The Wordy Milieu of the Mazarin Salon: Queer Anti-Absolutism with Hortense Mancini, Charles de Saint-Évremond, and Jean de La Fontaine

Abstract

This article explores the activities of the Mazarin salon, which was established in 1676 by two French exiles, Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin, and Charles de Saint-Évremond, in London. Serving as a space that connected French expatriates with writers, diplomats, politicians, and artists from the hostland, the Mazarin salon became a distinguished site of Anglo-French exchange despite rising tensions between England and France and so showcased the rich possibilities of a space outside the limits of an absolutist structure. With reference to the writings of Saint-Évremond and Jean de La Fontaine, as well as the Blenheim Papers at the British Library, the article follows the words – translated, reworked, debated – that caught the attention of habitués to see how the micro-world of this salon-in-exile came into contact with the wider world around it and, more broadly, to reveal how this activity formed a project of queer anti-absolutist resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• salon
• Anglo-French
• exchange
• exile
• translation

Introduction

In the late 1670s, the London-based salon of the Italo-French exile Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin, became obsessed with the use of the French word ‘vaste’. When a visitor to the salon hailed Cardinal Richelieu for his ‘esprit vaste’, an argument erupted over whether ‘vaste’ could represent a positive attribute in this context, used alone and without a further qualifier. The salonnière, Mancini, accepted the habitué’s initial use of ‘vaste’ as a term that expressed the depth of the Cardinal’s intellect, but the salon’s co-host, Charles de Saint-Évremond, objected, contending that ‘vaste’ was a defect and not a compliment. Habitués were so stubbornly divided over whether ‘vaste’ signified a positive or negative value that Saint-Évremond apparently wrote to the Académie Française, asking its members to settle the debate.¹ When the Académie’s decision was returned, as the story goes, and explicitly opposed Saint-Évremond’s definition, the latter penned an essay justifying his position, titled ‘Dissertation sur le mot de vaste’ (1678–81).² Leaning on a host of classical writers, Saint-Évremond argues that ‘vaste’ (from the Latin ‘vastus’) carries a negative connotation on the grounds that the idea of vastness undermines the beauty and proportion of the subject in question, that objects disproportionate in size (such as giants and cyclops) are typically perceived as monstrous, and that vast expanses of space are dizzying and disorienting.³ Whilst conceding that French words do not always have to conform to the meaning of their Latin roots, Saint-Évremond defends the importance of this particular etymological link, asserting that the Latin meaning – with its clear negative implication – offers a more nuanced understanding of the word that makes a useful addition to the French language.⁴

This debate reflected the larger discourse over the reform of the French language taking place in France at the time. Split between those who backed a system of French orthography and etymology rooted in Latinate genealogies and those who preferred phonetic spelling and a lexigraphy based on common usage, the discourse took on a gendered divide.⁵ As Dena Goodman has outlined, campaigners for the standardization of the French language according to classical etymological principles touted a system underpinned by an education in Latin that was almost exclusively the preserve of the male elite, and so became associated with masculine writing, while their opponents privileged ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ forms of French language and grammar unadulterated by Latin that were said to be found in the world of the women-headed salons, and were thus coded as feminine speech. The contours of the dispute found familiar divisions during the querelle de vaste at Mancini’s salon, which witnessed Saint-Évremond argue for the negative valence of ‘vaste’ on the basis of the word’s classical etymology against Mancini, the salonnière, who maintained the case for common usage.

The disagreement over ‘vaste’ and Saint-Évremond’s subsequent essay reveal one of the ways that Mancini’s salon, known today as the Mazarin salon, acted as a site of Anglo-French exchange in London. Established in 1676 in Mancini’s apartments adjoining St James’s Palace, the Mazarin salon welcomed a multilingual and multiconfessional group, comprising French Catholics, Huguenots, Anglicans, English nonconformists, and Dutch and Italian Protestants. Its membership counted courtiers (George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; Henrietta Hyde), diplomats (Honoré Courtin; Paul Barrillon; Henri de Ruvigny), writers (Anne de La Roche; Thomas Shadwell; César de Saint-Réal; Gregorio Leti), and the royal mistresses of Charles II (Barbara Villiers; Nell Gywn; Louise de Kérouaille) to become a much-frequented haunt for Francophiles, gamblers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians.⁶ Notably, the salon was the first major French-style salon to be founded in seventeenth-century England, imported to London by Mancini in an act of translation that experimented with situating the model of the salon beyond France’s borders and, along with its banished co-hosts and numerous banished attendees, in exile so to speak. Although this salon-in-exile quickly became one of the most acclaimed salons in Europe and had a profound influence on Anglo-French exchange in the era, critics came to see this space and its informal cultural production as marginal to the canon, overlooking its importance.⁷ This article intends to correct that oversight with the first chapter-length essay devoted entirely and specifically to the Mazarin salon.

As a salon attended by French and European exiles and expatriates as well as Restoration courtiers (see Figures 1 and 2), the Mazarin salon was a centre of cross-cultural encounter where different worlds mixed and where words were at the forefront of habitués’ interactions. Scholars have often invoked the ‘worldliness/mondanité’ of seventeenth-century French salons as a way of describing the open-minded outlook, polite sociability, elite (inter)national networks, and counter-cultural import of these circles, but there is also a rich ‘wordiness’ to salon culture that manifests in salons’ devotion to conversation and to literary output.⁸ At the Mazarin salon, this wordiness was transnational in scope; words were not only a means of communication and literary creation but also a resource that promoted Anglo-French exchange. That exchange took place at a time of heightened mistrust between the governments of England and France, which was seeping into society as tensions flared over the two countries' incompatible political, religious, and colonial policies, and later over the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) when England and France were officially in military conflict with each other. Against this backdrop of hostility, the Mazarin salon carved out a space for Anglo-French cross-cultural transfer. From its multilingual operas that switched between English and French to the recitations of key passages from seventeenth-century French drama, the salon was a place in which visitors could immerse themselves in French culture.

