Les damnés de la route – tome 1 - On achève bien les 2 chevaux (French Edition)

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Inscribed in this context of seventeenth-century money plays set in the city, Le Parisien crystallizes particularly well the conflict between noble and bourgeois approaches to money. Its success may also have been related to the social context it evoked. It shows merchant bourgeois characters falling prey to their enterprising servants, whose financial skill arouses anxieties over social class and value. Displaying both nobility and money on the stage, Le Parisien shows the contrast between traditional sources of value and new ones.

The play is a testament to a material world where money was taking on new roles, shapes, and national importance. It takes the spectator from the scribblings of notaries, to stashes of coins hidden away in a mattress, to jewels and silver coming from the Indies trade. Le Parisien , like other late seventeenth-century money plays, depicts a new economy in a way that explains it more explicitly to the spectator.

Viewed as a money play, Le Parisien is at a compelling point in the history of such representations: The plot, like that of his Rue Saint-Denys from the same year, turns upon questions of inheritance. The double louis , weighing This hoard contrasts with what several characters in the play argue should be a credit economy. He argues that he could have been putting it to good use earning interest:.

Those loans would have to be recorded on paper, another bearer of value that has an important role in the play. Indeed, paper in the play is used to mediate several aspects of life and death. The integrity of a notary is portrayed as being stronger than familial ties: As paper contracts with financial implications are portrayed in such a manner, the reliability of paper money is emphasized.

Precious objects also prove to be reliable bearers of value in the play. She explains that her plan is to bring it to a goldsmith, and to sell it to the first person who will buy it. Quatre ou cinq cens Ecus! But the search for another kind of diamond provides a backdrop for the play. This long exhortation in favor of searching for value abroad deserves a closer look. France is presented as a country where it was once possible to get rich, but no longer is.

In the monetary world portrayed in this play, knowledge of how the system works is key to being able to profit from it. In the late s, it was this promise of New World wealth that would result in the Mississippi Bubble, as the stock price of the company that was tied to the French national bank continued to rise uncontrollably based on inflated hopes of potential trading gains. Avant que cela soit, on tranchera mes jours.

Thus, just like her monetary references to old coins, her colonial references date far in the past. The search for value abroad, as depicted here, is strikingly unspecific and reflects an antiquated conception of colonial trade. The play is nevertheless thus inscribed in a larger context of international trade as a substitute for a flagging domestic economy.

Here, aspiring to international trade blurs the lines between nobility and bourgeoisie. As the play begins, Frontin tells him that his usual sources are dry: Frontin thus has to turn to new sources. Both Clitandre and his father turn to Frontin to navigate this world. This situation represents a key turning point. The methods by which Frontin ultimately gets money are personal: He does not realize that it is precisely this knowledge that Frontin will continually use to gain power over his master.

Although money circulates throughout the play, those who have the specialized knowledge to find it are not noble. Just as nobles needed to look to new sources of wealth, so does this bourgeois. Nobility by itself ceases to have currency in Le Parisien. In its focus on negotiation, Le Parisien also explicitly comments on changing values, particularly those of integrity and sincerity. He is anxious to hold onto something of real value in the face of artificial substitutes; his embrace of coin money, and desire to keep it safe, are a reaction to instability and a rather reactionary one at that: By examining the implications of finding new sources of money, the role of skilled mediators and masters of money, and the importance of money over nobility, Le Parisien focuses on the instability of traditional sources of value and shows a world in transition.

Le Parisien uses money to explore the impact of a new world where there are new sources of value to be exploited. This process in turn calls into question the traditional system of socioeconomic value in the country. Far more than just using money as a reality effect, Le Parisien explores the circulation of money, and in so doing examines the evolution of tensions between class and wealth, and between what is earned, what is inherited, and ultimately what and how things are valued.

Presses Universitaires de France, Actor and Dramatist, — Johns Hopkins Press, Cornell University Press, Histoire de la Compagnie royale des Indes Orientales: Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: Ecuyer baron d'Aubonne, qu'il a fait en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes. Gervais Clouzier et Claude Barbin, A detailed discussion of sources is found in Privitera 85— Orkey cites comedies with money between —, a period during which there were over comedies produced overall according to Lancaster's numbers. Printable PDF of Welch, — In the next sentence, though, the narrator admits that pirates might not make such reliable defenders of the empire after all.

This passage neatly illustrates the two-sided nature of the pirate as represented in late seventeenth-century travel and adventure literature. His strength and courage in battle resembled an ideal, chivalric form of heroism. The fact that it was motivated by the pursuit of worldly riches rather than fame or glory, however, made his valiance seem more criminal than virtuous. Scholars have suggested that the literary pirates evoke a traditional form of aristocratic heroism made anachronistic by absolutism. At a time when British nobles were losing power to an increasingly centralized government, pirates represented a fantasy of individual autonomy and resistance to the state.

