The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's

Tragédies Lyriques
Author(s): Patricia Howard
Source: Acta Musicologica , Jan. - Apr., 1991, Vol. 63, Fasc. 1 (Jan. - Apr., 1991), pp. 57-
72
Published by: International Musicological Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/932887

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 57

The Influence of the Pricieuses on Content and Structure in

Quinault's and Lully's Tragedies Lyriques

PATRICIA HOWARD (GUILDFORD, SURREY)

In a pamphlet published in 1923, Francis Baumal described the rise of 'femin

in the age of Molibre,' and argued that women in mid-seventeenth-cen
France laid claim to personal freedoms, many of which they had sti
achieved 250 years later.' Baumal identified specific questions which
burning issues in the seventeenth century: parental authority, marriage,
control and divorce, also the themes of promiscuity and celibacy.2 Such so
questions, in the Grand Siecle, were discussed in terms of the arcane argu
of mediaeval theology, and the question des dames involved an inquiry into
an's essential nature. Creation theories were re-interpreted to 'prove'
woman was innately inferior to man. The theologian Valladier made a deta
comparison between woman and the devil, and found they had much in co
mon.3 Then women entered the debate and undertook their own defence.
male writers seconded their claims." Neither the social problems nor the t
logical debates were resolved in that century, but they were aired, in con
tion and in literature, and the forum for discussion was the 'precieux' mo
ment. In this paper I aim to establish some of the attitudes which charact
the Precieuses, and to show both how far the poet Philippe Quinault respo
to their influence, and where, in the librettos he supplied for Jean-Ba
Lully's tragddies lyriques, he subverted their construction of woman's nature

Who were the Pr&cieuses? Twentieth-century scholars disagree over dating the
movement. Brunot claimed the high point to be 1605; Faguet dates it between
1630 and 1660,7 and Mongredien, while postulating two generations of Precieu-
ses, before and after the Fronde, suggests also that preciosity might be 'une
tendance permanente' of the French character." There seems good reason to
concur with Adam in associating the term 'pr&cieux' exclusively with the salon

'F. BAUMAL, Le Fiminisme au temps de Molibre (Paris 1923).

2 See for example, M. DE PURE, Histoire d'Eulalie, Histoire d 'Aracie, in his La Pricieuse (1656-60), ed. E. Magne (Paris
1938-9), t. 1, p. 276-287, 312-329. La Pricieuse purports to record actual conversation between Pr6cieuses.
' A. VALLADIER, La Sainte philosophie de l'dme (Paris 1614), p. 813-814.
STout ce qu'il y a de plus fort dans le corps de l'homme est employ6 pour former celui de la femme.' M. BUFFET,
Nouvelles observations sur la langue franqaise (Paris 1668), p. 200.
5 For example, P. LE MOYNE, Gallerie des femmes fortes (Paris 1647), which explores questions such as, 'S'il faut plus
de force et plus de courage pour faire un homme vaillant, que pour faire une femme chaste?' (p. 273).
6This paper was originally read at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, 1988.
Pr6cieux attitudes to the representation of women, and seventeenth-century proto-feminism, are explored in more
detail in my chapter Quinault, Lully and the Pricieuses: images of women in seventeenth-century France, in: Cecilia:
Feminist Perspectives on Women and Music, ed. S. Cook and J. Tsou, forthcoming.
7 W. ZIMMER, Die literarische Kritik am Prezi6sentum (Meisenheim am Glan 1978), p. 3.
8 G. MONGREDIEN, La Vie litteraire au XVII sidcle (Paris 1947), p.220.

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58 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully

movement in the second half of the century.9 The first metaphorical applic
of the adjective to a literary patron of formidable powers of taste and jud
ment has been traced to 1654.01 It was immediately taken up to identify a g
of aristocratic literary women, but the term quickly became pejorative. Fr
the moment when Moliere's Les Precieuses ridicules appeared in 1659, affect
rather than refinement became the predominant contemporary usage."
There seems at first glance to be a mismatch between the gravity of th
cial problems and the often trivial literary level on which they were debat
The seventeenth century was an age of revolutions: political, scientific, soc
and philosophical. The Precieuses wanted to be involved in all these m
ments, but their experience and education were too narrow for them to b
to contribute to more than a small corner of them. The Fronde had given
aristocratic women a taste for power,"2 but it was difficult to sustain
ambition in the post-Fronde era. Women unwisely aped the scientific revolu
by trying to apply scientific principles to the only area in which they had
pertise, the phases and refinements of the passions. They participated to m
purpose in the social revolution by extending membership of their origina
aristocratic salons to the bourgeoisie. Their most extensive contribution w
creative literature and literary criticism, but even here their scope was limi
Love was their sphere; they literally mapped it, with their 'Cartes du Pays
Tendre,' and categorised it, with their eight degrees of love, twenty kinds
sigh, forty categories of smile.'" To evaluate their achievements, we have to
card a good deal of the undoubted silliness of the movement, trenchantly
pooned by Moliere and Boileau, and search out their revolutionary underst
ing of woman's nature. For if in French theatre in the second half of the cen
women's roles are preeminent, it was the pr&cieux movement which made t
SO.

