1 de la Rochefoucauld, François, Réflexions, ou Sentences et maximes morales (Paris: C. Barbin: 1665), 33 and 60Google Scholar.

2 See Burke, Peter, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Melzer, Sara and Norberg, Kathryn, eds, From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Kantorowicz, Ernst discussed the projection of kingly identities in The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar, where he posited that the early modern period saw a transformation in the concept of political authority in which a sovereign came to be understood as possessing two bodies – a natural, mortal body and a supernatural, immortal body that represented the body politic. The rituals surrounding Louis XIV and representations of his kingship support the symbolic representation described by Kantorowicz. In ‘Royal Bodies, Royal Bedrooms: The Lever du Roy and Louis XIV's Versailles’ David M. Gallo describes how Louis's signature ritual of using two bedrooms, the private petite chambre and the public grande chambre, resonates with Kantorowicz's theory; see Gallo, , ‘Royal Bodies, Royal Bedrooms’, Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12/1 (2008), 111Google Scholar.

3 Stevens, Jane R., ‘The Meanings and Uses of Caractère in Eighteenth-Century France’, in French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. Cowart, Georgia (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989), 27Google Scholar. For a study of social commerce based on reading inner nature from appearance see Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (New York: Pantheon, 1983)Google Scholar.

4 Elias, The Court Society, 104.

5 de La Bruyère, Jean, Les caractères de Theophraste traduits du grec; avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, sixth edition (Paris: Estienne Michelet, 1691), 350–351Google Scholar. Quoted and translated in Posner, David, The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 187–188CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Euthrycrate appears first in the sixth edition of 1691, published three years after the first edition of 1688 (Paris: E. Michallet). Nine editions of the work appeared between 1688 and 1696, with revisions and additions in each.

6 French critical theorist Jean Rousset would venture even further in La littérature de l'âge baroque: Circé et le paon (Paris: Corti, 1954) to claim that a phenomenology of illusion and deception was fundamental to the baroque aesthetic. In his later L'intérieur et l'extérieur: essais sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Corti, 1968), he developed this phenomenological study to examine tensions between exterior façades, disguise, decoration and movement, and the interior, inner, religious and even mystical self. Some thirty years later, Scarpetta, Guy discussed a related phenomenology of illusion fundamental to the aesthetics of baroque and ‘neo-baroque’ modernisms in L'artifice (Paris: Grasset, 1988)Google Scholar.

7 Stevens, ‘Caractère’, 27. In his study of La Bruyère, Louis Van Delft detects a fundamental ambivalence towards interiority in the author's conflicting statements on the relationship between interior and exterior. On the one hand, La Bruyère writes that ‘one cannot judge man like an image or a figure, from one single and first glance: he has an interior and a heart that needs further study’ (‘il ne faut pas juger des hommes comme d'un tableau ou d'une figure, sur une seule et première vue: il y a un intérieur et un coeur qu'il faut approfondir’). On the other, Van Delft explains, ‘But this in-depth study is, for him, an exception’. He confines himself to what he sees (the allusion to the ‘glance’ in this last quotation is not a matter of chance): attitudes, gestures and looks. And if one of his remarks serves to define his method, it would be this instead: ‘There is nothing that is so subtle, so simple, so imperceptible that we cannot detect by its manners’ (‘Il n'ya rien de se délié, de si simple et de si imperceptible, où il n'entre des manières qui nous décèlent’). See Van Delft, Louis, La Bruyère moraliste: quatre études sur les Caractères (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 74Google Scholar.

8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, trans. Scholar, Angela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5Google Scholar and Rousseau, , Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau, volume 1 (Geneva, 1782), 2Google Scholar.

9 Diderot, , Paradoxe sur le comédien (Paris: A. Sautelet, 1830), 43 and 16Google Scholar. Translated in Diderot, Denis, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Bremmer, Geoffrey (London: Penguin, 1994), 124–125 and 198Google Scholar.

10 de Piles, Roger, Abregé de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs Ouvrages, Et un Traité du Peintre parfait, de la connoissance des Desseins, de l'utilité des Estampes (Paris, 1699), 71–72Google Scholar. Quoted and translated in Stevens, ‘Caractère’, 31.

11 See especially Phillips, Henry, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar and Fumaroli, Marc, ‘La querelle de la moralité du théâtre avant Nicole et Bossuet’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 73/5–6 (1970), 1007–1030Google Scholar.