Piles of coins, jewels, and assorted booty serve as the alluring backdrop for many descriptions of pirate culture. As historians from Henry C. For that reason, Frenchmen had to be coaxed into participating in commercial endeavors by convincing them that it was honorable and good for the state.

Pirate narratives complicate this view that commerce is only valuable when performed for the glory of the state. On the other hand, they depict their pirate heroes as corrupt, if not perverse, for their choice to renounce normal social values for the sake of profit. The Nouvelles were hurried to press without royal approval Ouellet and Villiers 33—4. The pirates they meet bear the names of freebooters who actually trawled the Caribbean. The nature of the risks—if not their frequency—is plausible and predictable. The protagonists give up safety in Europe and hazard their lives in America.

Sometimes, they are rewarded in gold. Shortly thereafter he sells his master, too: The merchant becomes a villain, and the young nobleman a casualty of the profit-driven society. In America, he discovers, his nobility no longer counts for anything. He is subject to the same ruthless economy as everyone else. In the fields and kitchens of the plantation, he learns to transform American crops and game potatoes, chilies, and turtle meat into tasty dishes that win the favor of his fellow slaves.

They succeed in escaping but are soon arrested by Spanish soldiers who mistake them for French pirates. They run into the woods, swim to an island and, like Robinson Crusoe, must hunt, fish, cook, and build pontoons out of logs in order to survive. Mont Val exchanges the inherent privilege of the nobleman for a different kind of merit, based on his ability to transform natural resources into usable goods.

He willingly participates in the pillage of a wealthy Spanish settlement but also prevents one of his fellow pirates from raping a young Spanish beauty His discomfort becomes clearer afterwards, when they divide up the spoils of the venture: He prizes his life more highly than the other pirates do. She takes him into her home, helps him heal, and finally puts him on a ship back to Europe, where he rejoices in his safety and vows never to return to America. His virtue in saving the woman is the cause of his redemption.

Yet even this seeming reversion to a traditional, chivalric narrative pattern is tainted by materialism. Although the tale ends happily, the tone is far from triumphant.

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When Mont Val forswears America at the end of the story, the adventure narrative becomes a moral tale. When Mont Val experiences misfortune, it is often because an immoral adversary has profited at his expense. The author modernizes the adventure plot by placing its many unfortunate events within an economic frame. In contrast, the pirates in Les Nouvelles and in other Caribbean adventure tales were prepared to risk their health and safety for food, goods, or bullion.

In the narrative logic of pirate adventures, in other words, material profit displaced aristocratic honor as the epitome of achievement. This version is a work of two halves. What unites both halves of the work is the recurring theme of the preeminence of money in the Caribbean. The book foregrounds this theme from the very outset, in its establishment of the narrative voice and point of view. This disillusioned perspective remains evident in the first part of the book that describes and classifies the natural riches of the Caribbean in terms of their use or exchange value.

What follows is a lengthy descriptive scene in which Exquemelin vividly brings to life the process of adding up the value of the treasure:. After the slaves seized in battle have been sold and after the spoils have been divided, the pirates celebrate their success with games and feasting, but also with plans for the next profitable venture: By risking life for profit, in other words, pirate figures literally put a price on their own heads. The document stipulates that officers injured in the fight receive a larger part of the spoils in remuneration for their bodily loss:.

Indeed, the agreement resembles modern-day insurance contracts. Yet there is something disturbing about its terms. The repetitive, short sentences disconcertingly take the form of equations: The chasse-parties make visible the metaphoric substitution of money or commodities some of which happen to be human commodities for the body. The equation of human life with commercial value is endemic in the world described in narratives of piracy. Adventurers seize not only bullion but also prisoners, who are later transformed into monetary riches in the form of ransom.

They attack slave ships and convert their human cargo into cash at illegal or corrupt versions of the sanctioned, regulated slave markets.

Money ensures the kind of esteem and dignity formerly conferred on heroes who displayed conventional forms of honor and valor. Commodities such as chocolate and sugar, for example, altered the everyday habits and appetites of elite French subjects. In her recent book, Trading Places: She interprets the relative absence of literary representations of the Antilles as indicative of a cultural desire to forget the abusive economic structures i.

The minor genre of Caribbean adventure tales may represent one textual space in which French readers did directly confront unsettling questions about the human costs of the material riches produced in the island colonies.

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They may be liberated from state oversight, these narratives suggest, but they are bound by their own greed. In this way, adventure narratives complemented contemporary moral and economic discourses that questioned the role of the profit motive in civilized society. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance, Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Duke University Press, The Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton University Press, Cartes, tableaux, chronologies, bibliographies Ed.

Histoire des aventuriers flibustiers. University of Pennsylvania Press, Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Gomberville, Marin le Roy sieur de. Belin-Leprieur et Plon, — Yale University Press, The Phantom of Chance: Edinburgh University Press, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: Johns Hopkins University Press, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade.

