex, which took away the

ridiculousness” (“avec la difference du sexe, qui en ôta le ridicule.”) (8:259). The Princesse des

Ursins meanwhile made her way to Paris and Versailles where she was shunned and received

only brief audiences with Louis and Madame de Maintenon. As Louis’s health declined, she

51
feared the coming regency of her old enemy, the Duke d’Orléans, and fled into retirement in

Italy, first in Genoa, then in Rome. Her pensions and annuities from both Spain and France

continued, and she lived in opulence for another seven years, mixing in and dominating the little,

“deplorable” court society of the English Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart) in Rome :

“What a sad expedience!” (“Quelle triste ressource!”) to replace her old grandeur.

Yes, it was ridiculous – Saint-Simon cannot get over it – for a woman, not for a queen nor, as

in the case of Madame de Maintenon, for a royal mistress-become-wife, but for a chief

chambermaid to have ruled a nation. Yet he also cannot get over the Princesse herself. He sums

her up.

Ce fut néanmoins une personne si extraordinaire dans tout le cours de sa longue vie, et

qui a partout si grandement et si singulièrement figuré, quoique en diverses manières,

dont l’esprit, le courage, l’industrie et les ressources ont été si rares, enfin le règne si

absolu en Espagen et si à découvert, et le caractère si soutenu et si unique, que sa vie

mériterait d’ȇtre écrite, et tiendrait place entre les plus curieux morceaux de l’histoire des

temps où elle a vécu. (5:232)

She was nonetheless such an extraordinary person in all the course of her long life and

who had in every part of it so greatly and so singularly made a figure, although in

different guises, whose intelligcnce, courage, energy, and abilities were so rare, and

finally her reign so absolute and so out in the open in Spain, her character so persistent

52
 and so unique, that her life would deserve to be written and would take a place among the

most curious bits of the history of the times in which she lived.

Saint-Simon has gone a long way in writing the life of the Princesse des Ursins himself, and this

invitation would be repeatedly taken up by biographers and novelists, almost as soon as the

Mémoires became widely accessible in print. There may be something deflationary in “curieux

morceaux” at the end of the sentence. relegating the Princesse to another historical curiosity and

sideshow, a comment perhaps on the absurdity of the times in which she lived that allowed her

rise to power. But Saint-Simon’s admiration is genuine: the Princesse was as absolute a ruler as

Louis – “un roi si absolu” (3:983)50 – and Saint-Simon immediately succeeds this passage with

his long section on the character of the Duke d’Orléans, her adversary and the main protagonist,

succeeding Louis, of the final third of the Mémoires. He elevates the Princesse by the

juxtaposition. Several volumes earlier he admires her noble, almost majestic air – “l’air

extrȇmement noble, quelque chose de majestueux en tout son maintien” (2:52), and her ambition,

“the kind of vast ambitions well above her sex and of the ordinary ambitions of men” – “de ces

ambitions vastes fort au-dessus de son sexe et de l’ambition ordinaire des hommes” (2:53).51

Saint-Simon now colors her downfall with noble grandeur: during the physical ordeal of her

expulsion from Spain “She was faithful to herself. There escaped from her no tears, no regrets,

not reproaches, not the slightest weakness.” “Elle fut fidèle à elle-mȇme. Il ne lui échappa ni

50
Coiraut draws attention to the parallel in his notes, 5:1221.
51
See the remarks of D. J. H. van Elden, Esprits fins et esprits géométriques dans les portraits du duc de
Saint-Simon (The Hauge, Martinus Nijhoff, 1975, 2445-270.

53
larmes, ni regrets, ni reproche, ni la plus légère faiblesse” (5:162.) Given permission by the

Duke d’Orléans to have two visits with his old friend, Saint-Simon saw the Princesse at Marly

just before she departed in self-exile from France. She did not conceal to him to him her

uncertainties and fears, “and nonetheless, without complaint, without regrets, without weakness,

always measured, always as if it had happened to and concerned someone else, she herself

superior to events” (“et néanmoins sans plainte, sans regrets, sans faiblesse, toujours mesurée,

toujours come s’il se fȗt agi d’une autre, et supérieure aux événements” (5:229) Saint-Simon’s

language in both passages evokes a noble protagonist of the heroic stage of Corneille -- self-

identical, refusing any sign of weakness in the face of fortune’s adversities, almost thinking and

speaking of oneself in Julius Caesar’s third person: Senecan stoicism turned into aristocratic

hauteur and virtue.52

Saint-Simon lends to the Princesse des Ursins the stuff of heroism, even as his larger work

describes a court society that has narrowed heroic outlets for its male denizens, a society in

which soldiers had to dance. Symptomatically, the very first thing that we learn in the ensuing

pages about the character of the good soldier (5:237), the Duke d’Orléans, is that he was very

bad dancer – “il eȗt fort mal dansé” (5:233). We can read this as a compliment to the Duke. The

court system, outlined by Castiglione and realized by Louis, drew noblemen to the presence and

of their prince and to a mixed society of men and women. Polite protocols towards women and

their entertainment at court reinforced and even taught subservience to the monarch. The

courtier saw his sphere of action reduced. The court lady was correspondingly empowered,

52
See the fundamental discussion in Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition:
Anger’s Privilege (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 19850, especially 144-146.

54
using the proverbial weapons of women, indirection and wit – to the point, in Saint-Simon’s

skewed if not groundless conspiracy-theory view, that Madame de Maintenon and the Princesse

des Ursins became the rulers, working together and separately, of their great nations. It is an

irony of the Mémoires, maybe only half-realized by their author, that when Saint-Simon looks

for the age-old virtues of his noble class – ambition, intrepidness, self-esteem – he locates them

in a valorous lady, much as the Princesse had herself claimed, as a woman, to have more honor

than many of the men around her. The Princesse was a heroine in an age wanting in heroes. The

courtier Saint-Simon observed and wrote: he was too good a dancer to be a hero himself.53

53
In April, 1712, Saint-Simon penned an anonymous letter highly critical of Louis and proposing a
governmental function for the nobility; he never sent it. See Yves Coirault, “Un Nathan invisible,” in Dans
la forȇt saint-simnonienne (Paris: Universitas, 1992), 39-53. [Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France
(1968), 470-481.] In a memorable scene of suspense and comedy inside the Mémoires, also set in 1712,
Saint-Simon waits anxiously while his sympathetic friend, the Duke de Beauvillier, hides compromising
documents Saint-Simon had written for the recently deceased Dauphin beneath a pile of other papers in the
Dauphins’s letter casket. Beauvillier read some of these other papers, innocuous projects about finances
and provincial government issues, out loud and at some length to Louis, who was quickly bored with them
and ordered the whole pile of papers to be burned. The unsuspecting Louis and Madame de Maintenon
actually stoked the flames in the fireplace that consumed Saint-Simon’s dangerous writings (4:441-443).
It is a close call, perhaps the closest Saint-Simon, who anticipated exile and disgrace if their contents were
to have come out, gets to playing a hero.

55