Return to the index of "Other Women's Voices."
Updated 02-07-08
Madeleine de Souvre, Marquise
de Sable (1599-1678)
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"WE WIN BY BREVITY WHAT WE OFTEN LOSE BY VERBAL EXCESS."
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Madeleine de Souvre, one of seven children of an influential courtier, was educated at court. At 15, she was married to Philippe Emmanuel de Laval, Marquis de Sable. Contemporaries at Louis XIII's court praised not only her beauty, but also her wit and her ability to keep as friends the admirers she had rejected. The 25 years of her marriage would test her wit. She would have nine children (four of whom would survive to adulthood), but her husband soon preferred other women; he also quickly spent both his own wealth and much of his wife's. In Paris, she regularly attended the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet, but to save money she had to spend an increasing amount of time in the country.
When her husband died in 1640, Sable had to sell most of her
remaining estates to establish her surviving children. When she
had done so, she bought a home in Paris, near the women's Cistercian
monastery of Port-Royal. Now she became a regular part of Rambouillet's
salon, where she became friends with the Duchesse de Longueville
and the future Duc de la Rochefoucauld. There she also came to
know Madeleine de Scudery, who would describe her as "Parthenie,
Princesse de Salamis" in her Artemene ou Le Grand Cyrus
(1649-53); in that novel, Scudery would tell the story of a woman
loved for her beauty whose husband tired of her, but who learned
to live alone and find peace and a final love.
When from 1648 to 1652, the series of conflicts known as the
Fronde convulsed Paris, Sable sided with the court, but she remained
close to the Frondeurs, whose leaders, such as Longueville and
La Rochefoucauld, she knew well; she spent the years trying to
act as a conciliator between the court and the Frondeurs.
With the end of the Fronde and the exile of its leaders,
Rambouillet's salon met less often. Sable had established her
own salon; it soon became --- with Scudery's --- the most popular
in Paris.
By the early 1650s, Sable had come to share at least some of the views of those who gathered around Port-Royal. Called Jansenists by their opponents (after a bishop who had died in 1638), the group emphasized the power of God's grace over the effect of man's good works. To church authorities, this sounded suspiciously like Protestantism; the group's emphasis on obedience to conscience over obedience to church and state worried secular authorities as well.
In 1655 Sable built a house on the grounds of the group's second foundation, Port-Royal du Champs, outside of Paris. For the next six years, her salon met there (and at an apartment at the Paris Port-Royal); among its members were those from a new generation: Marquise de Sevigne, Comtesse de La Fayette, and Blaise Pascal, all over 20 years younger than Sable. From their discussions of human nature and social morality, the salon group began to work together to express in concise form statements about love and friendship that could be seen as generally true. The results were epigrams, maximes; one person would propose a maxim, and the group would make comment and make suggestions until a finished and polished product resulted.
By 1659, La Rochefoucauld was back in Paris and an active member of the salon, and the Duchesse de Longueville a frequent guest. Cardinal Mazarin (who had been the chief target of the Fronde) wrote that the Frondeurs were regrouping at Sable's salon and would need to be watched. Since most of the chief supporters of Port-Royal were former Fronde activists, his concern was reasonable.
In 1661 the salon at Port-Royal du Champs came abruptly to an end. The nuns there were ordered to sign a statement condemning beliefs ascribed to Bishop Jansen; most refused, the monastery was closed, and those who lived on the property were forced to leave. Later, the monastery in Paris was also closed. During these years, Sable lived in a suburb of Paris, and again she tried to be a conciliator --- urging the nuns to compromise and the authorities to soften their sanctions. In 1669 the opposing sides finally reached an agreement that lasted until after her death.
During the early 1660s the members of the salon had continued to meet; later they would continue to discuss and polish their maximes by letter. The most skillful of the maxim-writers, La Rochefoucauld, published his Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales in 1665; Sable wrote a review of the work in the Journal des savants (and allowed La Rochefoucauld to edit the review before publication). We don't know when Sable stopped working on her own collection; in the year of her death they would be published by another salon member as Maximes de madame la marquise de Sable.
When the Port-Royal houses were re-opened, the 70-year-old Sable, in declining health, went to live at the Paris monastery, where she would stay until her death. For several years she continued her salon, and to the end she supported the Duchesse de Longueville in her defense of the rights of the nuns of Port-Royal.
No complete translation of Sable's 81 maximes have been printed in English, but they are available online. Her extant correspondence (much has been lost) and some essays were published in the 1800s, but most have not yet been translated.
On this page you'll find:
Links to helpful sites online.
Excerpts from a translation in print.
Information about secondary sources.
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1. Maximes de madame la marquise de Sable, in the original French and in a translation by Arthur Chandler, with a link to a 1621 portrait by Daniel Du Moustier, a biography, and a brief bibliography (through 1978); on this main page, you can do a word search in both English and French. You can also link to a selection of La Rochefoucauld's maxims (50 of a total of 504 published in his lifetime).
