Shifting Pictures of Class, Gender, and Self in Mademoiselle de Montpensier's "Portrait de Monsieur de Brais"

Largely overlooked in scholarly discourse devoted to the popular portrait mondain of the seventeenth century, Mademoiselle de Montpensier's "Portrait de Monsieur de Brais" both nuances and challenges the idealized picture of nobility projected by the Divers portraits (1659), the volume in which it first appeared. The social and sexual stakes of this written description of Mademoiselle's head groom encourage us to recognize the portrait book as much more than a mere salon game. Assuming the voice and "body" of her non-noble male servant via a false self-portrait, Mademoiselle performs the transgressions suggested in other period depictions of her. The text thus presents layers of trompe-l'œil that function as a locus for a trans-gendered noble identity—the persona of "La Grande Mademoiselle." A consideration of that hybridized figure further illuminates the complex presence-absence dynamic of the portrait. Moreover, this exploration of gender and authorship in the Divers portraits nuances our understanding of both the functions of seventeenth-century salon portraiture and the methods of identity-making strategies via text and image.