12 Bénichou, Paul, Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism, trans. Hughes, Elizabeth (New York: Anchor, 1971), xGoogle Scholar. Odette de Mourges offers a similar reflection on the ‘philosophical’ nature of disparate literary genres: ‘The relation between the body and mind, the study of the passions, the analytical survey of man's feelings and emotions had ranged from the very serious and coherent Traité des passions by Descartes to the equally coherent but more frivolous Carte de Tendre.’ See de Mourgues, Odette, Two French Moralists: La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 19Google Scholar.

13 For the purposes of this study I will focus on literature and music, but the visual arts offer another important point of comparison.

14 Fuller, David, ‘Of Portraits, “Sapho” and Couperin: Titles and Characters in French Instrumental Music of the High Baroque’, Music and Letters 78/2 (1997), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Couperin, François, Pièces de clavecin . . . premier livre (Paris: author, 1713), no page numbersGoogle Scholar. Translation adapted from Fuller, ‘Of Portraits’, 167.

16 David Fuller suggests that contemporaneity played a major role in understanding the titles: ‘Like the humor in Le Canard enchaîné or The New Yorker, [the music's titles] refer to the immediate, to current affairs, and they are as impenetrable to the uninitiated as jokes of one are to the reader of the other. The musical allusions refer to what is fashionable or popular. One has the impression, listening to Couperin, of standing on a dark terrace watching a brilliant “Regency” evening through windowed doors: of hearing a witty conversation in a language you do not understand by half.’ , Fuller, ‘Les pièces de clavecin’, in François Couperin: programme édité à l'occasion des grandes journées François Couperin réalisées par le Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, ed. Cessac, Catherine (Versailles: Centre de Musique Baroque, 2000), 74Google Scholar. I agree that the time lapse between Couperin's time and ours obscures much, but I would venture that more than history stands in our way. Sometimes the obfuscation seems deliberate.

17 Clark, Jane and Connon, Derek, ‘The Mirror of Human Life’: Reflections on François Couperin's ‘Pièces de Clavecin’ (Huntingdon: King's Music, 2002; revised edition, 2011)Google Scholar; Mellers, Wilfrid, François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition, new revised edition (London: Faber, 1987)Google Scholar; Citron, Pierre, Couperin (Bourges: Seuil, 1956)Google Scholar; Beaussant, Philippe, François Couperin, trans. Land, Alexandra (Portland: Amadeus, 1980)Google Scholar; Tunley, David, François Couperin and ‘The Perfection of Music’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)Google Scholar; Fuller, , ‘Of Portraits, “Sapho” and Couperin’; Baumont, Olivier, Couperin: le musicien des rois (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)Google Scholar; Porot, Bertrand, ‘Ville réelle, ville imaginée dans les pièces de clavecin de François Couperin (1668–1733)’, in Mélodies urbaines: la musique dans les villes d'Europe (XVIe–XIXe siècles), ed. Gauthier, Laure and Traversier, Mélanie (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), 255–283Google Scholar.

18 Fuller, ‘Of Portraits’, 170.

19 Citron, Couperin, 34.

20 Baumont, Couperin, 42.

21 Clark and Connon, ‘The Mirror’, 27.

22 Beaussant, François Couperin, 333.

23 Antoine, Michel, ‘Autour de François Couperin’, Revue de musicologie 34/103–104 (1952), 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 The inventory is reproduced in Antoine, ‘Autour de François Couperin’. The estate gives the entire contents of the Couperin lodgings – home also to his wife Marie-Anne Ansault and his daughter Marguerite-Antoinette. While this does raise the possibility that some contents of the library belonged to other members of the family, three factors suggest otherwise. First, the disposition of armoires en bibliothèque in the inventory suggests ownership by François. Two were located in a well-appointed chambre on the rue des Bons-Enfans probably occupied by François and Marie-Anne (among many furnishings, it contained two beds, a shaving basin and various guns and swords) (118). The third occupied a chambre on the rue Neuve des Petits-Champs that also contained two writing tables and no bed, suggesting that it functioned as a study or studio for François (120). The second factor suggesting that the library's contents belonged predominantly to Couperin comes from Moroney, Davitt's study of the revision of L'art de toucher le clavecin in ‘Couperin et les contradicteurs’, François Couperin: nouveaux regards (Paris: Klincksieck and Villecroze: Académie Musicale de Villecroze, 1998), 163–186Google Scholar. Moroney suggests that Couperin was self-conscious about his lack of education (hence the defensive tone of some of his writings), which raises the possibility that his extensive library was meant, in some way, to shore up a less than thorough education. Finally, book collecting in the period was, with a few exceptions, predominately a male pursuit; see Chatelain, Jean-Marc, La bibliothèque de l'honnête homme: livres, lecture et collections en France à l'âge classique (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Female collectors were more the exception than the rule, as was the case with Elisabeth Charlotte, second duchesse d’ Orléans (1642–1722), and female book collections had distinct characteristics not present in the Couperin catalogue. Her collection generally reflects the advice on reading set forth in de la Barre, François Poullain's De l'éducation des dames pour la conduit de l'esprit dans les sciences et dans les moeurs: entretiens (Paris: Dézallier, 1679), 306–332Google Scholar, in which he advises a healthy dose of Descartes as well as works on grammar, geometry, logic, theology and history. Other women to take up similarly rigorous reading lists included the duchesse du Maine and Madame de Montpensier. See Goodman, Elise, The Cultivated Woman: Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century France (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008)Google Scholar, especially 108–109, 120 and 126.