Quinault began his literary career under precieux patronage: his first
the comddie Les Rivales, was given in 1653 at the HOtel de Bourgogne, wh
the next seventeen years he produced a series of comedies, tragi-comidies a
gidies, conforming to many of the Pr&cieuses' requirements in his treatm
the 'Pays de Tendre.' His early success soon bred a jealous reaction. He wa
cused by his contemporaries of both literary and social ambition, and a
account in Somaize's gossipy Grand dictionnaire des Precieuses attributes h
rise to fame to his skilful plagiarism of other pr6cieux poets, and to his ab
please the literary women with his 'amorous disposition' and 'galant man
Throughout his life, however, Quinault had to pay for his early submiss
precieux values. His critics searched his work for the effete heroes and af
heroines who populate precieux fiction - and found them. Boileau, in his

9 A. ADAM, La Preciositd, in: Cahiers de l'association internationale des etudes franqaises 1 (1951), p.35-55.
'o ZIMMER, op.cit., p.51.
" J.-B. POQUELIN, dit MOLIERE, Les Pricieuses ridicules (Paris 1659).
12 For example, during the Fronde, Mademoiselle de Montpensier (Lully's first patron) raised an army a
throne, and rode at its head, capturing the city of Orleans for the rebel cause.
13 D. A. L. BACKER, Precious Women (New York 1974), p.163, 195.
14 A.-B. DE SOMAIZE, Le Grand Dictionnaire des Pricieuses (1661), ed. Livet (Paris 1856), t. 1, p. 20
'Quirinus').

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 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 59

Satire, ridiculed Quinault's theatre of love, in which heroes spoke like

herds, and where 'jusqu'a je vous ha's, tout s'y dit tendrement."" Where Quin
was praised, it was for the same characteristics: 'I1l conjugue Amo galamm
And when in 1657, Quinault abandoned the salons for the court, he seems
have taken with him the reputation of being an expert in preciosity: a few
later we find him playing on behalf of the king in a fashionable precieux pa
game.
It is worth spending a moment examining this game, samples of which were
published as Questions or Maximes d'amour,17 for the content of the questions
suggests that when Quinault eventually turned from the legitimate theatre to
the operatic stage, he continued to demonstrate his allegiance to pr&cieux val-
ues. In this game, someone would propose a question involving a delicate di-
lemma of the heart: replies in verse or prose would then be forthcoming and
their various merits debated by the company. Contemporary novels record
many such debates, imagined and actual. One particular batch of Questions,
posed by Charlotte de Bregy and replied to by Quinault at the king's command,
asked what one should do when one's heart dictated one course of action and
one's reason another, whether there was more joy to be had in the presence of a
loved one than pain caused by evidence of their indifference, whether one
should hate someone who does not return one's proffered love, and whether it
makes for greater happiness to love in vain someone who is indifferent to love
rather than someone who loves a rival.l8 The relevance of this apparently trivial
pursuit for Quinault's later work becomes clear when we realise that the ques-
tions summarized above outline the predicaments of many of his characters,
and his librettos, as much as his spoken dramas, act out the game with concrete
examples of each dilemma.",
'La crainte devant l'amour et le mariage ... est l'essence de la preciosit&.'20The
Questions d'amour were predicated upon the precieux belief that love was a
voluntary emotion, subject to reason. But in real life, seventeenth-century wom-
en had little control over such intimate areas of their life. The game concealed a

