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A FEMINIST VOICE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT SALON: MADAME DE LAMBERT ON TASTE, SENSIBILITY, AND THE FEMININE MIND*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

KATHARINE J. HAMERTON
KATHARINE J. HAMERTON*
Affiliation:
Department of Humanities, History and Social Sciences, Columbia College, Chicago E-mail: khamerton@colum.edu
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Abstract

This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenment salonnière madame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) and honnête thought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenment salonnières that emphasize the constraints of honnêteté on their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployed honnêteté towards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the honnête environment of the salons.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 209 - 238
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Honnêteté, one of whose central tropes was that refined women rightfully arbitrated literature, setting standards of taste and social polish for writers and other salon habitués, was linked to a refined redefinition of nobility and the birth of a self-consciously modern French vernacular literary tradition that newly imagined the polite, worldly intellectual and writer. See Lougee, C., Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976)Google Scholar; Dens, J.-P., L'Honnête homme et la critique du gout (Lexington, KY, 1981)Google Scholar; Viala, A., Naissance de l'écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l'âge classique (Paris, 1985)Google Scholar; Moriarty, M., Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; Chantalat, C., A la recherche du goût classique (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar; Beasley, F., Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Aldershot, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 Pekacz, J., Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Kale, S., French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2004)Google Scholar; Lilti, A., Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar. This scholarship often goes too far in correcting D. Goodman's overemphasis on enlightened salon seriousness in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994), depicting salonnières as frivolous, disempowered, or unable to engage independently in intellectual issues; Pekacz sees honnêteté determining women into conservatism, passim (on Lambert, see e.g., 91, 106, 134, 206).

3 L. Steinbrügge charges Lambert with “emotionalizing the female mind,” inaccurately contrasting her with Poulain in The Moral Sex: Woman's Nature in the French Enlightenment, trans. P. Selwyn (New York, 1995), chap. 1. It has become unquestioned dogma for feminist historians and literary scholars that Poulain denied any gendering of the mind and espoused an unyielding substance dualism, and this has become a metonymic figure for Cartesian philosophy as far as women were concerned; see e.g. Offen, K., European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford, 2000), 34Google Scholar; cf. de la Barre, François Poullain, Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, trans. Bosley, V., ed. Welch, M. Maistre (Chicago, 2002), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar (edition used for all subsequent references to Poulain's works). (Feminist philosophers have developed a very different body of work critiquing and exploring Cartesian dualism; see Wilkin's, R. helpful review and fresh analysis, Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Aldershot, 2008)Google Scholar, though she too reduces Poulain to substance dualism, 183.) J. Israel's excellent account of Cartesianism's mixed potential for women avoids reducing it to its res cogitans/res extensa distinction, but his analysis of Poulain—Enlightenment Contested (Oxford, 2006), 572–6—does emphasize substance dualism at the expense of mental gendering. The best recent study of Poulain is Stuurman's, S.François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar. See Hamerton, K., “Malebranche, Taste and Sensibility: The Origins of Sensitive Taste and a Reconsideration of Cartesianism's Feminist Potential,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008), 535–6Google Scholar.

4 Defenses of Lambert's feminism are similarly flawed: Fassiotto, M.-J., Madame de Lambert (1647–1733) ou le féminisme moral (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Danh, M. Barth-Cao, La philosophie cognitive et morale d'Anne-Thérèse de Lambert (1647–1733): La volonté d'être (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Beasley, Salons, 33–9.

5 I follow Stuurman's definition of early modern feminism in François Poulain, 8.

6 James, S., Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Harth, E., Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, 1992)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

7 Hamerton, “Malebranche”; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 572–6.

8 I make no claim to provide a comprehensive contextualization of Lambert, who influenced and was influenced by a multitude of intellectual, social, and cultural individuals and discourses; see Marchal, R., Madame de Lambert et son milieu (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

9 Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex, 20.