25 Marcelle Benoit, ‘La vie de François Couperin’, in François Couperin: programme édité à l'occasion des grandes journées François Couperin, 40.

26 Precedent for the close study of a composer's personal library and intersections with his work can be found in Hörwarthner, Maria, ‘Joseph Haydns Bibliothek: Versuch einer literarhistorischen Rekonstruktion’, in Joseph Haydn und die Literatur seiner Zeit, ed. Zeman, Herbert (Eisenstadt: Institut für österreichische Kulturgeschichte Eisenstadt, 1976), 157–207Google Scholar. This essay is translated by Talbot, Katherine in Haydn and His World, ed. Sisman, Elaine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 395–462Google Scholar.

27 Malebranche, Nicolas, De la Recherche de la verité, fourth edition (Paris: Prallard, 1678), 250Google Scholar. Translation from Malebranche, , The Search after Truth, trans. and ed. Lennon, Thomas M. and Olscamp, Paul J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 290Google Scholar. Malebranche follows this statement with a quotation from La Rochefoucauld: ‘virtue would be short-lived were vanity not its companion’ (‘la vertu n'iroit pas loin se la vanité ne lui renoit compagnie’).

28 Gray, Patricia, ‘Subscribing to Plutarch in the Eighteenth Century’, Australian Journal of French Studies 29 (1992), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Plutarch, , Les vies des hommes illustres, volume 6, trans. Dacier, André (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1724), 1–2Google Scholar. Translation from Lamberton, Robert, Plutarch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 71–72Google Scholar.

30 Curtus, Quintus, Quint-Curce de la vie et des actions d'Alexandre le Grande, fourth edition, trans. de Vaugelas, M. (Lyon: Chize, 1692), 7Google Scholar. The History of the Life and Actions of Alexander the Great: From the Time of his Birth, to that of his Death, who Afterwards was Embalmed. Translated from the French of Monsieur de Vaugelas … (London: M. Cooper[, 1755]), 2.

31 de Bellegarde, Jean-Baptiste Morvan, Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres et grands capitaines de France (Paris: Le Gras, 1726)Google Scholar.

32 DeJean, Joan, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 93Google Scholar.

33 Quoted in Bjornson, Richard, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 223–224Google Scholar. The quotation appears in the Preface to Lesage's Histoire d'Estevanille Gonzalez, second part (Paris: Prault, 1734), no page numbers.

34 Lesage, Alain René, Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, volume 1, third edition (Paris: Ribou, 1730), 131Google Scholar. Translation from Lesage, , The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, trans. Smollett, Tobias, ed. Brack, O. M. Jr and Chilton, Leslie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 57Google Scholar.

35 Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero, 224.

36 Villedieu was known not only for her fictions but also for her social criticisms in works such as Les annales galantes and Le portrait des faiblesses humaines, both of which offer scathing portraits of moral corruption to serve as counterexamples for the conduct of Villedieu's readers. See Kuizenga, Donna, ‘Madame de Villedieu: A Woman on Her Own’, in Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, ed. and trans. Kuizenga, Donna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

37 de Villedieu, Madame, Memoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, second part (Lyons: Guillimin, 1693), 145Google Scholar. Translation from Villedieu, Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, ed. and trans. Donna Kuizenga, 74.

38 Villedieu, Memoires, 8, and Villedieu, Memoirs, 26.

39 de Lafayette, Madame, La Princesse de Clèves, ed. Magne, Émile (Geneva: Droz and Lille: Giard, 1950), 39–40Google Scholar. Translation from Lafayette, , La Princesse de Clèves, trans. Cave, Terrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26Google Scholar.