Figure 1 Habitués of the Mazarin salon from 1676 until 1680⁵⁷

Figure 2 Habitués of the Mazarin salon from 1681 until 1690

While scholarship has emphasized the influence of French culture in late seventeenth-century England, research has rarely investigated Anglo-French exchange as a reciprocal phenomenon during this period.⁹ Yet, the activity that radiated from the Mazarin salon shows that this exchange was not unidirectional. Habitués engaged with literature and culture produced in France at the same time as participating in reciprocal exchanges of goods, letters, writings, and social introductions with the salon’s France-based networks. The respective correspondences of Mancini and Saint-Évremond exhibit this mutual cross-Channel exchange with their copious references to the goods, social recommendations, poems, and other forms of cultural output that they sent to, and received from, France.¹⁰ Based on these wide-ranging examples, the Mazarin salon represents a vital but under-explored case study for rethinking patterns of Anglo-French exchange in the late seventeenth century to which the present article seeks to draw attention via literary instances of this exchange.

Queer exemplarity

Over the Mazarin salon’s twenty-three-year duration from 1676 until 1699, its commitment to Anglo-French exchange, to its heterogenous membership, and to engagement with European thought and literature contributed to a project of anti-absolutist resistance. This activity opposed the culture of Francocentric absolutism, characterized by an emphasis on national and religious uniformity and a rapid expansion of monarchical authority, that the salon’s co-hosts had left behind in France. It also opposed the culture of Europhobic anti-Catholicism that was at times intensifying around them in England. In embracing a pan-European sociability that generated literary, intellectual, and amusing pursuits for habitués, the Mazarin salon lessened the burden of banishment for its exile attendees, undermining a punishment typically deployed to shore up absolutist rule, whilst also producing a cultural corpus that, as we shall see, chimed with the salon’s anti-absolutist, libertine values.¹¹

These values were cultivated by the Mazarin salon’s hosts. Mancini and Saint-Évremond espoused transgressive ideas and partook in non-conformist activities, and they are regarded as ‘libertines’ today even if this was not a label that either would have applied to themselves.¹² Many seventeenth-century observers viewed Mancini as a deviant figure because she repeatedly rejected the era’s ideals of femininity: she abandoned her husband and children in 1668; she initiated legal proceedings to procure a marital separation on the grounds of her husband’s coercive behaviour; she had high-profile extra-marital affairs with women and men including Charles II of England; and she famously enjoyed drinking, cross-dressing, and gambling.¹³ Saint-Évremond was also judged to be a figure of dissent. His tendency to ridicule people and events led to his dismissal from the regiment of the Prince de Condé around 1647 after the latter discovered that Saint-Évremond had been mocking him behind his back.¹⁴ Some years later, in 1661, Saint-Évremond was forced to flee France after the discovery of one of his works, Lettre sur la paix (1659), which satirized Cardinal Mazarin’s handling of the negotiations for the Treaty of the Pyrenees, resulting in a warrant for the author’s arrest.¹⁵ In the ensuing decades, Saint-Évremond lived in exile in London where he became well known for his epicurean and sceptical views as well as his resistance to the heteronormative expectations of the day by remaining unmarried, which was rare for a man of his rank.¹⁶ Rounding off these non-normative lifestyles, both Mancini and Saint-Évremond have attracted scholarly scrutiny for their sexuality. Mancini was involved in numerous romantic relationships with men and women, and, while Saint-Évremond’s sexuality has been harder to parse, Denys Potts has suggested that ‘he was bisexual in his younger days and became a confirmed bachelor in later years’.¹⁷ Over the course of their lives, then, Saint-Évremond and Mancini behaved in ways that were perceived as politically, socially, and sexually deviant.

Mancini’s and Saint-Évremond’s non-conformity to the heteronormative expectations of the seventeenth century as well as their broader resistance to other social norms through actions that contributed to their displacements recall Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s insistently polysemous notion of ‘queer’, meaning same-sex desire and acts, a gender and/or sexuality that eludes categorization as same-sex or heterosexual, and approaches that produce subversive, non-normative, or non-conformist discourses on identity more generally.¹⁸ In referring to the sexuality and ‘queerness’ of Mancini and Saint-Évremond, I stray into the vexed territory of conceptualizing early modern sexual behaviour and identity through modern, anachronistic terminology.¹⁹ There is a lengthy bibliography on this topic, and it is not my aim to engage extensively with those debates here, except to justify my characterization of two seventeenth-century individuals and their cultural activity, as ‘queer’. I take my cue from Gary Ferguson in Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance (2008) and Ferguson’s strategy of ‘queer historical reading’, which explores and historicizes literary representations of ‘moments that appear queer to the modern reader’, from same-sex acts to androgynous figures, and so allows a recognition of resonances between modernity and pre-modernity whilst grounding the analysis in the social, legal, and cultural history of early modern France.²⁰ Similarly, following Valerie Traub, my discussion of the Mazarin salon, its co-hosts, and its literary production is not a sweeping judgement on the merits and drawbacks of reading this cultural history through a queer lens, but an examination of the legibility – and illegibility – of the queer figurations and echoes that emerge in this history.²¹ Describing Mancini and Saint-Évremond as ‘queer’ offers a usefully concise theoretical tool. It conveys their peculiar sexual, romantic, and social lives, which evade early modern categories, nullifying the value of early modern language in this regard that some scholars use to sidestep anachronism. Far from obscuring the historical context, the anachronistic label ‘queer’ helps to describe the atypical – but not unique – lifestyles led by Mancini and Saint-Évremond, and in fact sheds light on the historical context by encouraging us to consider the parallels between banishment, salon hosting, and queer desire and acts, and to assess how the queerness represented by Mancini and Saint-Évremond at the salon might be inflected by political undertones. Indeed, even their co-hosting of the Mazarin salon in a heterosexual but romantically ambiguous pairing engineered a queer presidency that departed from the usual model of the solo salonnière. This queer exemplarity dovetails with the activity and values of the salon’s larger membership, which counted habitués with reputations for comparably ‘deviant’ sexual, romantic, and social behaviours.

