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4 The Libertine's Bluff IF ANY ONE PERIOD STANDS AS the heyday of gambling in France, it is the century and a third separating the rise to power of Louis XIV from the storming of the Bastille and the coming of the Revolution. The years between 1660 and 1789 represent an interlude, a proliferation of new ideas that involved a systematic rethinking of the notions of social identity, ofhappiness, and ofindividual freedom. That period was also marked by what was nothing less than a national obsession with chance and gambling in all its forms. That century and a third saw the elaboration of a new set of values that set it apart not only from medieval providentialism and the agonies of a sundered Christianity that preceded it, but also from the belligerent civic moralism that would produce the Revolution's bloody aftermath. Rather than a God of the past or a republic of the future, it was the uneasy amalgam of court and capital, of Versailles and Paris, of royal favor and social prominence that generated the secular and cultural criteria that would in turn define the place and value of all stations within Enlightenment society. The distinctive tenor of those times can be glimpsed in the startling homology between two aspects of that culture which are rarely brought together: the period 's signature rethinking of relations between the sexes known as libertinage and gambling as a favored form of aristocratic sociability. Bringing libertinage and gambling together, looking at each from the perspective of the other, will allow us to see the ancien regime's fascination with gambling for what it was: the hallmark of a new form of conviviality redefining the interplay of individual and group in its most fundamental dimensions. * * * Anthropologists have used the term "insistence" to describe certain objects and practices which they see as epitomizing the central assumptions The Libertine's Bluff and aspirations of a civilization. The pre-Columbian anthropologists Martha and Robert Ascher have, for instance, argued that the lncan quipus , the complex meshes of knotted cords used to inventory the possessions of every village as annual reports to the emperor, are objects which capture in miniature the very essence of that culture.1 Those elaborate braids used to inform the central authority of the exact number of households , children, slaves, grain holdings, animals, trees, and countless other objects in each village represent the "insistence" of lncan civilization because they were the crucial instruments of an obsessive counting and centralized control of people and goods which approached a level we would today associate with the most delirious ambitions of Weberian bureaucracy. In much the same way gambling, with its proliferation of cards, dice, and games structuring their use, can be seen as the "insistence " of French aristocratic culture during the period of its ascendance. Few authors provide a better insight into the homologies between sexuality and gambling than Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon. Crebillonfils , the son of the best-known tragic playwright of the first half of the century, was born in 1707 and lived until 1777. From the age of twenty-five until well into his sixties, he wrote a series of novels and short prose works that capture perfectly the eighteenth-century science of seduction and domination known as libertinage. The intense yet uneasy relations that characterized the sexual entanglements of the ancien regime aristocracy are the constant theme of his works. Like an Enlightenment anticipation of the Swiss filmmaker Eric Rohmer, he restages again and again in his prose comedies of manners the fundamental variants governing sexual attraction and resistance. His La Nuit et Ie moment, for instance, describes the complex chain of events set in motion when the beautiful Cidalise decides to invite to her chateau for the weekend not only the man she hopes to seduce but four of his former mistresses. His Le Hasard du coin du feu takes the form of infinitely nuanced conversations analyzing the psychological consequences of Clerval's reluctance to use the word "love" to describe his feelings for the very willing Celie. His full-fledged yet strangely incomplete Bildungsroman entitled Les Egarements du coeur et de Pesprit reveals the unsteady tension between desire and convention by describing the first difficult steps of the wellborn but naive Meilcour as he makes his entry into polite society at the age of seventeen.2 The libertine novel, with its constant focus on the parallel strategies ofseduction and resistance, provides its readers with the perfect portrait...

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