10 Wilkin, Women, 186.

11 Timmermans, L., L'accès des femmes à la culture (1598–1715): Un débat d'idées de Saint François de Sales à la Marquise de Lambert (Paris, 1993), 170Google Scholar, n. 243. Timmermans rightly notes that Lambert drew upon Pascal's notion of esprit de finesse (Pensées, no. 1) to counter Malebranche, but does not further explore Lambert's position, which went beyond this tradition, nor her reconciliation of the physiology of sensibility with her honnête feminism, as I do here. Also see Lougee, Paradis, 31–2.

12 Madame de Lambert: Oeuvres, ed. R. Granderoute (Paris, 1990), 8, 244–5, n. 23 (all references to Lambert's published writings here refer to this edition unless otherwise indicated and are cited in the text where possible; if not otherwise indicated, citations will refer to the Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (RN)); Marchal, Lambert, 148–9; Fassiotto, Lambert, 56–7; Beasley, Salons, 36 (leading to further misreadings; Wilkin, Women, 186).

13 Steinbrügge, Moral Sex, 11–13, 18–20; Barth-Cao Danh, Philosophie Cognitive, 28.

14 Beasley, Salons, 37; Steinbrügge, Moral Sex, 20.

15 Harth, Cartesian Women, 82–3; DeJean, J., Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, has been especially influential. Historical and philosophical work in this light includes Hesse, C., The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Conley, J., The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.

16 Pekacz, Conservative Tradition. Lilti, Le monde des salons, 117, 408, 410, allows male writers “intellectual autonomy . . . through adhesion to the values of the social elites” that constrained women's “intellectual ambition,” 408.

17 Shank, J. B., “Neither Natural Philosophy, Nor Science, Nor Literature—Gender, Writing, and the Pursuit of Nature in Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités,” in Zinsser, J., ed., Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science (DeKalb, IL, 2005), 86–110Google Scholar; Shank, J. B., The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2008), 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Before Voltaire: Newton and the Making of Mathematical Physics in France, 1680–1715” (unpublished MS which I am grateful to Shank for sharing with me), chap. 3.

18 Gelbart, N., introduction to Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Hargreaves, H. A. (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar; cf. Zinsser, J., “Entrepeneur of the ‘Republic of Letters’: Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, and Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002), 620–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Modest self-deprecation is a constant trope with Lambert, which she tended to invoke disingenuously before asserting her opinion, e.g., undated letter to Buffier in Oeuvres de Madame la Marquise de Lambert, avec un abrégé de sa vie, vol. 1 (Paris, 1748), 262: “Can you imagine [Songez-vous] . . . that I am only a woman, whose intelligence [esprit], if I had any, would be always constrained by customs; and that it must hide beneath the veil of the proprieties? But, after having paid the tribute that my Sex owes to modesty, I will tell you that . . .” Note the way Lambert deployed verb moods, an interrogative, and the verb songer with its overtones of dreaming, to strategic effect here. Cf. Marchal, Lambert, 161, 167–77, on her attempts to obscure her authorship and construct an aristocratic myth about her writing (which has effectively obscured its serious intent). Certainly, her chosen public was her habitués, but these were handpicked, influential individuals.

19 Russo, E., Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2007)Google Scholar; DeJean, J., Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar. Emile du Châtelet used the conventionally gendered trope about making knowledge pleasant and understandable to Maupertuis in 1734: “You sow the flowers on the path where others find only brambles, your imagination knows how to embellish the driest materials without diminishing their accuracy or . . . precision.” Quoted in Zinsser, J., “Mentors, the Marquise du Châtelet and Historical Memory,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61 (2007), 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 On the nouvelle préciosité (marked by neologisms, stylistic hybridity, and “philosophical gaiety”) of the writers of Lambert's “at once serious and precious” salon, see Deloffre, F., Marivaux et le Marivaudage: une préciosité nouvelle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar, passim, quot. 16, 21; Marchal, Lambert. Cf. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, for an analysis of the goût moderne.

