Madeleine de Scudéry's parents died early. But she was lucky: the uncle, with whom she grew up with her slightly older brother in Rouen, did not take it so exactly with the gender separation. He had both children raised together. It so happened that Madeleine did not learn to dance, play the harp, twist curls and smile, but learned Greek, Latin, Italian, mathematics. She read and read - stories of adventurers and heroes, texts of philosophers. Nowadays she would be the kid with the flashlight under the duvet. However, at that time, in the first years of the 17th century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, reading girls were the exception.
Today, 415 years ago, on November 15, 1607, she was born in Le Havre and graduated from life for her time. She became a writer who was able to live on her work - unmarried and free. And if the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) would not have been known to her with the detective story "The Miss von Scuderi", her name would hardly be known. The life of the real Scudéry was more eventful than the career of Hoffmann's figure.
When Madeleine reached marriageable age, she was not marriageable. She had no father to set her up, and no significant dowry. She was obviously not particularly pretty either, and her demands on life would probably have scared the last candidate away: she wanted to be free. Because she knew the constraints that young women were under: daughters – whether bourgeois or noble – were married in order to keep assets together or to secure social advancement. And all those who did not get into the marriage market, for example because the smallpox had disfigured them, entered the monastery. Life was preordained. Girls had no choice.
Not so Madeleine de Scudéry. She chose. Together with her brother Georges, she moved to Paris in 1630. The siblings lived together, he spent a few years with the military and she took care of the household. Both actually wanted to write. Georges led a coat and delegate life-and so his dramas read. Madeleine, on the other hand, found his own unique literary form.
The hot spots of literary salons in Paris
As soon as they arrived in Paris, she plunged into the salons. In the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), noble women came together. They talked about culture and philosophy, they played, joked, networked. Men were also approved, poets, composers and everyone who could behave who did not explain life and women explained life. Madeleine de Scudéry had found her place. She quickly made a name for herself as a clever and quick -witted salonière.
Soon she was no longer just a guest, but a hostess. From 1652, the precious, as the women were called, came to their Palais in the Marais district of Paris. Les Samedis was the name of the meetings at which nobles and commoners, courtiers and resisters met for a witty game. Many famous literary figures were regularly present: Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La Fontaine, Nicolas Fouquet, Paul Scarron, Paul Pellisson. Scudéry was the hostess and chronicler of this conviviality.
"Ibrahim ou l'In illustrious bassa" is called her first novel. He appeared under the name of the brother, because writing did not commemorate a woman. Nevertheless, many insiders knew the author, and those who wanted to be informed read their writings. That was less due to the adventure stories itself. In fact, it was about something else.
How Scudéry embedded puzzles in her novels
The original thing about the novels was the mix. This applies especially to Scudéry's large works "Le Grand Cyrus" (Kyros of the Great) and "Clélie": They were the keys to the Paris society. Both novels appeared in ten volumes. Embedded in adventure of antiquity, contemporaries were found in portraits. As soon as a new band came out, the puzzle rates started: who recognized himself or his neighbors? Lists with decrypted portraits soon circulated to the volumes. But not only people appeared, but also discussions about politics, society, art. Games from the salons were continued in the novel and played back into the salon. The novels described the baroque work of art, topics ran through several art forms: architecture, theater, ballet, fairy tales, fable, game.
Scudéry and her friends whistled the rules of the strict "doctrine classique", the French classical music, which otherwise determined the taste of the time. The novels had a larger circulation than prayer books, they were translated and read throughout Europe. Because the bookstores were regularly taken by surprise by the demand, salons set up a lending service. If you wanted to have a say, you had to know the latest volume. Madeleine de Scudéry mastered entertainment, she created the Netflix series of her time. And she lived on it.
Scudéry had managed to secure a place in the world of upheavals and intrigues around the Sonnenkönig that was unique: she lived as a writer from her work, unmarried and free. And she wrote what she wanted. If she wanted to improve the situation of the woman, Madeleine de Scudéry didn't hit the table. Nobody would have listened to her. In all modesty, she left her messages to her novel figures.