isN. BOILEAU-DESPREAUX, Satire III, 1. 188. See also Satire II, 1. 19-20: 'Si je pense exprimer un Auteur sans defaut,
I La raison dit Virgile, et la rime Quinault.'
16 E. BOURSAULT, Lettre ? la Reine, in: Lettres de respect, d'obligation et d amour (Paris 1669), p. 25-26: 'C'est un Auteur
doux, agrdable, I A qui la Schne est redevable; I Il ecrit toujours tendrement; I Il conjugue Amo galamment; I
Jamais Auteur hors-mis lui-mame, I N'a tant de fois dit, je vous aime; I Et de plus, selon le gofit mien, I On ne l'a
jamais dit si bien.
17 For example, COUNT DE BUSSY RABUTIN, Maximes d 'amour, in his Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (Paris 1856-75),
t. 1, p. 347-398. The Questions had a distant ancestry in the twelfth-century Provencal poetic genre known as the joc-
partit (jeu-parti), which discussed such topics as, 'is it better to be a wife or a mistress?' The Pr6cieuses' Questions may
also have been a deliberately bathetic copy of more elevated moral debate, in texts such as LE MOYNE, op. cit.
'"C. DE SAUMAIZE DE BREGY, Cinq questions d'amour, in her Lettres et Poesies (Paris 1666), p. 97-100.
9 For example, the head/heart dilemma is experienced by Sangaride: 'Revenez, ma raison, revenez pour jamais; I
Joignez-vous au d6pit pour 6touffer ma flame.' (Atys IV.2.) Alcide weighs up the pleasure of being in Alceste's
company against the pain of seeing her wed Admhte: 'Que je vais payer chbrement I Le plaisir de la voir encore!'
(Alceste I.1.) Phinde sees his love turn to hate: 'L'Amour meurt dans mon coeur; la rage lui succhde: I J'aime mieux
voir un monstre affreux I Devorer I'ingrate Andromide, I Que la voir dans le bras de mon rival heureux.' (Persde
IV.3.) Mercure consoles Chris with the argument that she need not attribute Jupiter's neglect to infidelity: 'Mais un
amant charg6 d'un grand empire, I N'a pas toujours le temps de bien aimer.' (Proserpine 1.2.)
20 A. ADAM, Histoire de la littiraturefranqaise au XVII siecle (Paris 1951), t. 2, p. 23.

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60 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully

crisis for them: how to maintain a degree of emotional and physical indep
dence, and how to prolong the period of courtship in order to defer the bio
cally enforced servitude which marriage and childbearing imposed on the
jority of women. No wonder the women who reigned in the salons of the
half of the century encouraged a return to the mediaeval ideal of courtly
which kept the lover firmly on his knees and at a safe distance. Later in t
century the Precieuses led a crusade against marriage. They offered their si
alternative roles: the 'Pr&cieuse prude' and the 'Pr&cieuse coquette.' The fo
advocated celibacy, the 'refus d'amour,' and took as her model the severely
tellectual novelist, Madeleine de Scudery. The latter admitted many admire
but imposed a long and arduous courtship on them, and, inspired by th
year-long engagement of another celebrated Precieuse, Julie d'Angennes, c
ed the right to defer submission almost indefinitely.
In his librettos, Quinault gives a voice both to the 'prude' and to t
coquette.' The character of the prude interested him greatly. Many of his
male characters aspire to celibacy, which they associate with 'innocence,' 'p
and 'libert&.' Mdde' describes the celibate state as a 'Doux repos, inno
paix' (Thesee, II.1); Proserpine develops at length the proposition that, 'Le v
bonheur I Est de garder son coeur' (11.8); Lybie, in Phai'ton, sings: 'Heu
une ame indifferente' (I.1); and Armide fears the consequences if she were
lose control over her emotions: 'Ah! si la liberte me doit tre ravie!' (III.1). But
the working out of his plots, Quinault subverts this pr&cieux aspiratio
shows the failure of women to remain celibate - the often tragic failure, as i
cases of Mdde and Armide, who struggle in vain against their own natu
preserve their roles as 'inhumaines.' This word betrays a male view of the
bate woman, and in these characterizations Quinault endorses the view
celibacy is unnatural, a dehumanizing state. That this was a common male
sponse to the 'Precieuses prudes' is suggested by Moliere's satire o
position of Armande in Les Femmes savantes.21
For those who briefly succeed in living independently of men, an even m
poignant fate is prepared. It is unusual in Quinault's librettos to find an ep
of intense drama tucked away in a divertissement. However, one of these
sodes is worth detaching from its uneven dramatic context to be giv
hearing on its own merits. The fable of Pan and Syrinx in Act III of Isis d
with an archetypal celibate. The episode emerges from a discussion bet
Hierax and Argus, in which Argus urges his brother to give up his doo
attachment to the nymph lo, who is being alternately wooed by Jupiter a
punished by Junon. Argus, advocating a hedonist creed of non-involve
sings, 'Libert&!', a cry which is immediately taken up by the would-be cel
Syrinx and her nymphs in a chorus which recurs throughout the episode.
word 'LibertY' is heard 95 times in a sequence of scenes containing just 33 li
The episode shows Quinault and Lully collaborating to emphasize a
word in pr&cieux dogma. An abundance of male and female pr&cieux write
confirm its significance: 'L'honneur et la chastet6 des Dames font leur ver

