Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France by Faith E. Beasley (review)

‘Entre tous les commerces qui se font dans toutes les parties du monde, il n’y en a point de plus riche, ni de plus considérable que celui des Indes orientales’: these words, written by François Charpentier in his Discours d’un fidèle sujet du roy, touchant l’establissement d’une compagnie françoise pour le commerce des Indes orientales (1664), offer a precious insight into how seventeenth-century France interacted with India. Faith E. Beasley’s most recent contribution to French studies challenges two dominant critical trends in the way we think about encounters between France and India in the early modern world. The first is that these encounters were shaped by a dichotomy between East and West, which Beasley argues is anachronistic and colonial. The second is that the eighteenth century was the period in which India became a particularly important source of interest and inspiration. By considering the traces and influences of encounters with India in some of the lesser-known work of François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière, Mme de Sévigné, Mme de La Fayette, and Jean de La Fontaine, Beasley tells a nuanced story of how seventeenth-century French culture became ‘indianized’ (p. 238). This rich and timely work combines close analysis of texts, images, and objects with historical contextualization and broad methodological reflections. The first of the four chapters reconstructs what Beasley calls a ‘nexus’ of France’s contact with India, primarily the salon of La Sablière (p. 25). Beasley places Bernier’s travel narratives within this salon context, and argues that these narratives were formed by the conversations that took place within that social space. Beasley’s analysis of Bernier’s text also uncovers an important distinction between France’s conceptions of India as opposed to a more general notion of ‘the Orient’. The centrality of salon culture is brought into sharper focus in Chapter 2, in which Beasley examines the extent to which Bernier’s image of India, so popular amongst his female public, shaped the evolution of the novel. In Chapter 3, Beasley reads La Fontaine’s Fables and Fontenelle’s Entretiens as further literary products of the specific encounter between France and India which, by virtue of being mediated by salon culture, paved the way to a particular kind of knowledge. This chapter concludes by considering the threat felt by Louis XIV in the face of such a celebration of diversity. This ‘taste for the foreign’ (p. 221) takes a material turn in Chapter 4, in which Beasley explores the importance of Indian influence with regards to the vibrant and elaborately patterned fashion and fabrics that were so popular amongst the subjects of Louis XIV. It was women, Beasley argues, who were the ‘driving force behind this new taste’ (p. 238), and who have been traditionally marginalized in this story. As is the case with much of Beasley’s other work, this study is characterized by creative encounters: between India and France, men and women, travellers and salonnières, and, methodologically speaking, between literary scholarship, the history of ideas, and the study of objects. Although the conversations that Beasley imagines are often hypothetical by nature, this thought-provoking book will particularly appeal to scholars of the early modern world who are interested in gender, the decolonization of history, and the dissemination of culture.