Like many contemporaries, she had an alter ego in the novels. Sappho, the most famous poetess of antiquity, put into her mouth demands that still sound modern today. At that time, however, they were dynamite. At a time when female education was focused solely on marriage, her characters advocate a free choice of spouse. When Louis XIV (1638-1715) sawed off his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet and put him in prison, there was sharp criticism in the novel conversations. When he overturns the edict of Nantes and has Huguenots persecuted bloody again, Scudéry's heroes demand freedom of religion. Every irritating topic can be found in her writings: injustice between the sexes and classes, dealing with education, politics, absolutism, arbitrary rule, cultural struggle. All this comes across harmlessly in the novel, in a casual oral tone. From the orality of the salons, Sappho wanted to develop no less than the orality and freedom of the woman.
The freedom of a woman to choose her husband
Freedom was Scudéry's biggest topic. Above all, the freedom to choose how and with whom a woman wants to spend her life. Madeleine de Scudéry never got married. In the novels, she calls so many reasons against marriage that this cannot be surprised. Girls only live under the father's foot, later under the husband's fox. They don't have much to decide. A woman is nothing more in marriage "than the first slave of the house". Every soldier lives a freer life than she, says a princess in Scudéry's work "Clélie". Even in the rare case of love marriage, the heroines in Scudéry's books remain skeptical: "Love may survive death, but never the marriage."
Even with the beauty, it is one thing: if the man falls in love with a woman's charm, it becomes difficult at the latest if after the birth of several children and the loss of several teeth there is not much left of the beauty. Then the marriage accident ended. He enjoys otherwise and she crouches around and can't even read. It is a dilemma about this construct. The dealings between men and women work much better in an equal friendship. A relationship that was considered very unlikely at the time.
Together, equal, friendly.
That was the ideal of human relationship in Sappho's eyes.
She herself lived in close friendship with Paul Pellisson, a poet who was 16 years younger than she was closely connected to for decades.
When Pellisson was arrested during the Fouquet affair in 1661, she fought the king for her boyfriend until Pellisson was released from prison.
Friendship is much more than any arranged marriage, if only because both sides would have to make constant effort.
Scudéry has set a monument to friendship in her novel "Clélie". It contains the "Carte de Tendre", an allegorical map. She shows the friend couple the way and lurking dangers. Rivers are recorded there, seas, mountains, "terres inconnues" – unknown areas. The card was celebrated in the salons as a signpost of the ideal relationship. Visitors used the metaphors and not only had a game plan at hand, but also the vocabulary to talk about interpersonal relationships that worked differently than usual. The prison of marriage was a comparatively simple place. In the freedom of friendship, the human couple had to reorient themselves.
Women who questioned the superiority of the man
Anyone who shakes the bars of society makes enemies. And Madeleine de Scudéry and her friends had a lot of them. The governors of morality, social order and poetic rules felt threatened by women who questioned the most obvious thing: the superiority of the man in marriage and the superiority of the academy over the salon. Opponents such as the author Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) stubbornly and persistently defended the canon against salon literature at that time.
It is therefore no wonder that many people today come up with "the ridiculous precious" by Molière (1622–1673), a comedy about two women who screens the Paris salon culture and thus all offend their heads. In fact, the girls in the drama are less ridiculous than their fathers and admirers. Much of what Molière denounces in the play is one of the topics that Scudéry itself criticizes in her texts. Incidentally, there is a book that establishes the connection between Molière's comedy and the precious texts: a bilingual edition of "Les Précieuses Ridicules" contrasts Scudéry and Molière. Editor Renate Baader is likely to be among the few who has read many meters of Scudéry.
When Madeleine de Scudéry died in 1701 at the age of 94, she is the only woman who was previously recognized by the Académie, the traditional scholarly company in Paris. Not with a seat between the men, but at least with a priority prize. For oral, maturity and freedom.