University of Minnesota Press, [original ]. Pirates, corsaires et flibustiers , eds. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. Cambridge University Press, Villiers, Patrick and Jean-Pierre Duteil. This comparative approach allows her to note that the few texts to portray Atlantic piracy in the second half of the seventeenth century pale in comparison to the large number of early seventeenth-century texts to feature Mediterranean pirates.

The text of the Code Michaud may be found in Isambert Patrick Villiers and Jean-Pierre Duteil write that, although by there was a clear distinction between corsaires contracted by states for the protection of their ships and outlaw pirates in the Mediterranean, no such clarity existed in the Antilles: The young couple runs away to sea together but is shipwrecked during a battle with pirates.

Leonor dies when a shark bites her leg off. Sent to Europe for his education, he takes up with bad company, seduces a girl, and is forced to escape to Brazil, passing through Africa en route. He falls in with English pirates, then French ones, with whom he seduces more women. He eventually flees to the Mediterranean, where his adventures with corsaires affect a peace treaty between France and Algiers. However, the only way to grasp fully the extravagance of these stories is to read them. The novella even includes recipes for potatoes with pimento sauce and turtle with broad beans and peas in herbs See Grussi for a more detailed account of the history of aristocratic gambling in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France specifically.

In his work on eighteenth-century literary aventuriers , Alexandre Stroev includes travelers and wanderers who search relentlessly for a better way of life. He argues that these figures reflect larger social fears, fantasies, and desires 3. The distinction between slavery and servitude was of utmost importance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal theory. Not surprisingly, then, the pirates in adventure narratives frequently target slave ships. See Serge Daget for an account of the intersections of piracy and the institutional slave trade in the early modern Caribbean.

Printable PDF of Rousseau, — Les vaines justifications paraissent alors dissonantes et parasitaires. Presses universitaires de Rennes, Hannon, Patricia, Fabulous Identities: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Lemoine, Patrick, La Fontaine les animaux et nous. Murat,Madame de, Contes, ed. Perrault, Charles et al.

Contes merveilleux , ed. Pinon, Laurent, Livres de zoologie de la Renaissance une anthologie — Editions Universitaires de Dijon, Tucker, Holly, Pregnant Fictions: Wayne State University Press, Ce n'est pas un Roi, ce n'est qu'un Roitelet. Le titre mentionne toujours sauf exception: Mirrors deceive and mirrors reveal. Mirrors are ephemeral, just like beauty. The tale concludes with a magical transformation in the desert from monkey to beautiful woman—after which she marries her cousin, the prince, who once rejected her apish love, but eagerly accepts her now human hand.

Babiole reunites with her birth mother, and they live happily ever after, free from bestial tones of the simian. Aspects of seeing, seeing oneself, and being seen are salient when considering this simian fairy tale. Imitation, linked with ugliness, refinement, and beauty, becomes a site of stigma: The post-colonial perspective will be important for my reading of this tale, and a surprising juxtaposition of two mirror scenes later in the article will take this into consideration. Self-reflexivity again plays a major role in collecting and cabinets of curiosity during this time period: In this frontispiece, we see an older woman, dressed as a sibyl, with glasses, holding a book.

Two standing children—a girl and a boy—accompany her. On the floor in front of her is a cherubic child playing with a monkey on a leash. Jones, on the other hand, highlights how the monkey is tied to the theme of imitation: Jones also reads this sign of imitation as signaling that the literary conteuses of the era used parody: It is not, of course, as delightful as Boswell; but who re-opens Boswell? Boswell is in another category; because, as every one knows, when he has once been opened he can never be shut. But, on its different level, the Lives will always hold a firm and comfortable place in our affections.

After Boswell, it is the book which brings us nearer than any other to the mind of Dr. That is its primary import. We do not go to it for information or for instruction, or that our tastes may be improved, or that our sympathies may be widened; we go to it to see what Dr. Doubtless, during the process, we are informed and instructed and improved in various ways; but these benefits are incidental, like the invigoration which comes from a mountain walk. It is not for the sake of the exercise that we set out; but for the sake of the view. The view from the mountain which is Samuel Johnson is so familiar, and has been so constantly analysed and admired, that further description would be superfluous.

It is sufficient for us to recognise that he is a mountain, and to pay all the reverence that is due. The parallel is close enough between this impudence and the attitude — implied, if not expressed — of too much modern criticism towards the sort of qualities — the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality, the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence of thought — which went to the making of the Lives of the Poets.

There is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that nobody minds. Our judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different, but because our whole method of judging has changed. Thus, to the historian of letters, the Lives have a special interest, for they afford a standing example of a great dead tradition — a tradition whose characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the critical methods of the eighteenth century and those of the present day, is the difference in sympathy. Johnson never inquired what poets were trying to do; he merely aimed at discovering whether what they had done complied with the canons of poetry. Such a system of criticism was clearly unexceptionable, upon one condition — that the critic was quite certain what the canons of poetry were; but the moment that it became obvious that the only way of arriving at a conclusion upon the subject was by consulting the poets themselves, the whole situation completely changed.