Taken together, the Mazarin salon brandished aspirations to become a queer anti-absolutist space and challenged norms and authorities on multiple fronts, all of which provides crucial context in understanding the salon’s role and influence as a cultural mediator. By paying attention to the queer anti-absolutist resonances across the salon’s output, we can appreciate the sort of Anglo-French exchange that it promoted and probe how this exchange intersected with the social and cultural life of the salon’s members.

Translation and circulation

Traces of the Anglo-French exchange facilitated by the Mazarin salon appear in an extraordinary manuscript, Add MS 61435, which forms part of the Blenheim Papers held at the British Library.²² The manuscript contains English translations of seventeenth-century French writers, including translations of Nicolas Boileau, Antoinette Deshoulières, Saint-Évremond, and Jean de La Fontaine (see Figures 3 and 4). Materially, the manuscript is comprised of folios of varying quality and size, with writing in two distinct hands but in different inks and with different quills, indicating that the papers were produced over an extended period of time. According to the catalogue, the papers are written in the hands of one steadfast habitué of Mancini’s salon, the statesman Sidney Godolphin, Earl of Godolphin, and one possible habituée, the leading courtier Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, whose lives became intertwined during the reign of Queen Anne when Churchill’s husband, John, and Godolphin took on principal roles in government.²³ The British Library’s catalogue attributes the translations in the Blenheim Papers to Godolphin, identifying him as author and copyist of the first half of the manuscript, and Sarah Churchill as the copyist of Godolphin’s translations in the remainder.

Figure 3 and 4 Images of Add MS 61435⁵⁸

This manuscript has never been connected to the Mazarin salon, yet its contents and provenance bear striking connections to the individuals who belonged to that circle. Beyond the fact that one of the scribes was a keen habitué, the inclusion of Saint-Évremond’s letters, letters which were not published with the author’s approval until after Saint-Évremond’s death but which were passed between his associates, alongside works by La Fontaine and Boileau that were certainly discussed at the salon’s gatherings, suggests that the collection as a whole constitutes some of the Mazarin salon’s circulated papers.²⁴ Although the papers are fairly clean, with only a few instances of folds and marks, their condition might be explained if we assume that they are copies of papers previously in circulation. The papers may have first circulated in their original French before Godolphin translated them either for private leisure or for re-circulation in English among habitués who found pleasure in his French–English translations as well as those whose literary French was weaker than their oral competence.²⁵ Godolphin would have been well placed to collect and translate these papers as a long-time habitué of the salon and as an English envoy to France with a decent education in French. If we accept the likelihood, then, that this Godolphin–Churchill manuscript represents a selection of the Mazarin salon’s circulated papers, we discover that the cross-cultural activity taking place within Mancini’s circle generated some of the first English translations of these seventeenth-century French writings, underlining the significance of the Mazarin salon as an Anglo-French forum even if these translations remained in manuscript form.

La Fontaine and the Mazarin salon

The Mazarin salon’s engagement with La Fontaine is immediately discernible in MS 61435 where we find that he is the most prominent translated author in the manuscript. That habitués of the Mazarin salon were so interested in the writings of La Fontaine is hardly surprising. Literary merit aside, La Fontaine was a writer with whom habitués had connections. Mancini was the sister of La Fontaine’s patron, Marianne Mancini, duchesse de Bouillon, whose lengthy visit to the Mazarin salon in 1687 prompted letter exchanges between Saint-Évremond, La Fontaine, Marianne Mancini, and the diplomat François Bonrepaus that partly sought to persuade La Fontaine to relocate to England.²⁶ This correspondence was disseminated among the salon’s habitués and was transcribed into at least two presentation copies at the behest of Saint-Évremond for Mancini and Bonrepaus. When Bonrepaus returned to France, he brought this manuscript with him, which contained dozens of Saint-Évremond’s letters and short essays including his ‘Dissertation sur le mot de vaste’.²⁷ Other attendees of the Mazarin salon boasted their own connections with La Fontaine, including the courtier Elizabeth Harvey and the French ambassador Paul Barrillon to whom the fabulist dedicated a fable apiece.²⁸

As well as belonging to a network with multiple ties to the poet, habitués would have found echoes of the Mazarin salon’s values in La Fontaine’s fables. Published in three volumes between 1668 and 1694, Fables offered seventeenth-century readers reworkings of fables from ancient Western and non-Western sources, mostly from the Greek fabulist Aesop and from the Indian fabulist Pilpay. As Faith E. Beasley has argued, La Fontaine’s fables, especially the second volume, present a valorization of diversity ‘not only by identifying Pilpay as his source, but by explaining this turn to an Indian source as deriving from his desire for variety, difference, and, most important, diversity’.²⁹ In offering his readers fables from a different cultural tradition and which often unfold around the concept of ‘diversité’, La Fontaine encourages exposure and openness to difference as a means of attaining new knowledge, signalling an opposition to the culture of absolutism that Louis XIV and his ministers were developing.³⁰ La Fontaine’s writings would have resonated with many of the exiles and libertines at Mancini’s heterogenous salon who were similarly committed to promoting the coexistence of difference and of divergent ideas.

This shared investment in diversity is reflected in the Mazarin salon’s literary output. Mirroring La Fontaine’s reworkings of fables by Western and non-Western ancient authors, the Mazarin salon’s co-host, Saint-Évremond, penned a poem, Les Poules de Lesbos : Fable Allégorique (undated), which riffs off La Fontaine’s fable ‘Les Deux Coqs’ (1678). Saint-Évremond’s fable has been completely ignored in criticism on his writings and does not appear in René Ternois’s modern edition of Saint-Évremond’s works. At nineteen lines, Les Poules de Lesbos is worth citing in its entirety:

Deux poules vivaient en paix,

L’une amante, l’autre aimée ;

Ce qu’on n’eut deviné jamais,

Autre poule survient, la guerre est allumée.

