Of Mind and Matter in Charles Duclos’s Acajou et Zirphile

Charles Duclos based Acajou et Zirphile (1744) on ten drawings by François Boucher, originally designed to illustrate the Comte de Tessin’s Faunillane, ou l’Infante jaune (1741). Separated from their source and rearranged, these illustrations, which depict a woman’s head severed from her body then reassembled, tell quite a different story. I consider the materiality of the illustrations, placing them in the context of the various media in which Boucher worked and which his drawings and engravings inspired, including painting, costume and set design, porcelain, and tapestry. I also explore the materiality in the illustrations, demonstrating how Duclos, like Boucher, places characters and objects on the same ontological level in both his tale and his moral treatise, Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751), which share the same pedagogical preoccupations. Boucher’s illustrations mediate relationships between the two tales, Duclos’s tale and his moral treatise, and Duclos’s tale and Charles-Simon Favart’s opéra-comique Acajou, affirming the status of book illustration as an intermedial cultural object.