21 MOLItRE, Les Femmes savantes (Paris 1672).

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Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 61

libert&. La Dame qui a consenti s'est rendue esclave.'22 'LibertY' is the them
the Abbe de Pure's seminal novel, La Pricieuse, in which De Pure consistent
associates the term with an all-female social environment: it is the absence of
men which confers 'libert&.' He also invokes the word to represent escape from
the 'Ipouvantable servitude' of marriage.23 Likewise, Somaize, who not only de-
fines marriage as 'l'amour fini,' and 'l'abime de la libertY,' but also writes of the
state of 'libert&' as being 'necessaire aux Precieuses.'24
The episode of Pan and Syrinx, then, seems deliberately designed to act out
the doctrine of the 'Pr&cieuse prude,' and it emphasises a significant contem-
porary term to express Syrinx's aspirations. Moreover, the divertissement
mirrors in miniature the action of the main drama: the flight of a nymph from a
god. But Syrinx is a more authentic would-be celibate than the heroine of the
main drama - lo comes late to a realisation that death is preferable to suffering
under the consequences of love and jealousy - and her fate is more powerfully
represented than lo's, since Quinault allows Syrinx to be metamorphosed into a
bed of reeds, but, in conformity with 'la bienseance,' draws the line at changing
Io into a cow.

A number of major and minor characters in Quinault's operas could w

declare with Syrinx, 'Je declare a l'Amour une guerre immortelle' (III.6)
that is only one side of the complex precieux response to love. Jean-Michel
lous identifies a rebellion, dating from around 1660, among male lovers, w
was a reaction to the perfect submission of the chivalric lover of the first ha
the century.25 Contending that in the second half of the century it became
admissible for a man of fashion to be unhappy in his suit for long, he trace
growth of a hedonist code of behaviour, summed-up ironically by Moli
Don Juan as, 'Toutes les belles ont droit de nous charmer' (I.2).26 Pelous arg
that some women, at least, chose to attempt to regain their former domin
by adopting the corresponding role of 'coquette.' The aspiration of the coqu
is expressed by Berelise in De Scudery's novel Cldlie as, 'D'etre fort aim&e,
n'aimer point, ou de n'aimer guere.'27
The role of the prude is to refuse, of the coquette to choose. The coquet
does not experience passion, and is fully in control of her emotions. Quinau
librettos contain many examples of the 'precieuse coquette': Dorine in T
warns that, 'I1l est dangereux d'aimer tant' (II.5). Charite in Cadmus divides
from the suffering with which it had been synonymous in past deca
'L'Amour n'est plaisant, des qu'il n'est plus un jeux' (II.1). Cephise in Alc
keeps two suitors dangling throughout the opera only to reject them both in
last act. In question was a power struggle between the sexes, in which both
donist and coquette viewed with cynicism the disregard of genuine fee

22 J. DU BOSC, La Femme hiroique, ou les hiroines comparies avec les hWros en toute sorte de vertus (Paris 1645), t. 2,
23 'Je veux travailler ... A la libert6 de mon sexe ... et a la destruction de cette 6pouvantable servitude.' DE PURE
t.2, p.269.
24 SOMAIZE, op.cit., t.1, p.51, 172-173.
25 J.-M. PELOUS, Amour pricieux. Amour galant (1654-1675) (Paris 1980), p.195-224.
26 MOLIERE, Dom Juan (Paris 1665).
27 M. DE SCUDERY, Clelie (Paris 1654-61, reprint Geneva 1973), t.5, l.iii, p.1188.

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62 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully

displayed in the way in which women were bought and sold in marriage. T
pr&cieux bid for emancipation, whether through celibacy or Don Juanism
volved denying the power of love, and the sexes competed to claim the rig
reject an unwanted lover, and sought to defend themselves from the pligh
being themselves rejected.
All Quinault's hedonists are gods and all his coquettes are servants. He n
er attempted to represent a heroine as coquette: he subverted the pr&cieux
for emancipation by refusing his heroines the power to choose. It is in this
that Quinault's representation of women differs crucially from the Precie
self-image; for the Pr&cieuses the issues were social, for Quinault, biologic
The Precieuses believed their unhappiness stemmed from the nature of th
ciety in which they lived, but Quinault portrayed them unhappy as the res
their innate nature. The Pr&cieuses prided themselves on the freedom ach
by their 'refus d'amour,' but Quinault represented them as powerless to re
invariably depicting sexual passion in women as a physical force whic
moves mental autonomy; we notice the recurrent formula, 'malgre moi,' w
which they excuse their capitulation.
The concept of the woman whose physical nature makes her unable to c
trol her emotions or her actions had been current in the Renaissance, deri
from the attribution of cold and moist humours, which were considered to
der women more imaginative and more implacable than men. This interpr
tion was discarded in the middle of seventeenth-century France, when
brief period, associated with the regency of Anne of Austria (1643-52)
image of heroic woman, the 'femme forte,' was constructed.28 Quinault n
the idea of the heroic woman by denying his heroines a capacity for disin
ested action. His portrayal of women borrows from the physical energy o
heroic image, but denies its moral strength, and replaces virtuous zeal
disabling sexual passion.
Quinault selected material from the stock of subject matter common to
seventeenth-century librettists in order to provide a context for this inter
tion. After his first opera, Cadmus (1673), he rejected the male-centred m
and legends popular in Italian opera - the stories of Jason, Hercules, Achil
Ulysses, and, notably, the widely-set myth of Orpheus. He chose instead s
which focus on women. But instead of representing the strong, indepe
women the Pr&cieuses aspired to be, he portrayed women who either subm
male domination or who are destroyed by their own passions.29 Furthermor
often modified the male and female roles represented in earlier literature
replacing the totally subservient male with a more spirited model.
As a result, he removed the woman's power to initiate action. When, fo
ample, in the mediaeval romance, Amadis de Gaule - a popular work with