J’avais bien lu touchant deux coqs

Telle chose dans La Fontaine,

Mais de ces poules de Lesbos

Ici la recherche était vaine.

Quel moyen de les accorder ?

Dit la poule des deux également chérie ;

La nouvelle me plaît, et l’autre est mon Amie

Qu’avec raison je dois garder :

Quitter pour un temps ma patrie

Est l’unique moyen de les raccommoder ;

Je vais partir, et vous ordonne

(Sur peine de désobéir

En rebelles à ma personne,)

De vous voir et vous réunir :

Poules, obéissez à l’ordre que je donne.³¹

As confirmed in line 6, this poem is a reworking of La Fontaine’s ‘Les Deux Coqs’, the twelfth fable in ‘Livre VII’ from the second collection of fables that appeared in 1678, which is itself a reworking of Aesop’s Two Cockerels and One Eagle.³² These earlier renditions highlight the subversive qualities of Saint-Évremond’s poem. Aesop’s fable is an androcentric story of two rival cockerels fighting it out for dominion in the farmyard before the victor cuts short his own triumph by chirping from the rooftops and thereby drawing the attention of an eagle who swoops in and carries him off.³³ In La Fontaine’s fable, however, the story becomes a heterosexual tale: two cockerels ‘vivaient en paix’ until a hen arrives and sparks war between the cockerels, who are now rivals for the hen’s affections.³⁴ One cockerel defeats the other, and the vanquished cockerel flees as he suffers the indignity of seeing his rival gloat. But, in a nod to Aesop, the victor cockerel, puffed up with pride, attracts the attention of a vulture with his boastful chants and is promptly crushed by the vulture’s claws. Now the formerly vanquished cockerel can return to the hen, and, when he does, he is greeted by a bevy of admirers. The moral here is to discourage pride: ‘Tout vainqueur insolent à sa perte travaille’.³⁵

Saint-Évremond’s version of the tale takes an emphatically queer turn, depicting a lesbian love triangle between three hens: this time, two hens ‘vivaient en paix’ until war is ignited by the arrival of the third hen. However, unlike the fierce conflict in Aesop and La Fontaine, combat between the queer hens is suspended. The hen at the nexus of the intrigue resolves to quell the hostilities by temporarily leaving the island and ordering the rival lovers to unite in her absence. While La Fontaine’s hen is likened to Helen of Troy, whose displacement from Sparta in an episode incited by heterosexual desire galvanized a decade-long war, Saint-Évremond’s poem and its title evokes Sappho and lesbian love, bringing to mind our salonnière Mancini.³⁶ Dubbed ‘nôtre Sapho Mazarin’ by Saint-Évremond, Mancini openly conducted several affairs with women.³⁷ Her behaviour prompted Saint-Évremond to claim that ‘Tout sexe pour Hortence a fourni des amants’ in a letter to one of Mancini’s purported female lovers, Elizabeth Harvey (the aforementioned dedicatee of one of La Fontaine’s fables who will be discussed in greater detail below), even if we get only glimpses of Mancini’s bisexuality from the primary sources.³⁸ Not only does Les Poules de Lesbos recall the sexual behaviour of the salonnière, it also foregrounds lesbianism, a form of sexual deviance in the eyes of seventeenth-century law in France and England, and so arguably pursues the anti-absolutist undercurrent of La Fontaine’s works with a fable that revels in sexual diversity.³⁹

Yet, while the fable recounts this lesbian tale, its moral is not simply a valorization of nonconformist sexuality. Indeed, war is not averted by the sexuality of Saint-Évremond’s protagonists. Tension ignites as soon as the third hen arrives. Rather, the hen at the centre of the love triangle undertakes a role as a pacifier. Unlike the explicit moral at the end of La Fontaine’s ‘Les Deux Coqs’, the moral of Les Poules de Lesbos must be teased out by the reader. Reversing La Fontaine’s narrative of conflict that focuses on the female hen, Saint-Évremond places the poules to the fore of all three moments of action: living in peace; the outbreak of strife; and, negotiating the end of war. It is feminocentric, and its dramatic climax rests on the way that the in-demand hen thwarts the full-scale conflict in Aesop and La Fontaine. While La Fontaine’s fable has been read as part of a series in ‘Livre VII’ in which war is presented as an evil triggered by misfortune, Saint-Évremond’s fable resists this hopeless subjection to fate.⁴⁰ The hen at the centre of the love triangle hatches a plan ‘avec raison’ in a blatant but playful wink to Descartes, choosing to leave the island. By using reason rather than passion in the face of fortune, conflict is subdued. Thus, it would seem that there were two morals at stake here: firstly, that careful, rational responses to high-pressure situations can lead to peaceful results, and, secondly, that these peaceful results occur following a woman-led intervention and/or in the absence of male characters, highlighting women’s perceived skill as pacifiers in seventeenth-century thought. Such a gendered understanding of peace-making contributed to the belief that women were suited to the role of salonnière, a role that might involve resolving tensions within a salon’s mixed company, once more linking Mancini to the hens in this poem.⁴¹ Tasked with managing outbreaks of conflict at the salon, such as debates over the meaning of ‘vaste’, Mancini was expected to broker resolutions, which did not mean avoiding conflict entirely but did mean finding ways to reconcile adversaries.