21 Marchal, Lambert, 211, and passim, e.g. 157, 161, 222 ff., 243–4, 583 ff., 750–51; see Shank, “Neither Natural Philosophy, Nor Science,” and cf. his analysis of the program of the Académie des sciences reformers (especially Fontenelle and Bignon) in the 1690s in Before Voltaire, chap. 3. On the honnête politesse of Fontenelle, Bignon, and Mairan in the Académie, and Lambert's influence in this regard, see Badinter, E., Les passions intellectuelles, vol. 1, Désirs de gloire (1735–1751) (Paris, 1999), 23Google Scholar ff. Lambert's portrait of Maine eulogizes the desired combination of Pascalian qualities: “a profound, precise, methodical and logical intellect [esprit profond, géométrique & conséquent], a refined delicate intelligence [esprit], luminous with all the charms of the imagination . . . this joy which animates everything, this playfulness which in no way rejects seriousness,” Lettres de Monsieur de la Motte . . . (n.p., 1754), 18–19; also on the serious-playful tone of Lambert's and Maine's Sceaux gatherings, see the abbé Leblanc's comments here, xii–xiii.

22 Scott, K., The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar; Cowart, G., The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago, 2008)Google Scholar. Also see Crow, T., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

23 Marchal, Lambert: dating of salon, xiv, 62, and of acquaintance with Fontenelle, 209–11; list of habitués, 763–5 (Marchal lists eighty-five, including women writers, an actress, intellectuals and le grand monde); salon's préciosité and intellectualism, passim; salon's anti-absolutist Fenelonian and Malebranchian politics, 235 ff.; Delorme, S., “Le salon de la marquise de Lambert, berceau de l'Encyclopédie,” in Delorme, S. and Taton, R., eds., L'“Encyclopédie” et le progrès des sciences et des techniques (Paris, 1952), 20–24Google Scholar. La Motte was a hatter's son; Fontenelle's father was an obscure parlementary lawyer from an old robe family of Rouen; his uncles were the Corneille brothers.

24 Marchal, Lambert, for her intellectual and moral formation, 95 ff.; her philosophical and scientific readings, esp. 132–4; protocol of and overlap between the mardis and mercredis, 213–22.

25 K. Hamerton, “Women's Taste in the French Enlightenment: From the Honnête Model to the Domestic Paradigm, 1674–1762” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002), chap. 2.

26 Marchal, Lambert, 108, 132, 141, 148–9, 237, n. 101. Further evidence in this Avis (AF) of the Cartesian affiliation of her earliest serious writings is in Lambert's linking “idées . . . nettes et démêlées” to producing clear speech (Madame de Lambert, Oeuvres, 131); cf. Shank, J. B. “‘There was No Such Thing as the “Newtonian Revolution,” and the French Initiated It’: Eighteenth-Century Mechanics in France before Maupertuis,” Early Science and Medicine 9 (2004), 282–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Granderoute dates the composition of both of Lambert's Avis to the 1690s (Madame de Lambert, Oeuvres, 34); Marchal to 1688–92 (196). Whether or not Sablière was a supporter of Cartesianism has been disputed, but both women were exposed to Cartesian ideas discussed in Sablière's salon; Sablière owned Malebranche's De la recherche de la vérité and Descartes's Les passions de l'âme; Conley, Suspicion, 77–9, 89; Gibson, W., Women in Seventeenth-Century France (New York, 1989), 273CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 147; Harth, Cartesian Women, 65.

27 Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France, 38; Azouvi, François, “Une duchesse cartésienne?” in La Duchesse du Maine (1676–1753): Une Mécène à la croisée des arts et des siècles (Brussels, 2003), 155–9Google Scholar.

28 Bayle, August 1683 Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, quoted in Rodis-Lewis, G., Nicolas Malebranche (Paris, 1963), 5Google Scholar. Malebranche scholarship is colossal, and Malebranchian affiliation meant different things to different constituencies at different times. For an introduction, see Oeuvres complètes de Malebranche, vol. 20, Malebranche vivant, ed. André Robinet (Paris, 1967); and Robinet's “Malebranchisme et Régence,” in Centre aixois d'études et de recherches sur le XVIIIe Siècle, La Régence (Paris, 1970), 263–75. Shank discerns a “Malebranchian Moment” in the 1690s in “No Such Thing.”

29 Marchal, Lambert, 148; cf. 349.

30 Ibid., on the Académie française, 250 ff.; on ties to the Académie des sciences, 211, 243, 283; cf. on Bignon and Fontenelle in the Académie des inscriptions, 265. A good discussion of Bignon and Fontenelle and their goals in the Académie des sciences is Shank, Before Voltaire, chap. 3.