40 Quoted in Cottrell, Robert D., Brantôme: The Writer as Portraitist of His Age (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 12Google Scholar.

41 La Bruyère, , Les caractères de Theophraste traduits du grec: avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, eighth edition (Paris: Michallet, 1694), 362Google Scholar.

42 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, Oeuvres diverses du Sr. Boileau Despréaux, volume 1 (Paris: D. Thierry, 1701), 120Google Scholar. My translation.

43 Corneille, Racine and Molière, along with Pascal, Bousset, Boileau-Despréaux and others, figure centrally in Bénichou, Paul's Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948)Google Scholar, with particular focus on what Bénichou describes as ‘heroic ethics’ and ‘worldly ethics’ on the theatrical stage.

44 Chatelain, La bibliothèque de l'honnête homme, 41.

45 La Bruyère, Les caractères de Theophraste, 77–78.

46 Posner, The Performance of Nobility, 189.

47 Stone, Harriet, The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 102Google Scholar.

48 Couperin, François, L'art de toucher le clavecin, ed. and trans. Halford, Margery (New York: Alfred Music Publishing, 1974), 49Google Scholar.

49 Moreover, what appears on the page is not the whole ‘picture’, so to speak. In both cadence and the execution of notes inégales the notes on the page look one way but are played another.

50 Amateur theatrics, on the other hand, are perhaps most similar to the multi-levelled performance of the musical portrait. Future research may yield fruitful connections between these two performance traditions.

51 Quoted and translated in Norman, Larry, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Norman, The Public Mirror, 53.

53 The play was premiered on 18 November 1659 and was one of the first offerings by Molière's troupe in Paris. It was republished multiple times during Couperin's lifetime, both in complete works and as a stand-alone play between 1674 and 1694. Tracing its performance is more difficult. Compared to others of Molière's works, it seems to have been performed less frequently in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. See Fuller, ‘Of Portraits’, 172.

54 Molière, , Les Oeuvres de Monsieur de Molière, volume 1 (Paris: D. Thierry et C. Barbin, 1674), 14Google Scholar. My translation.

55 Clark and Connon, ‘The Mirror’, 178. Clark and Connon also identify Jeanne de Beauval (‘Jeanneton’) and fellow actress Françoise Moureau (‘Fanchon’) in the vocal canon La femme entre deux traps attributed to Couperin in the Recueil d'airs sérieux et à boire en duo et trio choisis de différents auteurs appartenant à Mlle de Messine (the work has since been reattributed to Rameau) (33). David Fuller, in ‘Of Portraits’, acknowledges a connection between Jeanne de Beauval and Couperin in their shared link to the duchesse du Maine and her entertainments at Sceaux (172), but he disagrees with Clark and Connon's identification of Beauval as the subject of La douce Janneton, pointing to the lapse of time between Couperin's involvement with theatrics at Sceaux (1701), Beauval's death (1720) and the publication of the Quatrième livre (1730), and noting that the actress was best known as ‘La Beauval’ (172n). She appears under this title to rhyme with ‘royal’ in a 1670 poem by Jean Donneau de Visé cited in Parfaict, François and Parfaict, Claude, Histoire du Théâtre françois depuis son origine jusqu'à present, volume 4 (Paris: P. G. Le Mercier et Saillant, 1748), 530Google Scholar. She is elsewhere referred to as ‘Jeanneton’; see Chardon, Henri, Nouveaux documents sur les comédiens de campagne et la vie de Molière, volume 1 (Paris: A. Picard, 1886), 58Google Scholar. Beaussant, François Couperin, 320, identifies the subjects of the pieces as ‘two sisters … look-alikes except for their smiles’.

56 Even visually, the piece stands out amongst others in the same ordre for its degree of right-hand ornamentation. Looking across the entire body of pièces, such ornamentation is not without precedent, though it is exceptional in the later livres. Couperin uses the tierce coulée to decorate every note in a melodic phrase in only a handful of pieces: Les Baccanales – Tendresses Bachiques (I, 4), Les Agrémens (I, 5), Les Langueurs-Tendres (II, 6) and La Castelane (II, 11).

57 Couperin, , Troisième livre (Paris: author, 1722)Google Scholar, no page numbers. Quoted and translated in Couperin, L'art de toucher le clavecin, ed. and trans. Margery Halford, 22.