At the same time, the arch tone of the fable and its playful, homoerotic departure from La Fontaine invite readers to draw out some more humorous lessons: that women-only love triangles are better able to resolve conflict; that female hens are less jealous than male cocks; or even a musing on literary reworkings that hinges on the transformation of an explicitly heterosexual fable into a lesbian feel-good tale to make it funny.⁴² These humorous notes complicate the fable’s representation of queer love. On the one hand, its feminocentric narrative is a far cry from ‘une image d’incomplétude féminine’, which Marianne Legault has shown to pervade masculine writing of female intimacies in seventeenth-century French literature.⁴³ Yet, the double distancing effect of humour and anthropomorphism weaves in a slight lack of seriousness even if Les Poules de Lesbos has more in common with feminine writing of female intimacies in the period with its offering of a self-sufficient alternative to heterosexual practices and ideologies.⁴⁴ To an audience that would have registered the divisive theme of female intimacy, viewed alternately as sexual deviance or as pleasurable libertinism in Restoration England, the fable proffered an entertaining tale in which the implausibility of a lesbian love-triangle between hens and the recognition of Mancini’s sexuality embedded in the arc combine to comic effect, all the more so as homosexuality and lesbianism formed a target of mockery in the literary output of the era.⁴⁵ Paradoxically, then, Les Poules de Lesbos delights in both its frivolity and its outrageousness. It is a light-hearted parody, but also a scandalous reminder of the libertinism of Mancini and her salon, exemplifying what Carin Franzén has dubbed ‘the art of critique’, a type of libertine aesthetic practice, usually within salon circles and through a minor literary genre, that resists the docility and dominant codes of behaviour demanded by the late seventeenth-century French regime.⁴⁶ These literary tensions, amplified by the fable's multiple moral readings, advance a critical uncertainty that is surely part of the programme for Saint-Évremond, a long-time libertine and epicurean who saw uncertainty as a fundamental philosophical truth, in this reworking of a fellow sceptic’s fable.⁴⁷

A foxy fable

In a demonstration of the reciprocal cultural exchange – and shared interest in queer exemplarity – between La Fontaine and the Mazarin salon, La Fontaine penned ‘Le Renard anglais’, a fable that first appeared in 1685 and was later published in ‘Livre XII’ in 1694.⁴⁸ The fable features Mancini and Elizabeth Harvey, and is in fact dedicated to Harvey, who was an influential figure in Restoration court circles.⁴⁹ Born in 1634, Harvey (née Montagu) was the sister of Ralph Montagu, later Duke of Montagu, whose appointments as ambassador to France helped integrate Harvey into Anglo-French diplomatic and cultural networks, both by introducing Harvey to French visitors in London and by facilitating Harvey’s regular trips to Paris. Eventually Harvey was recognized as an important person of influence at the English court in her own right by the French ambassador Barrillon, who wrote letters to Louis XIV and his advisors requesting gifts and money to maintain Harvey’s favour.⁵⁰ Given this Francophilic lifestyle, it is no wonder that Harvey was a regular visitor to the Mazarin salon where she claimed a close friendship with the salonnière, Mancini, from the latter’s first days in the capital.⁵¹

La Fontaine’s connection, and subsequent dedication, to Harvey arose when the pair met during one of Harvey’s trips to Paris in the early 1680s.⁵² Harvey supposedly supplied La Fontaine with the core plot of ‘Le Renard anglais’. The fable follows a fox who craftily outwits a pack of dogs chasing him when he comes across a gibbet (or gallows) on which he pretends to hang himself. Blending in with the other corpses and pretending to be dead, the fox escapes this time, but when he attempts the same strategy again, he is not so successful and loses his life in a foolish attempt to repeat the same trick.⁵³ If this story of the fox initially seems very different from Saint-Évremond’s fable about the hens of Lesbos, it occupies very little of La Fontaine’s poem itself, most of which is an encomium to English values but which also registers queer undertones. Throughout the laudation, Anglo-French exchange comes to the fore as a central theme in which the poet-speaker’s praise of England shades into a larger celebration of particular figures and ideas that have inspired his verses, such as the country’s commitment to scientific research and the widespread national tendency towards stoicism in the face of death. Above all, the poem heaps praise on the inhabitants of England, namely Harvey and Mancini, two female friends who were artfully outfoxing countless powerful contemporaries during their lives. The appearance of both women in La Fontaine’s fable gestures towards their friendship and their shared Anglo-French connections, but also brings to mind their rumoured romantic relationship with one other, or at least their reputations as bisexual women, forming a parallel with the queer exemplarity in Les Poules de Lesbos.⁵⁴

It is in the final lines of the poem that La Fontaine evokes Mancini:

Agréez seulement le don que je vous fais

Des derniers efforts de ma Muse.

C’est peu de chose ; elle est confuse

De ces ouvrages imparfaits.

Cependant ne pourriez-vous faire

Que le même hommage pût plaire

À celle qui remplit vos climats d’habitants

Tirés de l’île de Cythère ?

Vous voyez par là que j’entends

Mazarin, des Amours déesse tutélaire.⁵⁵

Here, Mancini is depicted as a ‘déesse tutélaire’, a patron goddess of love and desire responsible for populating England with inhabitants from Cythera, the island devoted to Aphrodite/Venus. This portrayal recalls Mancini’s broader iconography as a woman frequently represented as Venus in seventeenth-century portraiture.⁵⁶ Whereas it is Mancini’s queer sexuality that is evoked in Saint-Évremond’s poem, in ‘Le Renard anglais’ it is the conspicuousness of her sexuality that takes centre stage. Through this deification, La Fontaine imbues his characterization of Mancini with creative forces, as the overseer of a growing circle in England that readers would associate with her salon and as a source of inspiration for the poem itself, in which the procreative powers of Venus blend into cultural creativity that rings out in the rhymes ‘faire’, ‘plaire’, ‘Cythère’, and ‘tutélaire’. It is a fitting end for a fable that commemorates the intellectual and cultural value of Anglo-French exchange in the seventeenth century, foregrounding two women who were playing key roles in this cultural diplomacy during a time of escalating hostility between England and France.