In other words, the critic discovered that his first duty was, not to criticise, but to understand the object of his criticism. That is the essential distinction between the school of Johnson and the school of Sainte—Beuve. No one can doubt the greater width and profundity of the modern method; but it is not without its drawbacks. It is then that one cannot help regretting the Johnsonian black cap. But other defects, besides lack of sympathy, mar the Lives of the Poets. One cannot help feeling that no matter how anxious Johnson might have been to enter into the spirit of some of the greatest of the masters with whom he was concerned, he never could have succeeded.

Whatever critical method he might have adopted, he still would have been unable to appreciate certain literary qualities, which, to our minds at any rate, appear to be the most important of all. His opinion of Lycidas is well known: Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, and he had no imagination. These are, indeed, grievous disabilities in a critic. What could have induced such a man, the impatient reader is sometimes tempted to ask, to set himself up as a judge of poetry?

The answer to the question is to be found in the remarkable change which has come over our entire conception of poetry, since the time when Johnson wrote. It has often been stated that the essential characteristic of that great Romantic Movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, was the re-introduction of Nature into the domain of poetry. Incidentally, it is curious to observe that nearly every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return to Nature.

No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne himself — the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century — wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance.

Precisely the same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets, the development of literature offers a singular paradox.

The further it goes back, the more sophisticated it becomes; and it grows more and more natural as it grows distant from the State of Nature. But it would have done very little, if it had done nothing more than this. Thomson, in the full meridian of the eighteenth century, wrote poems upon the subject of Nature; but it would be foolish to suppose that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely carried on a fashion which Thomson had begun. Nature, with them, was something more than a peg for descriptive and didactic verse; it was the manifestation of the vast and mysterious forces of the world.

We are still under the spell of The Ancient Mariner ; and poetry to us means, primarily, something which suggests, by means of words, mysteries and infinitudes. Thus, music and imagination seem to us the most essential qualities of poetry, because they are the most potent means by which such suggestions may be invoked.

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But the eighteenth century knew none of these things. To Lord Chesterfield and to Pope, to Prior and to Horace Walpole, there was nothing at all strange about the world; it was charming, it was disgusting, it was ridiculous, and it was just what one might have expected. In such a world, why should poetry, more than anything else, be mysterious?

Let it be sensible; that was enough. The new edition of the Lives , which Dr. Birkbeck Hill prepared for publication before his death, and which has been issued by the Clarendon Press, with a brief Memoir of the editor, would probably have astonished Dr. But, though the elaborate erudition of the notes and appendices might have surprised him, it would not have put him to shame. One can imagine his growling scorn of the scientific conscientiousness of the present day. And indeed, the three tomes of Dr. This is the price that must be paid for increased efficiency. The wise reader will divide his attention between the new business-like edition and one of the charming old ones, in four comfortable volumes, where the text is supreme upon the page, and the paragraphs follow one another at leisurely intervals.

The type may be a little faded, and the paper a little yellow; but what of that? It is all quiet and easy; and, as one reads, the brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the Past, with the friendliness of a conversation. Lives of the English Poets. By Samuel Johnson, LL. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D. When Napoleon was starting for his campaign in Russia, he ordered the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might be necessary to make.

The sensation in Paris was immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning of Moscow and the passage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination — on the one hand as a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and become historical.

Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was fixed — a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has passed; the gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us to-day seems hardly less remote — from some points of view, indeed, even more — than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the correspondence of Cicero.

Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange and dead antiquity: The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the eighteenth century, can never be out of date. A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate them in their completeness. The publication of these manuscripts in full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs.

A great mass of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance. The original edition produced by Miss Berry in , from which all the subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy, turns out to have contained nothing more than a comparatively small fraction of the whole correspondence; of the letters published by Mrs. Toynbee, are entirely new, and of the rest only 52 were printed by Miss Berry in their entirety. It skims the cream of the correspondence; and it faithfully preserves the main outline of the story which the letters reveal.

No doubt that was enough for the readers of that generation; indeed, even for the more exacting reader of to-day, there is something a little overwhelming in the closely packed pages of Mrs. Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself — the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year in the drawing-rooms of Paris.

She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century: It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between and ; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful.

The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action — which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory — were anathema to Madame du Deffand. In her letters to Walpole, whenever she compares the present with the past her bitterness becomes extreme. She saw Diderot once — and that was enough for both of them. She could never understand why it was that M. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse simply precipitated and intensified an inevitable rupture.

She was the younger generation knocking at the door. Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV. It was at Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations — supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park — that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved.

The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and the memoirs that have come down to us. It was an intermediate period, and the comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and intelligent classes led an existence in which the elements of publicity and privacy were curiously combined.

Never, certainly, before or since, have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years of the eighteenth century. Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of personal selfishness have played so small a part.

The selfishness of the eighteenth century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate degree, those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run smoothly — the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation — with the result that a condition of living was produced which, in all its superficial and obvious qualities, was one of unparalleled amenity.