31 Shank, “No Such Thing.” On Fontenelle and the Mercure, also see Gelbart in Fontenelle, Conversations, xiv–xv; Niderst, A., Fontenelle (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 2. On the Mercure's fostering of the new, mixed-sex public for literature, see DeJean, Ancients against Moderns; Stuurman, S., “Literary Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Southern France: The Case of Antoinette de Salvan de Saliez,” Journal of Modern History 71 (1999), 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Robinet, “Malebranchisme,” 271; Marchal, Lambert, 243; Badinter, Les passions intellectuelles, vol. 1, chap. 1; Shank, Newton Wars, 37–9; Robinet, A., “Le groupe malebranchiste introducteur du calcul infinitésimal en France,” Revue d'histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 13 (1960), 287–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Sturdy, D., Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), 244Google Scholar; Shank, Before Voltaire, chap. 3; idem, Newton Wars, 39; idem, “No Such Thing,” 286 ff.; Marchal, Lambert, 243, 750; Marchal, R., Fontenelle à l'aube des Lumières (Paris, 1997), 204Google Scholar; Deloffre, Marivaux, 32.

34 Shank, Before Voltaire, chap. 3; Marchal, Lambert, 133.

35 Marchal, Lambert, 243, where he argues that Bragelonne would have discussed Malebranche's works with Lambert; Robinet, “Malebranchisme,” 271; Robinet, ed., Malebranche vivant, 170; Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 427.

36 Zinsser, “Mentors,” 97; Marchal, Lambert, 243; Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 356, 421, 427.

37 Rodis-Lewis, Malebranche, 335; Marchal, Lambert, 243; Sturdy, Science and Social Status, 387 (Terrasson was at first given the unusual title of assistant to Fontenelle), 427.

38 See Marchal, Lambert, 149; Shank, “No Such Thing,” 283–4.

39 Hamerton, “Women's Taste,” chap. 2.

40 Cf. Wilkin, Women, 187–8; Shank, Newton Wars, 46–7. See Hamerton, “Malebranche,” upon which this section draws, for a full discussion of Malebranche's theories of taste, including his gendered departure from Descartes.

41 Poullain, Three Treatises, 82.

42 Malebranche, N., The Search after Truth, trans. and ed. Lennon, T. and Olscamp, P. (Cambridge, 1997), 130Google Scholar. Beasley, Salons, 36, entirely overlooks Malebranche's critique.

43 Ibid., 131, 155–6, 80.

44 Goldgar, A., Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shelford, A., Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Muet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY, 2007)Google Scholar. See Vopa, A. La, “Sexless Minds at Work and at Play: Poullain de la Barre and the Origins of Early Modern Feminism,” Representations 109 (2010), 57–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a nuanced discussion of class, status, and gender relations in polite milieux, which considers altering depictions of the masculinity of intellectual labor. I am grateful to La Vopa for sharing this MS with me in advance of publication.

45 See Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 550.

46 Also known as the Métaphysique d'amour. Lambert had sent a manuscript (with undated letter) to the abbé Choisy (d. 1724) of her salon; the first unauthorized edition (1727) appears to have been from this copy, found amongst Choisy's papers. On the dating and the history of editions of the MS see Marchal, Lambert, 165, 171, 174–7, 196; Granderoute, ed., Madame de Lambert: Oeuvres, 205–11.

47 La Motte wrote of Mongault's “unpardonable capital errors” and “bad principles”; Maine wrote that she did not think that it would be so easy to destroy this “heresy” “as Madame de Lambert claims”; Lettres de . . . la Motte, 14, 16–19, 23–7. (On a speculative note, perhaps Mongault's Oratorian education led him to invoke Malebranche's authority on the subject of women in the salon.) Mongault, preceptor to the duc de Chartres (eldest son of the duc d'Orléans) and Greek and Latin translator, joined the Académie française in 1718. See Granderoute and Marchal on the multiple other textual influences evident in the Réflexions.