58 In her study of Couperin's performance directions, Huguette Dreyfus explains the confusion and the relationship between title and direction: ‘The terms characterizing a piece are not objective. Their meaning is often determined by other elements that surround them.’ See Dreyfus, ‘Observations sur les termes “affecteusement”, “gracieusement”, “légèrement”, “sans lenteur”, “tendrement”’, in François Couperin: nouveaux regards, 187. In parsing the difference between ‘affecteusement’ and ‘tendrement’, Dreyfus deduces that pièces with the latter ‘have titles that are perhaps more evocative of tenderness than those marked “Affecteusement”’ (189). Dreyfus does not explore the possibility that ‘affecteusement’ could indicate ‘affected’, but Clark and Connon, ‘The Mirror’, do suggest ironical intent in the use of ‘affecteusement’ in La Flatueuse (I, 2), La Fine Madelon, La petite pince-sans-rire (IV, 21) and L'amphibie (IV, 24) (119, 178, 181 and 192 respectively). Other applications of the term include La Mimi (I, 2), Les Graces Naturèles (II, 11) and Les Folies françoises – ‘La fidelité’ (III, 13); the last may suggest ‘affectedness’ rather than ‘affection’.

59 Couperin uses ‘volupteusement’ only one other time in the pièces – the twenty-fourth ordre's La divine Babiche ou les amours badins (IV). Clark and Connon deem its use in Babiche to be ironic, depicting the manner in which aristocratic women lavished attention on their lapdogs (‘The Mirror’, 189).

60 These include Les Nonètes (1. Les Blondes, 2. Les Brunes) (I, 1), Les Petits âges (1. La Muse Naissante, 2. L'Enfantine, 3. L'Adolescente, 4. Les Delices) (II, 7) and Les Jeunes Seigneurs (IV, 24). In Les Fastes de la grande, et Ancienne – Mxnxstrxndxsx (II, 11) Couperin identifies the five consecutive pieces as ‘Actes’ and implies a consecutive performance by instructing the player ‘tournée pour le __ acte’ at the end of each. Couperin ends the same twentieth ordre that features Madelon and Janneton with another multipart work, Les Tambourins (1. 1er Air, 2. 2me Air, Rondeau), and instructs the player to ‘play these two airs alternately as often as you wish: but one must always finish with the first’ (‘On jouë ces 2 Airs alternativement et tant qu'on veut: mais, on doit toujours finir par le premier’). Other than these exceptional moments, Couperin does not directly indicate that the pièces in ordres be performed in any specific sequence.

61 To my knowledge, pairings of independent pièces are absent from the collections of Couperin's contemporaries as well.

62 Quoted from Décision faite en Sorbonne touchant la comédie, du 20 mai 1694, avec une refutation des sentiments relâchés d'un nouveau théologien, in Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics, 187. Attitudes like Pérugier's formed part of a large debate over the role of the theatre and the morality of actors and actresses. According to Scott, Virginia, Women on the Stage in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘early modern French law, based on Roman law, continued to declare actors and actresses to be civilly infamous, although it did not concern itself with infamies and marriage; that was left to the Catholic church and its power to deny the sacraments to those who earned disreputable livelihoods. French actors and actresses were also forced to renounce their profession before the church would permit them Christian burial’ (49); excommunication was also not infrequent.

63 Jeanne de Beauval specialized in the soubrette type.

64 Clark and Connon, ‘The Mirror’, 127. Beaussant, François Couperin, 246, recognizes the subject as a ‘figure from the comic theater, but quite different in character from what its title, La Pateline (The Cajoler), suggests to us today. Our heroine is guileful, deceitful, and wheedling, and of course, galante. The whirling, undulating theme with its arpeggiated accompaniment gives the piece its veiled, caressing theme.’

65 Brueys's L'avocat Patelin modernized the original by updating the language, adding a love intrigue between Pathelin's daughter and the draper's son and providing a cunning maidservant to serve as a counterpart to the wily shepherd, in effect transforming the French farce into a hybrid with the Italian commedia dell'arte. Just as the original farce appealed to audiences, so too its adaptation was a stunning triumph. According to theatre historian Clarence Brenner, Brueys's play ‘made the Patelin theme so familiar to the Frenchmen of the time that [it] came to be confused with the original fifteenth-century farce’. After its 1706 premiere at the Comédie-Française, it played some 691 times between 1706 and 1799 and appeared in seven printed editions in French between 1715 and 1786. See Brenner, Clarence D., ‘The Success of Brueys's Avocat Patelin in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Language Notes 48/2 (1944), 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 See Furetière, Antoine, Dictionnaire universel, volume 1 (Le Haye: A. et R. Leers, 1690)Google Scholar, no page numbers.