Indeed, those persons who were privileged to enjoy it showed their appreciation of it in an unequivocal way — by the tenacity with which they clung to the scene of such delights and graces. They refused to grow old; they almost refused to die. Time himself seems to have joined their circle, to have been infected with their politeness, and to have absolved them, to the furthest possible point, from the operation of his laws.

Pont-de-Veyle, it is true, died young — at the age of seventy-seven. More typical still of this singular and fortunate generation was Fontenelle, who, one morning in his hundredth year, quietly observed that he felt a difficulty in existing, and forthwith, even more quietly, ceased to do so. Yet, though the wheels of life rolled round with such an alluring smoothness, they did not roll of themselves; the skill and care of trained mechanicians were needed to keep them going; and the task was no light one.

Even Fontenelle himself, fitted as he was for it by being blessed as one of his friends observed with two brains and no heart, realised to the full the hard conditions of social happiness. The graceful, easy motions of that gay company were those of dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing, over the thinnest ice. Those drawing-rooms, those little circles, so charming with the familiarity of their privacy, were themselves the rigorous abodes of the deadliest kind of public opinion — the kind that lives and glitters in a score of penetrating eyes.

They required in their votaries the absolute submission that reigns in religious orders — the willing sacrifice of the entire life. The intimacy of personal passion, the intensity of high endeavour — these things must be left behind and utterly cast away by all who would enter that narrow sanctuary. Friendship might be allowed there, and flirtation disguised as love; but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself should never be admitted to destroy the calm of daily intercourse and absorb into a single channel attentions due to all. Politics were to be tolerated, so long as they remained a game; so soon as they grew serious and envisaged the public good, they became insufferable.

As for literature and art, though they might be excellent as subjects for recreation and good talk, what could be more preposterous than to treat such trifles as if they had a value of their own? Only one thing; and that was to indulge, in the day-dreams of religion or philosophy, the inward ardours of the soul. Indeed, the scepticism of that generation was the most uncompromising that the world has known; for it did not even trouble to deny: It presented a blank wall of perfect indifference alike to the mysteries of the universe and to the solutions of them.

Madame du Deffand gave early proof that she shared to the full this propensity of her age. While still a young girl in a convent school, she had shrugged her shoulders when the nuns began to instruct her in the articles of their faith. The matter was considered serious, and the great Massillon, then at the height of his fame as a preacher and a healer of souls, was sent for to deal with the youthful heretic. She was not impressed by his arguments. In his person the generous fervour and the massive piety of an age that could still believe felt the icy and disintegrating touch of a new and strange indifference.

The Abbess ran forward to ask what holy books he recommended. He had seen that the case was hopeless. An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse — such were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux.

About the middle of the century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which still showed traces — in the emblazoned arms over the great mantelpiece — of the occupation of Madame de Montespan. A few years later a physical affliction overtook her: For the rest of her life she hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most celebrated in Europe.

The thirty years of her reign there fall into two distinct and almost equal parts. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life, her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme. Toynbee have now presented to us for the first time in its entirety. Her letters to Walpole form in effect a continuous journal covering the space of fifteen years — They allow us, on the one hand, to trace through all its developments the progress of an extraordinary passion, and on the other to examine, as it were under the microscope of perhaps the bitterest perspicacity on record, the last phase of a doomed society.

For the circle which came together in her drawing-room during those years had the hand of death upon it. The future lay elsewhere; it was simply the past that survived there — in the rich trappings of fashion and wit and elaborate gaiety — but still irrevocably the past. The radiant creatures of Sceaux had fallen into the yellow leaf. We see them in these letters, a collection of elderly persons trying hard to amuse themselves, and not succeeding very well. Pont-de-Veyle, the youthful septuagenarian, did perhaps succeed; for he never noticed what a bore he was becoming with his perpetual cough, and continued to go the rounds with indefatigable animation, until one day his cough was heard no more.

Besides the diplomats, nearly every foreign traveller of distinction found his way to the renowned salon ; Englishmen were particularly frequent visitors; and among the familiar figures of whom we catch more than one glimpse in the letters to Walpole are Burke, Fox, and Gibbon. Sometimes influential parents in England obtained leave for their young sons to be admitted into the centre of Parisian refinement. The English cub, fresh from Eton, was introduced by his tutor into the red and yellow drawing-room, where the great circle of a dozen or more elderly important persons, glittering in jewels and orders, pompous in powder and rouge, ranged in rigid order round the fireplace, followed with the precision of a perfect orchestra the leading word or smile or nod of an ancient Sibyl, who seemed to survey the company with her eyes shut, from a vast chair by the wall.

It is easy to imagine the scene, in all its terrifying politeness. Madame du Deffand could not tolerate young people; she declared that she did not know what to say to them; and they, no doubt, were in precisely the same difficulty. To an English youth, unfamiliar with the language and shy as only English youths can be, a conversation with that redoubtable old lady must have been a grim ordeal indeed. One can almost hear the stumbling, pointless observations, almost see the imploring looks cast, from among the infinitely attentive company, towards the tutor, and the pink ears growing still more pink.