Conclusion

From ‘vaste’ to Venus, late seventeenth-century Anglo-French exchange was rich and varied. The examples in this essay show how words – debated, translated, reworked – caught the attention of habitués at the Mazarin salon, revealing some of the ways that the micro-world of this salon-in-exile came into contact with the wider world around it. Despite their banishments, Mancini and Saint-Évremond encouraged this reciprocal Anglo-French transfer, which pushed against the political tensions between England and France to create a forum of cultural resistance. At the heart of this exchange lies a queer exemplarity. As we have seen, Mancini’s life inspired writings that celebrated her non-conformist behaviour. Far from the passivity or objectification associated with female muses, Mancini’s example was instrumentalized by Saint-Évremond and La Fontaine to remind their readers of her provocative lifestyle choices. Such exemplarity testifies to the fact that early modern women could be meaningfully influential beyond authorship and committing their words to the page. Mancini’s non-conformism sparked writings about and around her, which in turn had the potential to influence readers through the blueprints that they offered.

In sum, the conjunction of Mancini’s salon and living example offered an alternative to absolutism. By heading a salon that connected exiles with writers, diplomats, and artists from the hostland and the homeland, she softened the punishing status of banishment and nurtured a cosmopolitan network whose activities showcased the vibrant possibilities of a space outside the limits of an absolutist structure. As well as dismantling the pain of exile, the literary activity of Mancini’s salon celebrated nonconformist sexuality and cross-cultural exchange, ultimately valorizing an ethics and politics of living otherwise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annalisa Nicholson

Annalisa Nicholson is Laming Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She is completing her first monograph titled A Salon-in-Exile: The Influence of Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London and is also preparing the first edition of Hortense Mancini’s correspondence for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

Notes

1 I present this querelle de vaste tentatively because not all critics have agreed on the veracity of this episode. Saint-Évremond’s modern editor, René Ternois, has cast doubt on the salon’s approach to the Académie, pointing to possible discrepancies in the first account of this dispute by Pierre Desmaizeaux. See Ternois in C. Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en Prose III, ed. by R. Ternois (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1966), pp. 367–71. On the other hand, Saint-Évremond’s most recent critical biographer, Quentin M. Hope, accepts the involvement of the Académie, who, according to Hope, decided in Mancini’s favour. See Q. M. Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1999), p. 395.

2 The dating of this essay is given by Ternois in Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en Prose III, pp. 368–70.

3 Saint-Évremond, ‘Dissertation sur le mot de vaste,’ Œuvres en Prose III, pp. 375–417.

4 For an in-depth analysis of the essay, see Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends, pp. 395–401.

5 D. Goodman, ‘L’ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime,’ French Historical Studies, 25.2 (spring 2002), 191–223.

6 For discussions of the Mazarin salon’s membership and activities, see E. C. Goldsmith, ‘Thoroughly Modern Mazarin,’ in The Wandering Life I Led: Essays on Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin and Early Modern Border-Crossings, ed. by S. Shifrin (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 2–30; and D. Potts, ‘The Duchess Mazarin and Saint-Évremond: The Final Journey,’ in The Wandering Life I Led, pp. 157–92.

7 Chapter-length essays that include substantial discussions of the Mazarin salon include J. Cherbuliez, The Place of Exile: Leisure Literature and the Limits of Absolutism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005), pp. 187–234; Goldsmith, ‘Thoroughly Modern Mazarin,’ pp. 2–30; E. C. Goldsmith, ‘Fashioning Equality and Friendship: Saint-Evremond, Hortense Mancini and Ninon de Lenclos,’ in Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France, ed. by Derval Conroy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 135–51; Potts, ‘The Final Journey,’ pp. 157–92; and, S. Shifrin and A. R. Walkling, ‘“Idylle en Musique”: Performative Hybridity and the Duchess Mazarin as Visual, Textual, and Musical Icon,’ in The Wandering Life I Led, pp. 48–99.

8 F. E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), especially p. 22 and pp. 29–39. See also A. Lilti, Le monde des salons : Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), which focuses on eighteenth-century salons but is still applicable to those in seventeenth-century France.

9 R. Scholar, Émigrés: French Words That Turned English (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); and, G. Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), especially pp. 63–107.

10 See C. Saint-Évremond, Lettres I–II, ed. by René Ternois (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1967–68). As for Mancini’s letters, I am in the latter stages of preparing the first ever edition of Mancini’s correspondence, which will come out with The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

11 On the use of exile as a strategy by Louis XIV, see J. Swann, Exile, Imprisonment, or Death: The Politics of Disgrace in Bourbon France, 1610–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

12 The terms ‘libertine’ and ‘libertinism’, or ‘libertin’ and ‘libertinage’ in French, have been probed and rejected by some critics for their vagueness. Yet, as Adam Horsley has argued, these terms can be usefully deployed to signal a broad range of transgressive and deviant behaviours in the early modern era. See A. Horsley, Libertines and the Law: Subversive Authors and Criminal Justice in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 1–17. See also L. Linker, Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility (1670–1730) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 1–6; and, J. G. Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. ix–xii. Both Linker and Turner contend that Mancini was associated with libertinism by her contemporaries. Linker, pp. 1–2 and pp. 36–68, and Turner, pp. 244–45.

13 J. E. Evans, ‘“The Splendour of Our Golden Age”: The Duchess of Mazarin and Epicurean Voluptuousness in Late Stuart England,’ 1650:1850: Ideas, Æsthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 19 (2012), 45–62; and, S. Shifrin, ‘“Subdued by a famous Roman dame”: Picturing Foreignness, Notoriety, and Prerogative in the Portraits of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin,’ in Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II, ed. by Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 141–74.

14 J. Hayward, ‘Introduction,’ in C. Saint-Evremond, The Letters of Saint-Evremond: Charles Marguetel de Saint Denis Seigneur de Saint-Evremond, ed. by John Hayward (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), pp. xix–lxii (p. xxviii).

15 Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends, pp. 82–5.