48 Granderoute, ed., Madame de Lambert: Oeuvres, 211; Lambert to Saint-Hyacinthe, 29 July 1729, quoted in Marchal, Lambert, 176; also see 194 on the women novelists Lambert was defending.

49 Abbreviated as RG. This short essay, published posthumously in her 1747 Oeuvres, echoes and occasionally varies and adds to the RN's passages on taste. Marchal suggests it was written earlier (Lambert, 374); Granderoute calls it a “partial repetition” of one paragraph of the RN (Madame de Lambert: Oeuvres, 211). It contains an almost identical sentence, not found in the pre-1724 RN, to one in Lambert's 20 Sept. 1726 letter to la Motte, and so it seems more probable that it was written after the RN. See below.

50 Marchal, Lambert, 161–7; see n. 46.

51 Ibid., 161–2, 217–20.

52 The Lettres de . . . la Motte include Lambert relating Maine's analysis and physiology of taste to la Motte (20 Sept. 1726), 17. This correspondence between the three began with a letter of Maine's being read in Lambert's salon, and it is not improbable that this letter of Lambert's was likewise read out at some point there too (at its writing, Lambert was at Sceaux, where she also could have aired it; numerous guests attended both gatherings, and in all events, it gives the tone of her group's discussions and interests). See Hamerton, “Women's Taste,” chap. 2; cf. Marchal, Lambert, 218–19, on the salon's self-image as tribunal of le bon goût.

53 During the visit discussed above, Maine made knowledgeable reference to Malebranche in an undated letter to la Motte: Lettres de . . . la Motte, 20.

54 Hamerton, “Women's Taste,” chap. 2.

55 Marchal, Lambert, 217 ff.; see n. 46.

56 Lambert to la Motte, undated but during the same 1726 visit discussed in n. 52 above (probably October), Lettres de . . . la Motte, 28. Marchal, Lambert, 195, argues for a chronological progression from rationalism towards a greater emphasis on sensibility in her work.

57 Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 542; Dens, L'Honnête homme; Moriarty, Taste and Ideology; Chantalat, A la recherche.

58 Malebranche, The Search after Truth, 130–31.

59 In French, the passage reads, “Je ne crois donc pas que le sentiment nuise à l'entendement: il fournit de nouveaux esprits, qui illuminent de manière que les idées se présentent plus vives, plus nettes et plus démêlées; et pour preuve de ce que je dis, toutes les passions sont éloquentes” (221). Without an understanding of this context, Lambert's meaning has been lost in translation. Beasley (Salons, 37) translates esprits as “insights”; Hine's, E. McNiven translation, New Reflections on Women by the Marchionesse de Lambert (New York, 1995), 40Google Scholar, completely obscures the passage. Animal spirits were frequently abbreviated by contemporary (French and English) writers to spirits (Malebranche wrote esprits animaux or esprits), and were regularly invoked to explain the passions, as by Lambert here. Russo discusses the spirits and this type of immediate judgment of sentiment in Styles of Enlightenment, 142–5. See n. 81.

60 Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 552; see James, Passion and Action, 215 ff.; cf. Shank, “Neither Natural Philosophy, Nor Science,” 102–4.

61 Cf. the valorizing of the beautiful female body in seventeenth-century Neoplatonism; Lougee, Paradis, 34–40.

62 Cf. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, 142 ff. Cf. the abbé Morellet's and his friends' frequent and honnête eulogizing descriptions of him as “lazy,” discussed in Gordon, D., Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, 1994), 141–5Google Scholar; La Vopa, “Sexless Minds,” on the honnête repudiation of conversational models smacking of labor; and Fontenelle's famous disclaimer reassuring his mondain audience that the kind of mental attentiveness needed to understand his Entretiens was the same as that needed to read the Princesse de Clèves.