67 de Brueys, David-Augustin, L'Avocat Patelin (Paris: P. Prault, 1725), 7Google Scholar.

68 Patelin advises a shepherd accused of theft to claim a defence of insanity and answer all questions by bleating ‘Baaaa!’. When at the end of the play the shepherd gives the same answer to Patelin's request for payment of fees, our antihero is left to muse, ‘What! Rogue! I would be the dupe of a clothed sheep!’ (‘Comment! coquin, je serois la dupe d'un mouton vêtu!’). Brueys, L'avocat Patelin, 56.

69 Nor is this the only ‘inversion’ in the original printing of the work. The original time signature reads ‘8/3’ instead of ‘3/8’. While this is corrected in modern editions (Couperin, François, Pièces de clavecin, ed. Brahms, Johannes and Chrysander, Friedrich (London: Augener, 1888)Google Scholar and Couperin, François, Pièces de clavecin, premier livre, ed. Gilbert, Kenneth (Paris: Heugel, 1972)Google Scholar), it could be intentional rather than a printing error. In ‘Des barricades toujours mystérieuses: ambiguïtés et curiosités dans la notation des Pièces de Clavecin’, Kenneth Gilbert notes similar inversions in Les Bacchanales – Tendresses Bachiques (I, 4), Le Chazé (II, 7), L'ausoniéne (II, 8), Le petite-deüil, ou les trois veuves (II, 9) and Les Fastes de la grande, et Ancienne – Mxnxstrxndxsx: Les Jongleurs; sauteurs et Saltimbanques: avec Les Ours, et les Singes and Desordre, et déroute de toute la troupe: Causés par les Yvrognes, les Singes, et les Ours (II, 11). See François Couperin: nouveaux regards, 76. Gilbert concludes that until proven otherwise, we must assume the signage to be negligence, but notes that ‘it is none the less strange that the composer has passed over a certain number of these “non-sense” [markings]’ (76). The inversions in Les fastes, Les bacchanales and Le chazé seem to indicate physical inversions referring to the acrobats, love-making and the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, but just what might be ‘inverted’ in the other works remains unclear.

70 This is not to say that the left hand never articulates melodic content in the first livre, but only that when it does so, it is in imitation of the right, as in the start of the Majeur section of ‘Fureurs bachiques’ from Les baccanales, the piece that immediately precedes La Pateline in the fourth ordre. In contrast to the latter, such imitative textual inversions are not sustained for more than one or two bars.

71 Couperin, , Les nations (Paris: author and Bovin, 1726)Google Scholar, no page numbers. A similar translation is provided in Tunley, François Couperin, 146.

72 Davitt Moroney further notes that this ‘first “trio sonata da chiesa” ever published in France, known originally as “La Pucelle” (as we know from Sébastien de Brossard's copy, c1695), was renamed when Couperin published it in 1726; it was called “La Française” – a nice admission on his part of how obvious his joke should have been’. It moreover suggests either that even at his most ‘Italian’ Couperin remained French, or (perhaps more likely) that Couperin sought a reconciliatory stance in the raging debates between French and Italian music (a hypothesis borne out in his Apothéose composé à la mémoire de l'incomparable Monsieur de Lully). See Davitt Moroney to HPSCHD-L: Harpsichord and Related Topics, 19 October 2009, Re: On-topic (was re: Pseudonymy), <https://list.uiowa.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0910&L=HPSCHD-L&F=&S=&P=123109>. Another possible interpretation of ‘La françoise’ is that the title was a commentary on the increasing accommodation of Italian styles in French music. What was once ‘Italian’ was now ‘French’.

73 Picaros in Spanish picaresque literature tend to be less upstanding figures than Gil Blas and other French picaros.

74 Wicks, Ulrich, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 175Google Scholar. In this respect, the French picaro differed considerably from the always dissolute Spanish picaros that had inspired Lesage.

75 Furetière, Antoine, Le roman bourgeois (Paris: D. Thierry, 1666), 16–17Google Scholar. Quoted in the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, volume 3 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1888), 140.

76 Bruyère, La, Les caractères, fourth edition (Paris: E. Michallet, 1689), 211Google Scholar. This passage does not appear in the first three editions.