But such awkward moments were rare. As a rule the days flowed on in easy monotony — or rather, not the days, but the nights. Upon this event the whole of her existence hinged. Supper, she used to say, was one of the four ends of man, and what the other three were she could never remember.

She lived up to her dictum. These figures should be largely increased to give them their modern values; but, economise as she might, she found that she could only just manage to rub along. Her parties varied considerably in size; sometimes only four or five persons sat down to supper — sometimes twenty or thirty. No doubt they were elaborate meals. In a moment of economy we find the hospitable lady making pious resolutions: A week later she would suddenly begin to issue invitations wildly, and, day after day, her tables would be loaded with provisions for thirty guests.

But she did not always have supper at home. The entertainment, apart from the supper itself, hardly varied. Occasionally there was a little music, more often there were cards and gambling. Madame du Deffand disliked gambling, but she loathed going to bed, and, if it came to a choice between the two, she did not hesitate: But distractions of that kind were merely incidental to the grand business of the night — the conversation. For those strange creatures it seemed to form the very substance of life itself.

It was the underlying essence, the circumambient ether, in which alone the pulsations of existence had their being; it was the one eternal reality; men might come and men might go, but talk went on for ever. It is difficult, especially for those born under the Saturnine influence of an English sky, quite to realise the nature of such conversation. Brilliant, charming, easy-flowing, gay and rapid it must have been; never profound, never intimate, never thrilling; but also never emphatic, never affected, never languishing, and never dull.

Madame du Deffand herself had a most vigorous flow of language. Then at moments her wit crystallised; the cataract threw off a shower of radiant jewels, which one caught as one might. Some of these have come down to us. A garrulous and credulous Cardinal was describing the martyrdom of Saint Denis the Areopagite: That, said the Cardinal, was well known; what was not well known was the extraordinary fact that he walked with his head under his arm all the way from Montmartre to the Church of Saint Denis — a distance of six miles.

If Madame de Gramont happened to be there, there was still some hope, for Madame de Gramont abhorred going to bed almost as much as Madame du Deffand. Or there was just a chance that the Duc de Choiseul might come in at the last moment, and stay on for a couple of hours. But at length it was impossible to hesitate any longer; the chariot was at the door. She swept off, but it was still early; it was only half-past three; and the coachman was ordered to drive about the Boulevards for an hour before going home. It was, after all, only natural that she should put off going to bed, for she rarely slept for more than two or three hours.

The greater part of that empty time, during which conversation was impossible, she devoted to her books. But she hardly ever found anything to read that she really enjoyed. Of the two thousand volumes she possessed — all bound alike, and stamped on the back with her device of a cat — she had only read four or five hundred; the rest were impossible. She perpetually complained to Walpole of the extreme dearth of reading matter.

In nothing, indeed, is the contrast more marked between that age and ours than in the quantity of books available for the ordinary reader. How the eighteenth century would envy us our innumerable novels, our biographies, our books of travel, all our easy approaches to knowledge and entertainment, our translations, our cheap reprints! In those days, even for a reader of catholic tastes, there was really very little to read. She considered that Racine alone of writers had reached perfection, and that only once — in Athalie.

Corneille carried her away for moments, but on the whole he was barbarous. And that was all. Everything else appeared to her either affected or pedantic or insipid. Walpole recommended to her a History of Malta; she tried it, but she soon gave it up — it mentioned the Crusades. She began Gibbon, but she found him superficial. At last, in despair, she embarked on a prose translation of Shakespeare. The result was unexpected; she was positively pleased. At King Lear , indeed, she had to draw the line. She lay back among the cushions, listening, for long hours.

Was there ever a more incongruous company, a queerer trysting-place, for Goneril and Desdemona, Ariel and Lady Macbeth? Often, even before the arrival of the old pensioner, she was at work dictating a letter, usually to Horace Walpole, occasionally to Madame de Choiseul or Voltaire. Her letters to Voltaire are enchanting; his replies are no less so; and it is much to be regretted that the whole correspondence has never been collected together in chronological order, and published as a separate book.

The slim volume would be, of its kind, quite perfect. There was no love lost between the two old friends; they could not understand each other; Voltaire, alone of his generation, had thrown himself into the very vanguard of thought; to Madame du Deffand progress had no meaning, and thought itself was hardly more than an unpleasant necessity.

She distrusted him profoundly, and he returned the compliment. Yet neither could do without the other: Besides, in spite of all their differences, they admired each other genuinely, and they were held together by the habit of a long familiarity. The result was a marvellous display of epistolary art. If they had liked each other any better, they never would have troubled to write so well.