16 Saint-Évremond settled in London from 1661 until 1665 before relocating to Holland where he believed he would be better placed to gain a pardon from Louis XIV. With no pardon forthcoming and a smaller social circle than anticipated, Saint-Évremond returned to London in 1670 thanks to the intervention of Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington. See R. Maber, ‘Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24482> [accessed November 14, 2023].

17 D. Potts, ‘Introduction,’ in C. Saint-Évremond, A Voice from Exile: Newly Discovered Letters to Madame de Gouville and the Abbé de Hautefeuille, ed. by D. Potts (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), pp. 1–34 (p. 12). See also Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends, p. 138.

18 In Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick offers multiple definitions of ‘queer’, including ‘same-sex sexual object choice’, ‘the open mesh of possibilities […] of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made to signify monolithically’, and ‘the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these [gender and sexuality] and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses’. See E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 8–9.

19 This debate is typically presented by two competing approaches to pre-modern sexual identity and desire. On one side are proponents of the essentialist model who view same-sex identity and desire as largely recognizable across time, place, and culture, and therefore see little or no complication with applying modern terms, such as ‘queer’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘homosexual’, to early modern society; on the other side are adherents of the socio-constructionist model who see sexual identity as constitutive of numerous historically specific roles and acts that differ across time, place, and culture, and therefore hesitate to use modern terms, preferring vocabulary from the early modern era, such as ‘sodomy’ or ‘tribadism’. The socio-constructionist position is often seen as an extension of the thought of Michel Foucault, who argued that premodern homosexuality was understood in terms of acts and not identity in Histoire de la sexualité : I : La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 58–60. That said, in reality most studies tend to bridge the divide, borrowing critical elements from both camps to offer nuanced stances on premodern sexual desire, identity, and acts. For an introduction to this debate, see M. H. Loughlin, ‘General Introduction,’ in Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550–1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts, ed. by Marie Helena Loughlin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 1–26 (pp. 1–3).

20 G. Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 50–3.

21 V. Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), especially pp. 7–17. See also V. Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

22 Blenheim Papers, Vol. CCCXXXV (ff.99), Western Manuscripts, Additional MS 61435, British Library.

23 On the relationship between John Churchill (Duke of Marlborough) and Sidney Godolphin (Earl of Godolphin), see F. Harris, The General in Winter: The Marlborough–Godolphin Friendship and the Reign of Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Sarah Churchill has occasionally been cited as an habituée of the Mazarin salon with little proof. This manuscript potentially evidences her participation, but further investigation is needed to tie her more definitively to the Mazarin circle.

24 Saint-Évremond mentions the writings of both Boileau and La Fontaine, for example, in ‘Jugement sur quelques auteurs français’, which is addressed to Mancini, in C. Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en Prose IV, ed. by R. Ternois (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1969), pp. 343–45 (p. 344). He also references Boileau’s works in ‘Dissertation sur le mot de vaste,’ in Œuvres en Prose III, pp. 375–417 (p. 417), and in ‘Défense de quelques pièces de Monsieur Corneille’, which directly stemmed from the salon’s conversations about seventeenth-century theatre, in Œuvres en Prose IV, pp. 423–31 (p. 429), while a reference to one of La Fontaine’s Contes appears in ‘L’amitié sans amitié,’ Œuvres en Prose III, pp. 276–93 (p. 290).

25 As the Mazarin salon’s lingua franca was French, most, if not all, habitués must have had fairly fluent oracy in the language.

26 M. Fumaroli, Le poète et le roi : Jean de La Fontaine en son siècle (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1997), pp. 406, 422. For a detailed study of the relationship between Saint-Évremond, Mancini, and La Fontaine, see L. Petit, La Fontaine et Saint-Evremond ou La Tentation de l’Angleterre (Toulouse: Privat, 1953).

27 D. Potts, ‘The Final Journey,’ pp. 167–68. The manuscript commissioned for Bonrepaus is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS Fr.15263). See D. Potts, ‘Desmaizeaux and Saint-Évremond’s Text,’ French Studies, 37 (June 1965), 239–52.

28 ‘Le Renard anglais’, Fable XXIII, Livre XII, was dedicated to Harvey, while ‘Le Pouvoir des fables’, Fable IV, Livre VIII, was dedicated to Barrillon.

29 F. E. Beasley, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), p. 197.

30 Ibid., pp. 199–211.

31 C. Saint-Évremond, Œuvres Meslées III, ed. by P. Desmaizeaux (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), pp. 370–71. I have modernized the grammar and orthography.

32 J. La Fontaine, ‘Les Deux Coqs,’ Fable XII, Livre VII, Œuvres complètes I : Fables, Contes et Nouvelles, ed. by J.-P. Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 273–74. Some modern editions list ‘Les Deux Coqs’ as the thirteenth fable of ‘Livre VII’.

33 This fable appears, for example, in French verse in Isaac Benserade’s edition of Aesop. See I. Benserade, Fables d’Ésope en quatrains (Paris: Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1678), p. 154.

34 La Fontaine, ‘Les Deux Coqs,’ p. 273.

35 Ibid., p. 274.

36 As Helena Taylor describes in a chapter titled ‘The Paradoxes of Modesty’ of her forthcoming book, there were conflicting ideas surrounding the sexuality of the figure of Sappho within early modern writings. Sappho was sometimes presented as a lesbian, elsewhere as the heterosexual lover of Phaon, and still in other places as a promiscuous lover of both men and women. See H. Taylor, Women Writing Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). For the etymological history of ‘lesbian’, see Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, pp. 282–83.

37 Saint-Évremond, ‘Réponse de Monsieur de Saint-Évremond à Monsieur l’Abbé de Chaulieu,’ Œuvres Meslées III, pp. 284–85 (p. 284).