28 The heroic woman is analysed in LE MOYNE, op.cit.

29 For a more detailed structural analysis of Quinault's heroines, see my paper The Positioning of Women in Qu
World Picture, in: J.-B. Lully: Actes du Colloque St-Germain-en-Laye - Heidelberg 1987, eds. J. de la Gorce - H. S
(Laaber 1990), p.193-199, in which I trace three possible roles for women characters, the goddess-victim, the h
pawn and the servant-coquette. I argue that Quinault's heroines offered a 'school for royal mistresses,' an
perceived as such by contemporary audiences.

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Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 63

Pr&cieuses - the knight Amadis believes his mistress Oriane to be unfaithful,

still remains enslaved: he declares that he loves even her hatred of him.30
Quinault found this implausible. He made his Amadis reject Oriane when
believes her to be unfaithful, allowing Amadis to pursue military glory, whi
Oriane is forced into waiting on events to restore her reputation. Quina
deviated from a more recent model when he adapted the story of Perseus fr
Corneille's machine play, Andromede (1650); Quinault added a new charact
Merope, who is passed over by Persee in favour of Andromede, and wh
perfectly exemplifies the suffering female victim of unrequited love.31 Quinau
heroines are often passive characters, who experience mental turmoil in a sta
of physical inaction. We can appropriately borrow a phrase from Rolan
Barthes's study of Racine, in whose works he found that 'le verbe aimer soit p
nature intransitif,' and apply it to Quinault's heroines, for Quinault, like Racin
represented the state of being in love by concentrating on the subject of the
emotion to the exclusion of any object at all.32

II

To explore the uneasy conjunction of violent emotions and social restraint,

Quinault devised a dramatic monologue which sets out the tensions of the he-
roine's role. Typically in three sections, with a short, heartfelt aspiration or
desire, a middle paragraph which either explains the wish, or explains why it
cannot be granted, and a return to the initial aspiration, it focusses exclusively
on states of mind. For example in the opera Thesee, Medde's first monologue
opens with a desire, typical of the Precieuse prude, for

Doux repos, innocente paix,

Heureux, heureux un coeur qui ne vous perd jamais!

But Quinault subsequently makes her articulate an anti-precieux position in this

exposition of womanly susceptibility:

L'impitoyable Amour m'a toujours poursuivie.

N'etait-ce point assez des maux qu'il m'avait faits?
Pourquoi ce Dieu cruel, avec de nouveaux traits,
Vient-il encor troubler le reste de ma vie?

The opening couplet then returns with reinforced tragic meaning, since both we
and Medde understand that she will be unable to regain her state of fancy-free
'liberte'. What, at the beginning of the monologue, had been an expression of
hope, is now repeated in despair.

30 G. RODRIGUEZ DE MONTALVO, attr., N. DE HERBERAY, tr., Amadis de Gaule (Paris 1540, 7th ed. 1577).
31 Compare, P. CORNEILLE, Andrombde (Paris 1650).
32 R. BARTHES, Sur Racine (Paris 1963), p. 58.