They were on their best behaviour — exquisitely courteous and yet punctiliously at ease, like dancers in a minuet. His cajoleries are infinite; his deft sentences, mingling flattery with reflection, have almost the quality of a caress. He rejoins in that wonderful strain of epicurean stoicism of which he alone possessed the secret: Sometimes one just catches the glimpse of a claw beneath the soft pad, a grimace under the smile of elegance; and one remembers with a shock that, after all, one is reading the correspondence of a monkey and a cat.

Its precision is absolute. It is like a line drawn in one stroke by a master, with the prompt exactitude of an unerring subtlety. There is no breadth in it — no sense of colour and the concrete mass of things.

One cannot wonder, as one reads her, that she hardly regretted her blindness. What did she lose by it? Her perception was intellectual; and to the penetrating glances of her mental vision the objects of the sensual world were mere irrelevance.

The kind of writing produced by such a quality of mind may seem thin and barren to those accustomed to the wealth and variety of the Romantic school. Yet it will repay attention. Madame du Deffand carries the classical ideal to its furthest point. She never strikes more than once, and she always hits the nail on the head. Such is her skill that she sometimes seems to beat the Romantics even on their own ground: The following passage from a letter to Walpole is characteristic:. In the simple, faultless rhythm of that closing sentence, the trembling melancholy of the old harp seems to be lingering still.

The revelation is not a pretty one. Bitterness, discontent, pessimism, cynicism, boredom, regret, despair — these are the feelings that dominate every page. What more could anyone desire? The harsh old woman would have smiled grimly at such a question. She was like a dyspeptic at a feast; the finer the dishes that were set before her, the greater her distaste; that spiritual gusto which lends a savour to the meanest act of living, and without which all life seems profitless, had gone from her for ever.

Yet — and this intensified her wretchedness — though the banquet was loathsome to her, she had not the strength to tear herself away from the table. Once, in a moment of desperation, she had thoughts of retiring to a convent, but she soon realised that such an action was out of the question. Fate had put her into the midst of the world, and there she must remain.

For instance, there was Necker. It was clear that Necker was not a fool, and yet — what was it? Something was the matter — yes, she had it: Sometimes the world in which she lived displayed itself before her horrified inward vision like some intolerable and meaningless piece of clock-work mechanism:. At other times she could see around her nothing but a mass of mutual hatreds, into which she was plunged herself no less than her neighbours:.

Once or twice for several months together she thought that she had found in the Duchesse de Choiseul a true friend and a perfect companion. But there was one fatal flaw even in Madame de Choiseul: One person, however, there was who pleased her; and it was the final irony of her fate that this very fact should have been the last drop that caused the cup of her unhappiness to overflow.

Horace Walpole had come upon her at a psychological moment. Her quarrel with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and the Encyclopaedists had just occurred; she was within a few years of seventy; and it must have seemed to her that, after such a break, at such an age, there was little left for her to do but to die quietly. Then the gay, talented, fascinating Englishman appeared, and she suddenly found that, so far from her life being over, she was embarked for good and all upon her greatest adventure.

What she experienced at that moment was something like a religious conversion. Her past fell away from her a dead thing; she was overwhelmed by an ineffable vision; she, who had wandered for so many years in the ways of worldly indifference, was uplifted all at once on to a strange summit, and pierced with the intensest pangs of an unknown devotion.

Henceforward her life was dedicated; but, unlike the happier saints of a holier persuasion, she was to find no peace on earth. The total impression of him which these letters produce is very damaging. It is true that he was in a difficult position; and it is also true that, since only the merest fragments of his side of the correspondence have been preserved, our knowledge of the precise details of his conduct is incomplete; nevertheless, it is clear that, on the whole, throughout the long and painful episode, the principal motive which actuated him was an inexcusable egoism.

He was obsessed by a fear of ridicule. He knew that letters were regularly opened at the French Post Office, and he lived in terror lest some spiteful story of his absurd relationship with a blind old woman of seventy should be concocted and set afloat among his friends, or his enemies, in England, which would make him the laughing-stock of society for the rest of his days.

He was no less terrified by the intensity of the sentiment of which he had become the object. Thoroughly superficial and thoroughly selfish, immersed in his London life of dilettantism and gossip, the weekly letters from France with their burden of a desperate affection appalled him and bored him by turns.

The seats were hammocks hung from the roof by wires. The suspension system, designed by Alphonse Forceau, used front leading arms and rear trailing arms, connected to eight torsion bars beneath the rear seat: The front axle was connected to its torsion bars by cable. The overload bar came into play when the car had three people on board, two in the front and one in the rear, to support the extra load of a fourth passenger and fifty kilograms of luggage.

An atmosphere of impending disaster led to the cancellation of the motor show less than a month before it was scheduled to open. During the German occupation of France in World War II Boulanger personally refused to collaborate with German authorities to the point where the Gestapo listed him as an 'enemy of the Reich',[30] under constant threat of arrest and deportation to Germany.

Several TPVs were buried at secret locations; one was disguised as a pickup, the others were destroyed, and Boulanger spent the next six years thinking about further improvements. Until , when three TPVs were discovered in a barn, it was believed that only two prototypes had survived.