38 Cited by Ternois in Saint-Évremond, Lettres II, p. 383; see also Saint-Évremond, ‘Lettre à Madame Harvey,’ Œuvres Meslées III, pp. 10–12 (p. 10). Mancini’s relationships with men are well documented. See, for example, E. C. Goldsmith, The Kings’ Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (New York: Public Affairs, 2012). For her relationships with women, see B. Bevan, The Duchess Hortense: Cardinal Mazarin’s Wanton Niece (London: The Rubicon Press, 1987), p. 80; and, C. H. Hartmann, The Vagabond Duchess: The Life of Hortense Mancini Duchesse Mazarin (London: Routledge, 1926), pp. 186–87 and pp. 200–05.

39 As Nicholas Hammond’s study has shown, while the attitudes of jurists in early modern France to same-sex love were unyielding, provoking the most serious punishments, the relatively small number of trials for ‘sodomie’ combined with the relaxed attitude to same-sex desire within the cultural output of the period suggest some level of sexual tolerance. See N. Hammond, The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), especially p. 99 and p. 163. See also A. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 70–6 and pp. 92–104.

40 M. Slater, ‘La Fontaine’s Fables, Book VII: The Problem of Order,’ The Modern Language Review, 82.3 (1987), 573–86.

41 D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 101–02.

42 The humour of this fable and the parallels with Mancini are reminiscent of Saint-Évremond’s tendency ‘to joke about the intimate details of his friends’ sex lives’, as Hope puts it, in Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends, p. 118.

43 M. Legault, Narrations déviantes : L’intimité entre femmes dans l’imaginaire français du dix-septième siècle (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008), p. 125.

44 Ibid., pp. 190–213. It is very possible that Mancini contributed in some way to Les Poules de Lesbos since she often acted as Saint-Évremond’s unofficial editor, which complicates how we frame the authorship of the poem and how it (mis)aligns with other literary representations of female intimacies, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article.

45 Loughlin, ‘General Introduction,’ in Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, pp. 12–14 and pp. 20–5.

46 C. Franzén, ‘Subjects of Sovereign Control and the Art of Critique in the Early Modern Period,’ in Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline, ed. by Frida Beckman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 63–81 (p. 65).

47 On the epicureanism of Saint-Évremond and La Fontaine, see J.-C. Darmon, Philosophie épicurienne et littérature au XVII^e siècle en France : Études sur Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Évremond (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), especially pp. 263–373.

48 La Fontaine, ‘Le Renard anglais,’ Fable XXIII, Livre XII, Œuvres complètes I, pp. 497–99. It is difficult to be exact about the chronology of La Fontaine’s and Saint-Évremond’s respective poems since Les Poules de Lesbos is undated, leaving us with little idea about which poem came first.

49 This is not the only poem by La Fontaine featuring Mancini; she also appears in the series of poems by La Fontaine included in ‘Lettre de Monsieur de La Fontaine à Madame la Duchesse de Bouillon’ and in his letter to Saint-Évremond in December 1687, ‘Réponse de Monsieur de La Fontaine à Monsieur de Saint-Évremond’, which appear in Saint-Évremond, Œuvres Meslées III, pp. 135–40 and pp. 147–53.

50 Petit, La Fontaine et Saint-Evremond, pp. 45–6.

51 Bevan, The Duchess Hortense, p. 67; B. Bevan, Charles the Second’s French Mistress: A Biography of Louise de Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth (London: Robert Hale, 1972), p. 89; Hartmann, The Vagabond Duchess, pp. 183, 187, and 210; and, S. Hicks, Ralph First Duke of Montagu (1638–1709): Power and Patronage in Late Stuart England (London: New Generation Publishing, 2015), pp. 74–7. Mancini’s correspondence, forthcoming with The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, also attests to her longstanding friendship with Harvey.

52 Petit, La Fontaine et Saint-Evremond, p. 45.

53 Petit notes Desmaizeaux’s claim that Harvey furnished La Fontaine with the fable, suggesting that Harvey may have come across the story in Laurentius Abstemius’s Hecatomythium (1495) or in an English translation of the medieval cycle, Le Roman Renart, p. 51 n.18. Elsewhere, Henri Busson has argued that the fable was inspired by Kenelm Digby’s Demonstratio immortalitatis animae rationalis (1664), while André Versaille maintains the strong echoes between ‘Le Renard anglais’ and Le Roman Renart. See H. Busson, Littérature et théologie : Montaigne, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Prévost (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 179–83; and A. Versaille, in J. La Fontaine, Œuvres : Sources et Postérité d’Ésope à l’Oulipo, ed. by André Versaille (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1995), p. 1324.

54 In his edition of La Fontaine, Versaille notes: ‘Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin, pour qui Mme Harvey s’était prise d’un sentiment passionné’, Versaille, in La Fontaine, Œuvres : Sources et Postérité, p. 1302 n. 1. Evidence of Mancini’s and Harvey’s potential liaison is patchy and merits further scholarly attention. On Harvey’s sexuality, the famous court satire Colin (1679) refers to ‘Harvey and her long clitoris’, an anatomical description that was thought to evidence lesbianism in seventeenth-century England. See J. H. Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), pp. 23–31. See also C. Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King (London: Pan Macmillan, 2005), p. 138; and, D. Jordan and M. Walsh, The King’s Bed: Sex, Power & the Court of Charles II (London: Abacus, 2015), p. 161.

55 La Fontaine, ‘Le Renard anglais,’ Œuvres complètes I, pp. 498–99.

56 E. C. Goldsmith, ‘Fanning the “Judgment of Paris”: The Early Modern Beauty Contest,’ Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 36.1 (2014), 38–52 (47).

57 For additional information on the habitués of the Mazarin salon, see A. Nicholson, ‘Appendix A: Members of the Mazarin Salon,’ in ‘The Mazarin Salon: French Exiles in Seventeenth-Century London’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2021), pp. 206–11.

58 Both images show English translations of Saint-Évremond’s letters, Blenheim Papers, Add MS 61435, fol. 39 and fol. 60. © From the British Library archive.