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poem]” was invested with significance for elite life, becoming perhaps the primary medium for advancing claims to elite social status, particularly for those seeking to base that claim on intelligence rather than blood, strength, or fortune. It is in this ascendancy, one can argue, that literary life takes shape. For the rise of print publication as a remarkably effective conduit for the assertion and reflection of social prestige represents one key index of the formation of the “first literary field,” as Alain Viala defined it.

      Viala describes a process by which a subset of intellectual practices— namely belles-lettres, referring to a set of creative activities identified by the fact that they are undertaken in view of offering what might be called “aesthetic” pleasure, though they are also closely tied to the pleasures of “society”¹⁰⁰—was distinguished within the broader field of “letters” as they were concentrated in particular spaces—courts, academies, and salons— recognized as privileged sites for their undertaking and appreciation, as well as for the judgment of those engaged in them. According to Viala, the process was one of “autonomization.” However, autonomization is a loaded and multivalent term, as we have seen, which functions at a number of different levels. It can refer to the autonomy of the “aesthetic,” indicating an activity whose end is its own contemplation and enjoyment. It might also point to the autonomy of a discipline whose coherence is recognized and institutionalized, for instance, in a system of prizes or in a pedagogical program.¹⁰¹ Finally, the term can refer to the autonomy of a series of practices viewed together as a sufficient basis for a distinct, coherent, and even valorized social identity, one able as such to support the individual economically and symbolically. It is no doubt this sense that Viala has in mind when he writes, “literary activity has at its disposal a certain autonomy within social structures, and possibilities of work and compensation which are specific to it.”¹⁰²

      It would be a mistake, though, to understand the term here in what is certainly its more modern and intuitive signification. For the autonomy of the first literary field had little to do with freedom from the control of the politically powerful and the socially dominant. On the contrary, it was a function of the ascendancy of cultural institutions that were created at the initiative of elites and operated under their stewardship, bringing writers into their orbit rather than out of it. Christian Jouhaud has recently traced what he subtitles “the history of a paradox,” according to which the “growing autonomy” of writers in the Classical age was possible only as the outcome of their growing dependence on authorities. Drawn into relationships of service with patrons and the state, they were made directly subordinate, to be sure. Yet their expanding role in the exercise of political power as propagandists and normalizers of language, as well as in the elaboration of a self-consciously “modern” elite social culture, was at the same time acknowledged and institutionalized, thereby rendering the social identity of writer not just legitimate but desirable, prestigious, and lucrative, and sufficient.¹⁰³ For their part, the gens de lettres of the period consistently conveyed a sense of their own “freedom of expression” as a direct function of their subjecthood vis-à-vis a prince, or of their subservience in strongly hierarchical relations of protection. “I am born free, and we live under the domination of a Prince who lets us peacefully enjoy an honorable license to do as we please,” writes d’Aubignac, justifying the printing of his third Dissertation against Corneille.¹⁰⁴ Such “liberty” was construed as a benefit of the writer’s presence in a rapport that spoke to his or her elevation and legitimacy, and thus to his or her prerogative to speak the personalized language of belles-lettres, which celebrated the self in its connections to a tight-knit and highly exclusive community of exceptional individuals. In the éloge to Voiture with which he prefaces his edition of the poet’s Oeuvres, Pinchesne calls attention to Voiture’s “too familiar” style in his letters and poems to nobles: “he had acquired this privilege by his habit of interacting in this way with the most noble individuals, and by the liberty that they themselves allowed him.”¹⁰⁵

      As a result, patronage and service to political and social elites were more likely to be experienced as an opening up of possibilities for “literary” self-expression rather than as a limitation on them. And it is in this opening that seventeenth-century “court writers” located their autonomy, the most powerful figuration of which lay in an image of leisure manifesting their now enhanced standing.¹⁰⁶ This leisure was represented as the crucible of their writing and, in turn, transformed the writing by infusing it with prestige and cachet. Offered as a backdrop to the activities of composing epistles, poems, plays, and prose romances, it rendered the various practices of belles-lettres as credible reflections of their privileged status, and therefore as the vehicles of plausible claims to “noble” identities.¹⁰⁷ The “autonomization” of belles-lettres—and we could add, echoing Timothy Reiss, the invention of “literature”¹⁰⁸—might be gauged by the extent to which such practices became, through the elevation of esprit as a marker of personal quality, sufficient for establishing valorized identities insofar as they were able, in and of themselves, to situate gens de lettres in social milieus where their ennobled selves would be recognized as such: Voiture’s “facility of intellect,” Pinchesne pointed out, “led him to be warmly welcomed by the highest noblemen and princes of the court.”¹⁰⁹

      Put another way, the “autonomization” of the first literary field consisted in the process by which the activities of belles-lettristic writing and publishing, as these increasingly opened opportunities for service to political and social authorities, also increasingly afforded possibilities for individuals to represent themselves as integrated into the elite. Expressing gratitude to the Académie for its final judgment in the Querelle du Cid, Scudéry writes: “It is not in the mass of people nor in the cave of a loner that one must seek sovereign reason; it is where I have always found it, that is, in a society of excellent individuals.”¹¹⁰ By dint of their service, they were able to project themselves into a state of leisure that was at the same time a respite from the weighty responsibilities that had come with their social ascension and the underlying reality of their day-to-day existence in the upper reaches of the hierarchy. This leisure was then reinterpreted as the cause rather than the effect of their writing; it was offered as a condition that, in allowing them to “do as they please,” freed them to write, with “freedom” understood not as a “lifting of barriers” but as a “privilege” or “entitlement” ensuing from their high social position. Scudéry depicts himself in his prefaces as a retired soldier having once served the king in battle but now with time to kill: “Poetry is for me an agreeable entertainment, and not a serious occupation,” he writes in the preface to his 1631 tragicomedy Ligdamon et Lidias. “If I write verse, it is because I do not know what else to do.”¹¹¹ Such a stance, of course, downplays any hint of professionalism; and as he would do in the course of the Querelle, Scudéry affects insouciance toward his writing, which contributes to the sense of an identity rooting itself not in any intellectual practice but in his past as a former commander of Royal troops. Poems and plays were no more than side occupations for a now idle man of the sword:

      You will easily overlook the mistakes that I have missed, if you realize that … I’ve spent more years amongst arms than hours in my study, and used far more wick firing an harquebus than burning a candle; such that I know better how to arrange soldiers than dialogue.¹¹²

      Scudéry was called out on this posturing, as we have seen.¹¹³ But while it was challenged, the image gained credibility. In the polemics of the Querelle, the motif of Scudéry as a soldier who battled heroically for the common cause insinuates itself not only into his own writing but into the language of other anti-Corneille pamphleteers as well. Surprised by Corneille’s attack against him, Claveret imputes it to “a remainder of pride that the arms of the Observateur du Cid [Scudéry] have not yet been able destroy.”¹¹⁴ Mairet brings the militaristic imagery into sharper focus, recounting a critical assault on Le Cid in which “Monsieur de Scudéry slashed twenty times with his sword into its body.”¹¹⁵ Against the arrogance of Corneille, Scudéry offers the model of a viable, honnête intellectual autonomy that was established in two moves: first, a rhetorical inversion by which Scudéry’s “literary” practices are presented as the reflections of his military

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