The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Two brief and understated anecdotes can frame this study. They il-­ lustrate the ambiguities that will be at the core of my account of the “mod-­ ernization” of intellectual identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly to the degree that this book explores the historical process of the “birth of the modern author” in light of continuities with the values and behaviors of the early modern period rather than, as is more traditionally done, in terms of a sharp break with them. The first is told by Paul Pellisson in the history of the Académie fran-­ çaise, which he wrote in the late 1640s and early 1650s at a time when he was lobbying for a seat in the assembly. Remembering the strong inter-­ est in theater of the Académie’s first patron, Cardinal Richelieu, Pellisson recounts how the cardinal brought together five of the leading dramatists of the day in the mid-­1630s—­among whom the best known was Pierre Corneille—­and commissioned them to write a series of plays based on subjects and arrangements of his own inspiration, including a 1635 Co-­ médie des Tuileries, celebrating the palace next to the Louvre that Cath-­ erine de Médicis had built after the assassination of her husband Henri II in 1560; a now lost Grande pastorale from 1637; and a tragicomedy called L’aveugle de Smyrne, which was performed a month later.1 Each of the cinq auteurs was assigned to write one act of each play. For this, Pellis-­ son observes, the writer received a pension from the minister, along with “considerable gestures of generosity [quelques libéralitez considérables], when they succeeded to his liking.”2 To explain what he means by “libéral-­ itez,” Pellisson reveals what one of the playwrights, Guillaume Colletet, had confided to him: Thus M. Colletet assured me that, having brought to him [Richelieu] the Mono-­ logue from Les Tuileries, the latter was especially drawn to the following two lines [sic] from the description of the Carré d’eau: [At the same time, I saw on the banks of a stream] The female duck dampened by the muddy water, With a hoarse voice and a flap of her wings, Reinvigorate the male duck which languished at her side,  Introduction [Au m�me temps j’ai vu sur le bord d’un ruisseau, [Au m�me temps j’ai vu sur le bord d’un ruisseau, La cane s’humecter de la bourbe de l’eau, D’une voix enrouée, et d’un battement d’aile, Animer le canard qui languit auprès d’elle,] And after listening to the rest, he gave him from his own hands fifty pistoles, with the obliging words that they were only for those two lines which he had found so beautiful, and that the King was not rich enough to pay for the rest.3 The second story dates from almost two hundred years later. When Victor Hugo published his play Cromwell in 187, he removed from the fa-­ mous preface a historical excursus originally intended as part of it. Having recently founded the Revue de Paris, Louis-­Désiré Véron approached Hugo about printing the excerpt in his new journal in return for a reasonable fee. In a letter from May 18, 189, Hugo laid out the terms on which he might agree to this: I am eager, Monsieur, to respond to the kind solicitation that you addressed to me yesterday. I have never sold a manuscript, however thin it might be, for less than 500 francs. But I have, on occasion, given them away, and I could do it again. If you are interested in the fragment for which you do me the honor of asking, you could have it for 500 francs (or for nothing). Choose. Whatever your choice, I will agree with pleasure.4 At one level, both exchanges highlight attitudes and views that seem appropriate for their times. Colletet’s desire to please his patron appears as fitting for the seventeenth century as Hugo’s aggressive response to the commercial journal editor for the nineteenth. At another level, how-­ ever, both convey these attitudes and views in an unexpected way, in the evocation of a transaction through which the writer gained a specified sum of money. We really anticipate the opposite; we expect instead that the core values in question for both the Classical and the Romantic writ-­ ers would be communicated...