63 DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, 78; Spink, J., “‘Sentiment’, ‘sensible’, ‘sensibilité’: les mots, les idées, d'apres les ‘moralistes’ français et britanniques du début du dix-huitième siècle,” Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich 20 (1977), 33–46Google Scholar; Mesnard, J., “Le classicisme français et l'expression de la sensibilité,” in Popperwell, R., ed., Expression, Communication and Experience in Literature and Language (London, 1973), 28–37Google Scholar; Baasner, F., “The Changing Meaning of ‘Sensibilité’: 1654 till 1704,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 15 (1986), 77–96Google Scholar; Rousseau, G. S., “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Brissenden, R. F. and Eade, J. C., eds., Studies in the Eighteenth Century, III (Toronto, 1976), 137–57Google Scholar.

64 Bos, Abbé Du, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar; Chantalat, A la recherche. On Malebranche's influence on Du Bos, which should at least partly be sited within Lambert's salon, see Hamerton, “Malebranche.”

65 See Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 540–41; James, Passion and Action, chap. 5.

66 This was part of a broader anti-stoic reaction; see Baasner, “Changing Meaning”; Mesnard, “Classicisme.” Cf. Gordon's discussion of ideals of douceur for the gentleman in this period, outside of the court context, in Citizens, 116–26.

67 Quoted in Baasner, “Changing Meaning,” 80.

68 Mitton, quoted in ibid., 85.

69 Quoted in ibid., 89; Spink, “Sentiment.”

70 Here, Lambert sounded very like Malebranche on the dominating persuasion of the senses and imagination, though epistemologically unworried by what had so disturbed him; see Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 545.

71 Du Bos, Réflexions, 13.

72 Hamerton, “Women's Taste,” chap. 2.

73 Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, 144, notes that Marivaux has Marianne describing her sensibility in aristocratic terms; this was in the 1730s.

74 Hine, E. McNiven, “The Woman Question in Early Eighteenth Century French Literature: The Influence of François Poulain de la Barre,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 116 (Oxford, 1973), 65–79Google Scholar; Marchal, 489.

75 Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 552.

76 See La Vopa, “Sexless Minds.”

77 Poullain, Three Treatises, 83, 86, 91, 100, 101–2.

78 Ibid., 101.

79 Ibid., 83.

80 Ibid., 91.

81 Ibid., 100–1. Such warmth was typically understood in this period in relation to the activity of the animal spirits and “fermentation of the blood.” See Malebranche, The Search after Truth, 91–2, 95; James, Passion and Action, 98.

82 Poullain, Three Treatises, 113.

83 See Lambert's feminist praise of Dacier, undated letter to Buffier in Oeuvres de . . . Lambert, vol. 1, 259–60.

84 RG, 240.

85 Cf. RG, 239.

86 “The justice of taste judges that which is called pleasurable [attractiveness; agrément]” (RN, 220; cf. RG, 240); “taste has for its object the agreeable [l'agréable]” (RG, 240); “the justice of sense [justesse de sens] has for its object the truth . . . this justice comes from good sense and right reason” (RG, 240).

87 Cf. Poullain, Three Treatises, 115; Hamerton, “Malebranche,” 547–8.

88 Cf. RG, 239. Lambert explicitly adopted this view over that of taste as harmony between esprit and reason; RN, 219–20; RG, 239. Moreover, in the RG, which I suspect incorporates later thinking on taste than the RN (see n. 49 above), she did not choose to adopt the distinction she attributed to Maine between organic taste and artistic taste based on experience, only the latter of which could be reduced to principles; recounted to la Motte, 20 Sept. 1726, Lettres de . . . la Motte, 17. Even when Lambert remarked that taste depends both on “a very delicate sentiment in the heart, and on a great justice of the mind” (RN 220; RG, 241) we must remember that the mental accuracy with which she associated taste was always derived from sentiment. Cf. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, 144.

89 RG, 240; RN, 220.

90 Cf. RG, 240.

91 RG, 239; cf. RN, 220; cf. Lambert to la Motte, 20 Sept. 1726, purportedly recounting Maine's views, but here in language almost identical to Lambert's in RN and RG, Lettres de . . . la Motte, 17.

92 RG, 240.

93 Ibid.

94 See Smith, W., Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

95 James, Passion and Action, 86, 117–20, 248–9.

96 See Hamerton, “Women's Taste,” chap. 2; and idem, “Malebranche,” for fuller discussion of this material.

97 Steinbrügge, Moral Sex, 20.