77 Satyre des moeurs et des abus du tems. A Madame de *** (Paris: M. de Voyer Dargenson, 1702), 11. Quoted in Lougee, Carolyn, Les Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 71Google Scholar. My translation.

78 David Fuller makes a similar observation: the ‘six changes in tempo or style of playing are indications that illustrate the ambivalence or inconstance suggested by the title’. See Fuller, ‘Le grandeur du grand Couperin’, in François Couperin: nouveaux regards, 160. Citron, Couperin, 155, perceives the title to refer most immediately to the genre, and secondarily to the monstrous: ‘L'Amphibie does not correspond to any existing form, and it could not even be called a Fantasie or Toccata even if Couperin had known these words; a compromise between a passacaille-rondeau and a binary piece, very free in its modulations, its rhythmic variations and its absence of definitive reprises, l'Amphibie deserves its title: a hybrid, or simply – to challenge the learned of the time – a monster.’ Clark and Connon, ‘The Mirror’, 190, link the title to Les bains de la porte Saint Bernard by Germain Boisfran. Beaussant, François Couperin, 330, associates the title with an unidentified seventeenth-century definition of amphibie referring to ‘a man who underwent a metamorphosis of sorts when he flitted from one idea to another or expressed contrary sentiments in quick succession’. This definition did not turn up in my research into the term.

79 Modulations to D major to D minor and B minor function similarly to destabilize the harmony of Jacquet de la Guerre's L'inconstante.

80 A complete list of chaconnes and passacailles by Couperin follows. Pièces de clavecin: Chaconne, La favorite (I, 3); Passacaille (II, 8); Chaconne légere, Concerts royaux, No. 3 (1722); Chaconne légere, Nouveaux Concerts, No. 13 (1724); Chaconne ou Passacaille, Les nations, ‘La françoise’ (1726); Passacaille, Les nations, ‘L'espagnole’; Chaconne, Les nations, ‘L'impériale’; Passacaille ou chaconne, Pièces de violes, Première Suite (1728). Couperin indicates ‘mouvement marqué’ in the fifth couplet from the passacaille of the eighth ordre; ‘viv et marqué’ in bar 41 of the ‘chaconne ou passacaille’ from ‘La françoise’; ‘vivement’ in bar 73 of the passacaille from ‘L'espagnole’; and ‘gayement’ in bar 137 of the chaconne from ‘L'impériale’.

81 The through-composed passacaille from ‘L'espagnole’ moves through successive couplets with no returns. As mentioned above, the Rondeau: passacaille from the eighth ordre takes the form of a passacaille en rondeau. Some of Couperin's chaconnes, however, demonstrate different kinds of hybridity. La Favorite, Chaconne a deux temps (I, 3) defies generic conventions by virtue of its duple metre. Two works from Les nations and the Pièces de violes display a kind of generic ambivalence: the ‘Chaconne ou Passacaille’ from Les nations and the ‘Passacaille ou Chaconne’ from the first suite of the Pièces des violes. A similar ambiguity marked the first passacaille from the Suite in G minor by Louis Couperin, listed in the Bauyn manuscript as ‘Chaconne ou passacaille’. See also Silbiger, Alexander, ‘Passacaglia and Chaconne: Genre Pairing and Ambiguity from Frescobaldi to Couperin’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 2/1 (1996) <www.sscm-jscm.org/v2/no1/silbiger.html> (15 September 2013)Google Scholar.

82 It also had a role to play in political critique by virtue of its connection with the subversive comedy of the Italian players of the commedia dell'arte.

83 Castle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 4Google Scholar.

84 La Bruyère, , Les caractères, sixth edition (Paris: E. Michallet, 1691), 266–267Google Scholar. In the same edition, La Bruyère uses ‘masque’ in his chapter on ‘Les hommes’: ‘There is as much difference between a man who adopts a foreign character and his real character as there is between a mask and a real face’ (‘La difference d'un homme qui se revêt d'un caractere étranger, à luy-mesme quand il rentre dans le sien, est celle d'un masque à un visage’) (414–415). Later, in a chapter on ‘Des jugemens’, La Bruyère's description suggests a full masquerade costume: ‘We should not judge men like a picture or a statue upon a first and single glance; there is an interior and a heart that must be mined in depth; a veil of modesty covers merit, and a mask of hypocrisy disguises wickedness’ (‘Il ne faut pas juger des hommes comme d'un tableau ou d'une figure sur une seuel & premiere vûe; il y a un interieur, & un coeur qu'il faut approfondir, le voile de la modestie couvre le merite, & le masque de l'hipocrisie cache la malignité’) (441). In the seventh edition, the courtier of the quotation above is identified as Ménophile (301), believed to be a pseudonym for Père de la Chaise, the Jesuit confessor of the king. The name Ménophile also appears in volume 6 of de Scudery, Madame's Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (Paris: Courbe, 1649–1653), 540Google Scholar, where it refers to the spouse of Lycaste, in the Histoire des quatres Gordiens (Paris: Florentin and Delaulne, 1695), 54, and in de Tillemont, Louis Sébastian Lenain's Histoire des empereurs, second edition (Paris: Robustel, 1722), 195Google Scholar, where it refers to a dutiful deputy of Alexander the Great.