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64 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully

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Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 65

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66 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully

Quinault's varied scheme of versification probably derives from the sta

popular in the French theatre between 1630 and 1660.33 Stances were m
logues, formed by a sequence of self-contained strophes, using shorter
than the standard alexandrine, and with various constraints on the relatio
of content to form. In spoken drama, monologues, whether in regular alex
drines or in the shorter-lined verse forms of stances, already showed
kinship with the aria: they were almost always given over to effusion
emotion, dwelling on a state of mind rather than furthering the narration,
they were favoured as opportunities for virtuoso delivery by actors who u
wide range of pitch and emphasis to enhance the meaning. Not surprisi
we find some of the same complaints against such opportunism as are hear
the eighteenth century against singers' excesses in the da capo aria.34
delivery of the stances used another musical resource: actors took advantag
the rhythmic freedom implicit in the irregular lines, and exploited caesuras
cadences to suggest the pauses and hesitations of impromptu meditation -
despite the dictum of one critic who advocated that stances should only be
in a dramatic context in which they might realistically have been prepared
rehearsed.31
As with the stances, there is no fixed verse form for Quinault's monologues.
He tends to make the first line a short one of eight syllables:

Doux repos, innocente paix (Thisde, II.1)

A qui pourrai-j'avoir recours? (Amadis, IV.2)
Vaine fiert&, faible rigueur (Proserpine, 1.4)

Shorter lines are also possible:

O rigoureux martyre (Phafton, V.3)

Only rarely does a monologue open with a full alexandrine:

O mort! venez finir mon destin deplorable! (Persde, V.1)

The middle lines are almost always longer, usually the conventional alexandri-
ne:

Ah! faut-il me venger

En perdant ce que j'aime?
Que fais-tu, ma fureur, oiN vas-tu m'engager?
Punir ce coeur ingrat, c'est me punir moi-meme ... (Thisee, V.1)

33 I am grateful to Patricia Ranum for first drawing my attention to the correspondence

monologues and Corneille's stances.
34 'Les monologues sont trop longs et trop frequents ... les comediens les souhaitaient, et croy
plus d'avantage.' P. CORNEILLE, L 'Examen de Clitandre (Paris 1660).
35 F. HEDELIN (ABBE D'AUBIGNAC), La Pratique du thadtre (Paris 1657), p.343-348.

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 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 67

Quinault's monologues have a characteristic distribution of lines betw

the aspiration and the middle part. The aspiration is always shorter, typical
very much so. In 'Doux repos,' the text pattern was two lines, four lines, tw
lines, which the musical setting renders as four bars, nine bars, four bars. M
monologues have greater contrast between the two components, for exampl
the line pattern of 3-12-3 for Andromede's monologue 'Dieux qui me destine
une mort si cruelle' in Persde, IV.5. Sometimes the aspiration occurs three tim
This can give the short opening lines a particularly brooding, obsessive effe

Espoir si cher et si doux,

Ah! pourquoi me trompez-vous?
Des supremes grandeurs vous m'avez fait descendre;
Mille coeurs m'adoraient, je les neglige tous:
Je n'en demande qu'un, il a peine a se rendre:
Je ne sens que chagrins et que soupcons jaloux.
Est-ce le sort charmant que je devais attendre?
Espoir si cher et si doux,
Ah! pourquoi me trompez-vous?
Helas! par tant d'attraits fallait-il me surprendre!
Heureuse si toujours j'avais pu me defendre!
L'Amour qui me flattait me cachait son courroux.
C'est donc pour me frapper des plus funestes coups,
Que le cruel Amour m'a fait un coeur si tendre!
Espoir si cher et si doux,
Ah! pourquoi me trompez-vous?
(Atys, 111.8)

Corneille defined the subject matter of his stances as avoiding the most vio
ent emotions, but dealing rather with 'les deplaisirs, les irresolutions, les inqu
tudes, les douces reveries, et g6neralement tout ce qui peut souffrir a un act
de prendre haleine, et de penser a ce qu'il doit dire.'36 Quinault goes beyond th
and invests his monologues with the most extreme passions expres
anywhere in his librettos - though even at his most violent, Quinault ne
touches the ferocity of Corneille's and Racine's alexandrine monologues. Som
of Quinault's strophes, however, reach a mood of desperate fatalism. F
example, in M6rope's first monologue in Persde, 1.3, the initial aspirat
expresses, as usual, the desire of a would-be Precieuse prude:

Ah! je garderai bien mon coeur,

Si je puis le reprendre.

In the next four lines she demands to be released from her consuming passi
and for peace to be restored. The two opening lines are then repeated. Th
follows a little piece of psychology particularly typical of Quinault: the next

36 P. CORNEILLE, L 'Examen d'Andrombde (Paris 1660).

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68 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully

four lines begin with a sigh:

H61as! mon coeur soupire, et ce soupir trop tendre

Va, malgr6 mon d6pit, rappeler ma langueur:
L'Amour est toujours mon vainqueur,
Et je veux en vain m'en d6fendre.

The sigh reveals to M6rope that she can't help herself, and that love has con-
quered her once more. The final couplet tellingly alters the aspiration to:

Ah! j'ai trop engage mon coeur;

Je ne puis le reprendre.

Lully collaborates with Quinault in subverting the Pr&cieuses' self-image.