2. Link to Chapter 5, "A Literary Salon at Port Royal," of Amelia Gere Mason's 1891 The Women of the French Salons. There you will find Mason's translation of maxims #s 26, 48, and 79, and of parts of Sable's essay on friendship; you will also find Sable described by her contemporaries: Madame de Motteville, the Duchess of Montpensier, and others.
3. Near the end (about four-fifths of the way down the page) of a French edition of La Rochefoucauld's Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales is a section "Lettres relatives aux maximes": there you find the originals of five letters from Sable to La Rochefoucauld, written between 1663 and 1665, discussing the preparation and the publication of his work (the letters are given as #s 11, 25, 26, 42, and 48). Also given are a number of letters from La Rochefoucauld to Sable. At another site, a manuscript page from a 1661/62 letter of Sable to La Rochefoucauld.
4. In English, letters to Sable:
(a) In an partial 1871 translation, by J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell, of La Rochefoucauld's Reflections; Or Sentences and Moral Maxims, click on "Second Supplement" for passages from his letters to Sable.
(b) A brief thank-you note from Blaise Pascal to Sable, written in 1660, in which he expresses his wish to discuss his reading with her. (The physician Antoine Menjot would become one of Pascal's closest friends and supporters.)
5. After a French-language biography of Sable by Benedetta Craveri and a 2004 bibliography of works and studies, a group of "Jugements," including Madeleine de Scudery's description of her in Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus.
6. An interesting illustration of the methods used at Sable's salon, thirty-two questions on love, submitted for discussion in the mid-1660's by the Marquis de Sourdis, one of the group's regular attendees.
7. Others on Sable:
(a) Elizabeth Gaskell's 1854 essay, "Company Manners," which discusses a sketch about Sable written that same year by Victor Cousin; Gaskell considers French salon life of the 1600s and wonders how it could be transferred to contemporary English life, how her contemporaries could "discover the lost art of Sableing."
(b) A single sentence from George Eliot's 1853 essay "Woman in France: Madame de Sable": "She was not a genius, not a heroine, but..." (for information on Eliot's essay, see "Secondary sources").
8. Reviews (for excerpts from Conley, see below, under "In print"; for information on the study's treatment of Sable, see "Secondary sources"):
(a) David Klinck on John J. Conley's 2002 The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France; and elsewhere, another review, this by Margaret Atherton.
(b) Caroline Moorehead on Teresa Waugh's 2005 translation of Benedetta Craveri's 2001 study, The Age of Conversation.
9. For historical background:
(a) A description of the two stages of the Fronde.
(b) Illustrated lecture notes by J.P.Sommerville, "Louis XIV, Religion and dissension," which include a description of Jansenism and Port-Royal's involvement.
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[John J. Conley's study includes a chapter, "Madame de Sable: a Jansenist Code of Moderation," which sees in Sable's writing a coherent moral philosophy. In the process of discussing Sable's themes, Conley translates 33 of her 81 maxims, as well as passages from her letters and from her essay on friendship. The original French of all the maxims is given in an appendix. Note, too, Conley's useful introductory chapter on "salon philosophy." (See the book's table of contents online.):]
Conley, John J. The suspicion of virtue: women philosophers
in neoclassical France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
(xi, 222 p.)
LC#: B1815 .C66 2002; ISBN: 0801440203
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"...the same gifts from God."
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[In a 1664 letter to a bishop who opposed the Jansenist theologians, Sable made one of her attempts at conciliation, but also shows her willingness to express her own views:]
I must tell you that there is nothing in this world that disturbs me more than to see such a bright and good prelate as yourself and such teachers who have the same gifts from God, piety and intelligence, so opposed to each other.
Although you roar like a lion in your letter, you have such a sweet soul that I do not fear sharing with you my feeling on the subject, although they differ from yours. [p.27]
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"If the good is the short...."
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[For each of the maxims, the number is given so that you can see the original online. First, on the value of brevity, and therefore of the maxim:]
Speaking too much is such a great fault, that in the area of conversation and business, if the good is the short, it is doubly good, because we win by brevity what we often lose by verbal excess. [#36; p.34]
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"...the natural malignity within us."
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[At times Sable presents acerbic, La Rochefoucauld-like, views of human nature:]
It is quite a common fault never to be happy with one's fortune and never unhappy with one's soul. [#67; p.36]
Knowing how to discover the interior of another and hide one's own is a great mark of a superior mind. [#35; p.35]
It is sometimes useful to pretend that one is mistaken. [from #4; p.34]
...[W]e even have a secret delight in seeing the most tragic and horrifying events, both because of their novelty and because of the natural malignity within us. [from #34; p.43]
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"...for most people."
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[But even in these, Sable often moderates La Rochefoucauld's near-universal cynicism:]
Society and even friendship for most people is only a business that lasts as long as there is a need. [#77; p.41]
The stupidities of other people should be a lesson for us rather than an occasion for us to mock those who do them. [#49; p.42]
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"The study and search for truth...."
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[More typically, Sable speaks of the search for self-knowledge:]
The study and search for truth often serve only to make us see, by experience, the ignorance which is naturally ours. [#38; p.35]
The greatest wisdom of man is to know his own folly. [#8; p.35]
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"If we esteemed virtue...."