As of there were five known TPVs. Boulanger decided to redesign the car to use mostly steel with flat panels, instead of aluminium. Becchia persuaded Boulanger that the fourth gear was an overdrive. Other changes included seats with tubular steel frames with rubber band springing[33] and a restyling of the body by the Italian Flaminio Bertoni. Horse-drawn vehicles had re-appeared in large numbers. The car on display was nearly identical to the 2CV type A that would be sold the next year, but it lacked an electric starter, the addition of which was decided the day before the opening of the Salon, replacing the pull cord starter.

The Type A had one stop light, and was only available in grey. The only other instrument was an ammeter. The car was heavily criticised by the motoring press and became the butt of French comedians for a short while. At the time a second-hand 2CV was more expensive than a new one because the buyer did not have to wait. Grudging respect began to emanate from the international press: Production reached cars a week. The 'Weekend' version of the van had collapsible, removable rear seating and rear side windows, enabling a tradesman to use it as a family vehicle on the weekend as well as for business in the week.

In the 2CV side repeaters were added above and behind the rear doors. It was now also available with cc AZ , In a heating and ventilation system was installed. The colour of the steering wheel changed from black to grey. The mirrors and the rear window were enlarged. The bonnet was decorated with a longitudinal strip of aluminium AZL. In September , the model AZLP P for porte de malle, 'boot lid' , appeared with a boot lid panel; previously the soft top had to be opened at the bottom to get to the boot. It had a third side window, not available in the normal version, and improved details. In the front fenders round turn signals were integrated.

The corrugated metal bonnet was replaced by a five-rib glossy cover. Simultaneously, the grille was slightly modified flatter shape with a curved top edge. This had an additional engine-transmission unit in the rear, mounted the other way around and driving the rear wheels. For the second engine there was a separate push-button starter and choke. With a gear stick between the front seats, both transmissions were operated simultaneously. For the two engines, there were separate petrol tanks under the front seats.

The filler neck sat in the front doors.

Both engines and hence axles could be operated independently. The spare wheel was mounted on the bonnet. The car had ample off-road capability, but at twice the price of the standard 2CV. Many were used by the Swiss Post as a delivery vehicle. Today they are highly collectable. A sun roof was installed. An electric wiper motor replaced the drive on the speedo.

The ammeter was replaced by a charging indicator light. The speedometer was moved from the window frame into the dash. In the s 2CV production caught up with demand. The exterior is more modern and distinguished by the recessed lights in the fenders and bodywork. Between and about 1. This was in response to competition by the Renault 4.

The Dyane was originally planned as an upmarket version of the 2CV and was supposed to supersede it, but ultimately the 2CV outlived the Dyane by seven years. From , only two series were produced: All 2CVs from this date can run on unleaded fuel. In the front bench seat was replaced with two individual seats. In 2CVs were fitted with standard three-point seat belts.

In new seat covers, a padded single-spoke steering wheel and ashtrays were introduced. Sales of the 2CV were reinvigorated by the oil crisis. The 2CV after this time became as much a youth lifestyle statement as a basic functional form of transport. The round headlights were replaced by square ones, adjustable in height.

A new plastic grille was fitted. The small, square speedometer which dates back to the Traction Avant , and the narrow rear bumper was installed. It also had the earlier round headlights. In one scene the ultra light 2CV tips over and is quickly righted by hand. In all 2CV models got inboard front disc brakes.

This lasted until , when production of the 2CV ended.

In the arrived. In there was the Cocorico. This means 'cock-a-doodle-doo' and tied in with France's entry in the World Cup. In came the Bamboo, followed by the Perrier in association with the mineral water company. Other changes were a new rear-view mirror and inboard disc brakes at the front wheels. It was introduced mainly because of stricter emissions standards. In it was replaced by the 'Sausss-duck' special edition.

Production of the 2CV in Belgium was from to It achieved some success in these markets, to the extent that all Slough-built 2CVs were fitted with improved air cleaners and other modifications to suit the rough conditions found in Australia and Africa, where the 2CV's durability and good ride quality over rough roads attracted buyers. The 2CV sold poorly in Great Britain in part due to its excessive cost, because of import duties on components. The pick-ups also served aboard HMS Albion.

They were to serve as motor transport with the 42nd Commando regiment of the Royal Marines, which required robust and reliable vehicles to cope with jungle tracks, that were light enough to be taken ashore by helicopter from the aircraft carriers. In , the 2CV was re-introduced to the British market in the wake of the oil crisis, which resulted in an increasing demand for smaller cars, to which most manufacturers had responded by launching small 'supermini' cars, including the Renault 5, Ford Fiesta and Volkswagen Polo. The second wave of 2CVs for the British market were produced in France but avoided the crippling import duties of the s, because the UK was by then a member of the EEC.

One of these, the La Dalat, was the first automobile manufactured in Vietnam.

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