Madeleine de Scudéry  

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Madeleine de Scudéry (November 15, 1607 - June 2, 1701), often known simply as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, was a French writer, best known for her ten volume novel Clelia. The romances of Madeleine de Scudéry gained great influence with plots situated in the ancient world and content taken from life. The famous author told stories of her friends in the literary circles of Paris and developed their fates from volume to volume of her serialised production. Readers of taste bought her books, as they offered the finest observation of human motives, characters taken from life, excellent morals regarding how one should and should not behave if one wanted to succeed in public life and in the intimate circles she portrayed.

Biography

She was the younger sister of author Georges de Scudéry, but is generally regarded as his superior in skill.

Born at Le Havre, Normandy, in northern France, she is said to have been very plain as well as without fortune, but she was very well educated. Establishing herself at Paris with her brother, she was at once admitted to the Rambouillet coterie, and afterwards established a salon of her own under the title of the Société du samedi. For the last half of the 17th century, under the pseudonym of Sapho or her own name, was acknowledged as the first bluestocking of France and of the world. She formed a close friendship with Paul Pellisson which was only ended by his death in 1693.

Her lengthy novels, such as Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (10 vols., 1648-53), Clélie (10 vols., 1654-61), Ibrahim, ou l'illustre Bassa (4 vols., 1641), Almahide, ou l'esclave reine (8 vols., 1661-3) were the delight of Europe, including persons of the wit and sense of Madame de Sévigné.

With classical or Oriental characters as nominal heroes and heroines, the whole language and action are taken from the fashionable ideas of the time, and the characters can be identified with Mademoiselle de Scudéry's contemporaries. In Clélie, Herminius represents Paul Pellisson; Scaurus and Lyriane were Paul Scarron and his wife (afterwards Mme de Maintenon); and in the description of Sapho in vol. 10 of Le Grand Cyrus the author paints herself. It is in Clélie that the famous Carte du Tendre appeared, a description of an Arcadia, where the river of Inclination waters the villages of Billet Doux, Petits Soins and so forth.

The interminable length of the stories results from endless conversations and, as far as incidents go, chiefly by successive abductions of the heroines, conceived and told decorously. Although the books are hardly read now, it is still possible to understand their success. In the early days of the novel, prolixity was not a fault. "Sapho" had studied mankind in her contemporaries and knew how to analyse and describe their characters with fidelity and wit. Her novels had the interest always attaching to the roman à clef. She was a skilled conversationalist, a thing quite new to the age as far as literature was concerned. She had a distinct vocation as a pedagogue, and is compared by Sainte-Beuve to Mme de Genlis. She could moralize—a favourite employment of the time—with sense and propriety. Though she was incapable of the exquisite prose of Mme de Sevigné and some other of her contemporaries, her purely literary merits were considerable.

Controversial in her own era, de Scudéry was satirized by Molière in his plays Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) and Les Femmes savantes (1672).

Madeleine survived her brother by more than thirty years, and in her later days published numerous volumes of conversations, to a great extent extracted from her novels, thus forming a kind of anthology of her work. She outlived her vogue to some extent, but retained a circle of friends to whom she was always the "incomparable Sapho."

Her Life and Correspondence were published at Paris by MM. Rathery and Boutron in 1873.

Literature

• C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, volume iv (Paris, 1857-62)
• Rathery and Boutron, Mademoiselle de Scudéry: Sa vie et sa correspondence (Paris, 1873)
• Victor Cousin, La société française au 17me siècle (sixth edition, two volumes, Paris, 1886)
• André Le Breton, Le roman au XVIIème siècle (Paris, 1890)
• A. G. Mason, The