85 Cohen, Sarah provides a fascinating study of masquerade in fashion plates, including a reading of this print, in ‘Masquerade as Mode in the French Fashion Print’, in The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Munns, Jessica and Richards, Penny (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999), 174–207Google Scholar.

86 Couperin's ‘Frenchification’ of the folia may also relate to other ‘Frenchified’ terminology (sonade, ordre and so on).

87 Citron, Couperin, 97.

88 Citron, Couperin, 23. The Carte du Tendre, designed by Madame de Scudéry in 1654 to accompany her novel Clélie, is a map of the imaginary territories of love. The map visualizes the emotional terrain of love and the paths one might take to traverse its topography from Novelle Amitié (new friendship) to Tendre (affection).

89 Mellers, François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition, 221. In contrast to both of these readings, Clark and Connon argue that Les folies pertains to scandalous masked balls held by the Regent (158), and that the progressive dissolution of virtue and emotional distress that culminates in the ‘inevitable doom’ of L'âme en peine serves as a moral critique of the amorous (and sexual) excesses of the regency court. In Beaussant's reading ‘this vaguely theatrical setting, this play of masks, this dream of love in theatrical costume, all these belong to a very specific genre known as fêtes galantes …. Once again, Couperin joined Watteau’ (François Couperin, 294).

90 Caitlin E. Snyder, ‘Pattern and Meaning in François Couperin's Pièces de clavecin’ (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2010).

91 In the passacailles and chaconnes outside of the Pièces de clavecin, Couperin does not designate any formal sections. Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre employs the same formal designations as in Couperin's clavecin passacaille (II, 8) and chaconne in her chaconnes from the Pièces de clavecin of 1687, as does D'Anglebert in the Pièces de clavecin of 1689. The opening couplet of Jacquet de la Guerre's chaconne from the 1707 book does not indicate any formal marking for the opening, but follows it with ‘2e couplet’. Formal designations of sections in passacailles and chaconnes in the work of Louis Couperin are highly inconsistent. In folia variations by Corelli printed by Gasparo Pietra Santa (Rome, 1700) and Étienne Roger (Amsterdam, 1708–1712) no formal indications mark the variations. D'Anglebert (Paris: author [,1689]) and Marais (Paris: Marin Marais, 1701) begin their sets with a ‘1er couplet’, as does Couperin.

92 Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, no page numbers.

93 Citron, François Couperin, 23, and Fuller, ‘Le grandeur’, 74n.

94 Ellis, Katherine, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 56Google Scholar.

95 Revue et gazette musicale 22/9 (1855), 67, and 24/49 (1857), 394. Quoted and translated in Katherine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 57.

96 Crowder, Louis and Birkby, Arthur, ‘Master of the French “Baroque”: François Couperin’, in François Couperin: A Tercentennial Tribute, (Evanston: Clavier Magazine, 1968), 17Google Scholar. Quoted in Snyder, ‘Pattern and Meaning’, 4.

97 A leading work in this revisionist approach is Cowart, Georgia's The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar, in which she unearths subversive messages in court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera and opera-ballet of the era. A related rereading of early eighteenth-century repertoire can be found in Fader, Don's ‘The “Cabale du Dauphin”, Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage around 1700’, Music and Letters 86/3 (2005), 380–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other scholars trace subversive parodies of ‘official’ repertory. See Gordon-Seifert, Catherine, ‘Heroism Undone: The Erotic Manuscript Parodies of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Tragédies en Musique’, in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Austern, Linda Phyllis (New York: Routledge, 2002), 137–166Google Scholar, and Powell, John S., ‘The Opera Parodies of Florence Dancourt’, Cambridge Opera Journal 13/2 (2001), 87–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.