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[And of the search for virtue:]
If we esteemed virtue more than any other thing, then neither any favor nor any promotion would ever change the heart or the face of people. [from #32; p.36]
We are more worried to appear as we should be that to be in effect what we should be. [from #19; p.38]
There is always enough self-love hiding behind the greatest piety to place clear limits on one's charity. [#64; p.42]
If we we had as much care to be what we should be as we have to deceive others in disguising what we are, we would be able to show ourselves just as we are, without having the trouble of disguising ourselves. [#20; p.38]
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"Honesty and sincerity in action shake those who are cruel."
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[On the difficulty of distinguishing between virtue and vice:]
Virtue is not always where one sees actions which appear virtuous.... [from #74; p.36]
There is nothing which doesn't have some perfection. Happily, good taste finds it in everything. However, natural malignity often discovers a vice hidden among several virtues, in order to highlight it and publish it. This is more a trait of congenital evil than an advantage of discernment, and it is quite wrong to pass one's life in the single-minded delight in another's imperfections. [#61; p.39]
Honesty and sincerity in action shake those who are cruel and make them lose the way by which they plot to arrive at their end, because the cruel usually believe that one never does anything without artifice. [#9; p.39]
It is almost better that the great of this world seek glory and even vanity in good actions, rather than not being touched by it at all, because, although they do not act by principles of virtue, there is at least this advantage: that vanity makes them do what they otherwise would not. [#71; p.39]
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"One can neither hide where it is nor...."
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[On the effects of love:]
Love is to the soul of the one who loves what the soul is to the body of the one it animates. [from #79; p.40]
Love has a character so particular that one can neither hide where it is nor pretend where it is not. [#80; p.40]
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"...that one has seen so well depicted in the comedy."
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[In her most well-known maxim, Sable did not oppose all theatrical performances but warned against a blind acceptance of the view of life and of love that contemporary comedy so successfully conveyed:]
It is so natural and delicate a representation of the passions that it makes them come alive and makes them arise in our heart. This is especially true of love..., because the more it seems innocent to innocent souls, the more are those souls susceptible to comedy's effects....
So, one goes away from the comedy with the heart so full of all the sweets of love and the mind so persuaded of its innocence that one is completely prepared to receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices that one has seen so well depicted in the comedy. [from #81; p.38]
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"In friendship one cannot... love without being loved."
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[Not from Maximes (and so not online), but from Sable's essay on friendship:]
Friendship is a species of virtue which can only be founded upon the esteem of the persons loved, i.e., upon the qualities of the soul, such as fidelity, generosity, and discretion, and on the good qualities of the mind....
It is also necessary that friendship be reciprocal, because in friendship one cannot, as in romantic love, love without being loved....
One must not give the name "friendship" to natural inclinations, because they depend neither on our will nor on our choice. Although they may make our friendships more pleasant, they must not be the foundation. [p.40]
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[Benedetta Craveri's 2001 Italian study (translated by Teresa Waugh) includes a chapter, "The Marquise de Sable: The Salon in the Convent," which discusses Sable's life and thought, and quotes from her correspondence. Note especially the bibliographical notes at the end (no superscript leads you to them); they provide a detailed description of contemporary and later views of Sable and her world. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
Craveri, Benedetta. The age of conversation; translated by
Teresa Waugh. New York: New York Review Books: Distributed to
the trade by Publishers Group West, 2005. (xv, 488 p., [16] p.
of plates: ill.)
LC#: DC121.7 .C73 2005; ISBN: 1590171411
Includes bibliographical references (p. 377-446) and index
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[This collection includes a substantial essay (pp.58-90), "Woman
in France: Madame de Sable," written by George Eliot in
1853 for the Westminster Review, The essay is on Sable's
"life and character." Eliot did not think highly of
Sable's maxims, but she saw how they differ from Rochefoucauld's:
"Her own maxims are as full of the confidence in human goodness
which La Rochefoucauld wants, as they are empty of the style
which he possesses" (p.85):]
Essays and reviews of George Eliot not hitherto reprinted;
together with an introductory essay on the genius of George Eliot
by Mrs. S. B. Herrick. Boston, Aldine, 1887. (xxxiii, 192 p.)
LC#: PR4659 .E78 1887
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[Leonard Tancock's introduction to his translation of La Rochefoucauld's
Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales includes a
brief but clear description (pp. 10-17) of Sable's salon
and the process by which maxims were developed and polished.
(See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Maxims / La Rochefoucauld; translated with an introduction
by Leonard Tancock (Penguin classics). London; New York: Penguin
Books, c1959 (26 p.)
LC#: PQ1815 .A72 1959; ISBN: 014044095X
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[Alexander Sedgwick's study mention Sable only in passing, but Chapter 1 provides useful background on the period and Chapter 8 sums up the various points of view included under the term "Jansenism" and so explains what lies behind some of Sable's maxims:]
Sedgwick, Alexander. Jansenism in seventeenth-century France:
voices from the wilderness. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, c1977. (xvii, 243 p.)
LC#: BX4722 .S43; ISBN: 0813907020
Includes index. Bibliography: p. [225]-237
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Updated 02-07-08