Graffigny’s Self, Graffigny’s Friend: Intimate Sharing in the Correspondance1750–52

Je crois que nous servirons d’exemple unique de la plus parfaite amitié.¹

Putting Pen to Paper

Late one evening in January 1751, Françoise de Graffigny managed to escort her last guest to the door. As a well-known author, Graffigny was at the center of a busy social circle, though she was not always a willing hostess. Exhausted, exasperated, she took up her quill pen and began a letter to her friend François-Antoine Devaux. She wrote: “Me voilà, Dieu merci, tête-à-tête avec toi.”² Similar remarks recur throughout the correspondence, pointing to the link between close friendship and epistolary practice. That link proves especially strong in Graffigny’s letters to Devaux.

Why should we read the letters of Françoise de Graffigny? Critics have identified several good reasons. The letters provide information about mid-eighteenth-century French society, including famous people, political intrigue, and current events. The letters are also a reading journal—they disclose one individual’s reading practices and they reveal the wider public’s reaction to new texts. ³ The letters offer insight into a single woman’s private life, including everything from fashion and health to food and home décor. Furthermore, those interested in Graffigny the author learn more in the letters about her literary works (their genesis, revisions, reception, and comments from acquaintances). As Joan Hinde Stewart remarks, what sets apart Graffigny’s letters from those of her peers “is that she wrote about everything.”⁴

Here, I focus on yet another reason to read the letters. Namely, they expose the inner workings of an eighteenth-century friendship between a woman and a man, Graffigny and Devaux (whom she sometimes called “Panpan”). He remained behind in their native Lorraine in 1738 when Graffigny left for Paris. I will suggest that their letters both illustrate and exceed eighteenth-century theories and practices of friendship; these two friends were by turns typical and extraordinary.

Certainly one must exercise caution when advancing a claim of exceptionality. Such a claim may be difficult to substantiate and can never be absolute. And, on the one hand, Graffigny and Devaux’s friendship was typical in a number of ways. The two friends communicated through letters, a widespread practice during the eighteenth century. In the letters, they expressed affection, concern, and a whole range of emotions that characterize close friendship, then as now. Public and private elements appear side by side in their correspondence, the subjects ranging from news of the day to updates on their personal illnesses and family matters. Graffigny and Devaux discussed topics—such as recent books and plays—important to many, if not most, literate people of the era. As I discuss below, the mere fact of being a woman and a man who communicated through letters certainly did not make them unique in eighteenth-century France.

On the other hand, the friendship as well as the correspondence between Graffigny and Devaux were without doubt extraordinary. Their degree of intimacy and their passionate attachment despite the lack of a romantic relationship made their bond unique. The significant difference in age, with the woman occupying the role of elder—Graffigny was old enough to be Devaux’s mother—is also remarkable. The two maintained a frequent—often daily—correspondence over twenty years. They engaged in startlingly forthright conversation (one thinks of the parrhesia, or frank speech, of the Stoics). Their use of code words comes close at times to a private language. Graffigny’s invocation of the term amitié was itself rare, as I discuss below. In what follows, I hope to convey some sense of the extraordinary nature of this epistolary friendship. Above all, I emphasize intimate sharing between the two correspondents, which disclosed identity and relation, the self and the friendship.

The present essay focuses on two years in the life of Graffigny and Devaux’s relation: July 1750 through August 1752 (dates that coincide with Volumes XI and XII in the published Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny). As English Showalter observes, the two friends were “convince[d] [End Page...