His settings reinforce and intensify the psychology of Quinault's monologues.
He matches Quinault's structure of aspiration-explanation-aspiration with a
form which uses measured, free, and a return to measured style. The aspira-
tions contain some of Lully's most powerful inventions. He often fuses the an-
guished exclamation in Quinault's opening line with a memorable musical
phrase, arising out of the declamation of the words.

Music example 2
2/ i Oriane

A qui pour - rai-j'a- voir re - cours?

2/ ii Ar6thuse

Vai - ne fier - t6, fai - ble ri - gueur, Quevous a - vez peu de puis-san - ce!
2/ iii M6rope
A A M

0 Mort! Ve-nez fi - nir mon des-tin d6 - plo - ra - ble, C

_ Z Z_ _ dik '1 I I '

Mort! Ve-nez fi - nir mon des - tin d6 - plo - ra- - - ble.

2/ iv Cybele

Es - poir si cher et si doux, Ah! ah! pour- quoi me trom - pez - vous?

Ah! je gar - de - rai bien mon coeur, si je puis le re - pren - - - dre!

i: Amadis, act IV, scene 2; ii: Proserpine, act I, scene 4; iii: Persde, act V, scene 1; iv:
Atys, act III, scene 8; v: Persde, act I, scene 3.

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Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully 69

We can draw some generalisations from these incipits, noticing the use of
reticent, self-deprecating, predominantly conjunct melodic lines, in a restrict
register, in which the singer reveals her self-knowledge of her own weakne
'Vaine fierte, faible rigueur,' 'Venez finir mon destin d6plorable,' 'Espoir si ch
et si doux,' - the settings articulate the accents of despair. In contrast, the for
right leaps for 'Ah!' or 'O' give clues to that strength of passion which Quin
diagnoses as his heroines' downfall. As declamatory settings of French seven
teenth-century verse, these opening lines are exemplary.
The middle episode is usually cast in recitatif simple. The bass line loses i
rhythmic drive, while the voice part propels the music through a series of m
ulations in a style melodically less structured than the head phrase. Althoug
invariably syllabic, the episode relies less heavily on the reiterated anap
than does the recitative in Lully's dialogue scenes. The aspiration gains in dr
matic force from the juxtaposition of styles, and it is often further underlined by
a ritournelle, which may introduce the same material, and, exceptionally, ret
within the movement. The mixture of measured and free setting is, of cour
typical of Lully's style throughout the operas, but it is nowhere used more lo
cally than in this genre, where it represents the dichotomy between head a
heart.
But what genre is it? I have tentatively suggested the term 'reprise mono
logue' to identify it, but, as with so many aspects of Lully's genres, there can
no straightforward definition. The telling recurrence of brief, measured phr
is a widespread device in Lully's operas, and the resulting structures vary fr
short, lyrical rondeaux with a single reprise (for example, Hymen's 'Ven
Dieu des festins', Cadmus, V.3) to whole recitative scenes which are given so
unity and much dramatic impact by the recurrence of a single line (Alcide's
partirai trop tard,' Alceste, 1.1). Between these extremes falls the reprise mon
logue, which differs from a passage of recitative by the fact that it is clear
identifiable as a closed form, and is distinguishable from Lully's airs by its
clamatory style. It is usually - not always - a soliloquy, and most often open
scenes. It is generally accompanied by the continuo alone, though two examp
in Armide are accompanied by five-part strings. The reprise monologue is e
sentially female rhetoric: of some 30 reprise monologues I have identified in
Lully's operas, only five are sung by men.
The distinction between the reprise monologue and the rondeau air is som
times fragile. In Medee's 'Ah! Ah! faut-il me venger,' quoted above, Lu
departs from the poetic form Quinault devised for him. The librettist presen
Lully with a five-section monologue, with three statements of the aspiratio
Lully chose to set the first three sections as a lyrical rondeau air, breaking in
recitative for the fourth section, and returning to a semblance of the measur
opening for the final (altered) aspiration. In the context of Lully's general usa
of air for relaxed episodes and recitative for moments of heightened emotio
the effect of this unconventional structure is to weight the conclusion, under
ing M~dde's destructive jealousy.

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70 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully

Music example 3

Ah! Ah! faut- ii me ven - ger En per - dant ce que

I . '2. I

j'ai me? -me? Que fais - tu, ma fu - reur, of vas - tu m'en- ga -

- ger? Pu - nir ce coeur in - grat, c'est me pu - ir moi- m - - me. J'en mour-

- rai de - dou- leur, je trem - ble d'y son - ger. Ah! Ah! faut-

il me ven - ger, En per - dant ce que j'ai - - - me?

Ma ri - va- le i - omphe, et me yol ou- a - g

1j Im,
- our sans peine et sans dan - ger, Voir le

- tr - me! Non, non, i faut me en-ger, En per- dant ce quej'ai - - me.

Thise'e, act V, scene 1.

Like Quinault, Lully drew on a preexisting form for his new structur
Anthony has identified Italian models for Lully's 'extended-binary-form
and the same is probably true for the reprise monologues. The lament,
in Italian seventeenth-century music, is an obvious source. Lorenzo
traces the evolution of two types of lament, the monologue scene,
from Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, and the ground-bass lament, fr
same composer's Lamento della Ninfa.38 Because of his ostensible role a
tor and protector of a French national style, Lully would have been con
to avoid overt reference to so Italian a style as the ground bass: ground

37 J. R. ANTHONY, Lully's Airs - French or Italian?, in: MT 128 (1987), p.126-129.

38 L. BIANCONI, Music in the Seventeenth Century, tr. D. Bryant (Cambridge 1987), p.209-219.

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 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully 71

are rare in the operas (and often curiously concealed: for example 'Je me d
fends,' Atys, 1.3.). His reprise monologues are closer in spirit to the less-s
typed Italian monologue scene. As a source for Lully's Italianate binary
Anthony suggests Luigi Rossi's Orfeo, first performed in Paris in 1647; the
work also contains a possible prototype for the reprise monologue in the lam
'Uccidetemi, o pene' (111.3.).
Lully and Quinault took both structural and stylistic hints from such I
laments, imitating the alternation of inner conflicts and the fluidity of styl
the French genre is altogether more compressed, reducing the often lavish
quence of emotions in the Italian lament to two, and organizing them
tightly, in reprise form. The particular miniaturized intensity of Lully's re
monologues clearly springs directly from the content and structure
Quinault's verse, and in their juxtaposed sections, we can trace the tension
tween on the one hand, temperate precieux rationality, and on the oth
patriarchal perception of woman's susceptibility.
In the operas of Lully's French successors, notably Campra, Destouches
Rameau, the outer sections of the reprise monologue become longer, a cha
initially brought about by the composers, who use verbal repetition to ext
the first line.39 Eventually both the musical and the textual proportions ar
versed, so that the monologue takes on a form much closer to the Itali
capo aria, but without the virtuosity often associated with the da capo's Fr
equivalent, the ariette; orchestral accompaniment becomes the norm, and
substantial structure is almost invariably introduced with a ritournelle.

III

In conclusion, we note that precieux roles and precieux attitudes are consp
uously represented in Quinault's librettos: they dominate his characterizatio
women in the minor roles, and his operas as a whole give a new prominenc
expressing female points of view which the women who made up a signifi
proportion of his audiences found irresistible.40 But in his heroines, he por
a concept of women's roles, whose frank acknowledgement of the potentia
tragic consequences of their sexuality the Pr&cieuses would have been relu
to endorse. Curiously enough, his contemporaries seem to have overlooked
novelty of his heroines. The attitudes adopted in seventeenth-century crit
of Quinault were formed during his early years as a dramatist, which wer
the years in which he was a model precieux pupil. His opponents took
tone from Boileau, who concentrated his virulent attack on the passive
roles in the plays and in the first two operas. By the time Quinault cam

39 See A. CAMPRA, 'Tristes appas,' Hippodamie (1708), IV.4.; the librettist supplied a verse form of 2-4-2-4
Campra reversed the proportions, setting it as 13-8-13-9-13, with both an introductory and an inter
ritournelle.

40 See, for example, the wide use of quotation from and, allusion to Quinault's verses by Madame de S~vign6 and her
circle: L. HIBBERD, Mme. de Sivignd and the Operas of Lully, in: Essays in Musicology: A Birthday Offering for Willi Apel,
ed. H. Tischler (Indiana 1968), p.153-163.

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72 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully

write his most effective librettos, critical attitudes, for and against his w
had become fixed, and his new dramatic hierarchy, built around tra
heroines, seems to have gone unmentioned by French critics.
But the fatality of love makes for good drama. Audiences appla
Quinault's images of womanly frailty, and a century on from Quinault, Fr
opera had become irreversibly woman-centred. Revivals of Lully's op
played a major role in the early eighteenth-century repertory and they w
followed in the last quarter of the century by a remarkable spate of resettin
Quinault's librettos, of which the most famous is Gluck's version of Armi
1777. Quinault's influence extended even later than this, with resettings of
by Piccinni and Persee by Philidor in 1780, of Thisee by Gossec in 1782, and
markably, of Proserpine by Paisiello in 1803. By that date, Quinault's thea
women had already entered the mainstream of European opera, perpetuati
tradition in which woman rather than man served as the hub of the action and
the focus of psychological interest - an emphasis which would surely have sat-
isfied precieux ambitions at last.

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