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LHMP #442 Grist 2001 The Salon and the Stage

Full citation:

Grist, Elizabeth Rosalind. 2001. The Salon and the Stage: Women and Theatre in Seventeenth-century France. Dissertation.

Publication summary:

Reviewed as part of the research for the stage/actresses trope series on the podcast. No specifically sapphic content.

This dissertation didn’t have quite as much information about actresses as I thought it might. The majority of the focus is on playwrights—which is wonderful and informative! But I ended up skimming a lot to pull out the bits on actresses.

This analysis considers the parallels in the emergence of women as central the public stage and the private salon, both of which opened up new roles, and both of which became a focus of morality-based criticism, taking the view that women “putting themselves forward” was inherently dangerous to feminine morals.

With respect to the theater, this criticism targeted not only the actresses themselves, but the roles they played, as well as the enthusiastic presence of women in the audience (rather than keeping to the domestic sphere).

The leadership of women in salon culture, and the encouragement it gave them to engage in literary endeavors, broadened women’s opportunities for education and increased the centrality of women as subjects within those literary ventures. The salon was also central to women’s patronage of the theater, with many plays being initially presented within the salon, or even acted out privately by amateur companies that might include the aristocratic women who hosted them. Women acted as patrons for female playwrights, as seen in dedications.

French theater is its modern sense was established in Paris in the early 17th century, with earlier precursors being guilds that produced religious mystery plays. Two permanent professional companies were established in 1629 and 1635, with the building of the first dedicated theater building in 1641. The theaters were supported (and regulated) by the crown and records show regular attendance by royal figures. Marie de Medici was an enthusiastic supporter of both French companies and visiting Italian troupes.

Early in the century, records refer to popular farces, but with the establishment of the professional companies we see more prestigious works, often dedicated to powerful female patrons. Those upper class women were not the only female audience, as visual records show women among the middle-class audience in the cheaper seats. Female audiences, in turn, influenced the nature of the material being featured, with an increasing focus on tragedy and more serious drama across the first half of the century.

Moral criticism of theater-going included its function as a place of social and economic display.

There are no surviving records of actresses in Paris before the early 17th century, in contrast to the records of stage actresses in Italy and Spain in the late 16th century (and also in contrast to England where all-male companies were the rule until the 1660s). It is likely that women were acting on provincial stages earlier, though the profession may have been looked askance. A reference in 1592 to an actress in Bordeaux notes that she was received in respectable houses, implying that this might have been surprising. There are suggestions that the Parisian mystery plays of the latter 16th century used all-male companies, and that this was typical for bawdy farces as well. But the presence of celebrity actresses in visiting Italian troupes may have helped shift the tide. England lagged behind, and when French mixed-gender companies visited England in the 1630s, English commenters were harshly critical, considering actresses “unwomanly.”

The first named French actress we know of was Marie Venier, who like most of the early actresses had a husband in the same profession. Women entering the French theatrical companies were treated as equals to their male co-workers and could expect to receive a general education as apprentices, as well as theatrical training. The apprenticeship included room and board. By mid-century, companies had roughly equivalent numbers of men and women on stage, and a number of female performers were achieving star status. Later in their careers, well-known actresses might supplement their income by providing elocution lessons to women of the upper classes.

Despite all this, actresses were the target of moral criticism, with complex and ambiguous rationales. Because of the roles they played on stage, they were seen as potential seductresses. When the characters they played strayed from idealized women, they were considered to be setting a bad example for their female audiences. Their revealing stages costumes were accused of inciting more general fashions.

[Note: This work doesn’t have any mention of lesbian accusations against French actresses, in contrast to the discourse in the 18th century. There is a note that one particular play—Le Railleur by Antoine Mareschal—was suppressed in 1635 likely due to lesbian allusions directed at Madame d’Aiguillon, a niece of Cardinal Richelieu. (She was a target of various rumors due to her refusal to remarry after being widowed at age 18, but it isn’t clear that there was any substance to the lesbian accusations.)]

Time period:

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France

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 291 – The Font of Liberty by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

Saturday, July 20, 2024 - 07:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 291 – The Font of Liberty by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall - transcript

(Originally aired 2023/07/20 - listen here)

Here we are, scheduled only a little bit later than originally planned, the second fiction episode of 2024. “The Font of Liberty” by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall is set in Paris in 1830, among the printers and booksellers who dodge around the capricious demands of the censors. As a bit of pop culture historic grounding, this story takes place two years before the revolt that is the climax of Les Miserables. I love this story for the varied community of women it depicts…and for the word-play in the title.

The author, Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, lives in Boston with her wife, a lot of books, and a lot of tea. In her day job, she's a French to English translator, and she worked as a translator and editor on the video game Harmony: The Fall of Reverie by Don’t Nod. Her short fiction has been published in places such as "Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories," the "Women Destroy Science Fiction!" special issue of Lightspeed Magazine, and Etherea Magazine. In her free time, she likes hanging out in nature and flitting between entirely too many hobbies, especially handicrafts. She can be found online on Bluesky and Mastodon. See the links in the show notes.

When looking for narrators who can do right by the various settings of our stories, I belatedly realized I had a great international resource in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. I was attending the annual SFWA conference a few months ago and mentioned that I was looking for narrators with some specific competencies and rather hit the jackpot. Our narrator for this episode is C. J. Lavigne, a Canadian SFF author. Her urban fantasy novel In Veritas, from NeWest Press, was a finalist for the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Speculative Fiction and the 2021 Crawford Award, and was the Alberta Book Publishers Association 2021 Speculative Fiction Book of the Year. Her short fiction has appeared in On Spec, Fusion Fragment, Augur Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, PodCastle, and other publications, and her novella The Drowned Man's Daughter is forthcoming from NeWest Press in 2025. She is generally busy drinking coffee, petting the cat, and being a full-time media studies academic.

Without further ado, let’s get to our story.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

THE FONT OF LIBERTY

by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

Sandrine dropped into the chair beside me and stretched her back dramatically. I took the opportunity to admire the view, as I was sure she intended. “Ugh!” She wiggled her fingers high overhead. “Never be a compositor, Mylène my beauty. You’ll have to typeset a scholar’s list of sources in eight point, half of them in Greek.”

“I don’t speak a word of Greek,” I pointed out, though it didn’t need saying. When would a girl from a little Normandy village have learned such a thing as Greek? Sandrine was the one who had grown up in this printshop two streets from the Quartier Latin, not me. I had the impression that she didn’t read it terribly well herself, come to that; the king’s censors had been striking out texts so eagerly recently that the shop had been taking on jobs we might ordinarily have farmed out.

“Then you’ll have to learn to read Greek by typesetting such things,” Sandrine retorted, “off that same scholar’s badly scribbled fair copy, which is the least fair copy I ever saw, by the way. Then your pretty dark eyes will cross forever. Mine certainly have; I don’t think I’ll see straight for a week.”

“Charge the scholar extra for the trouble to your pretty grey eyes,” I suggested, and she laughed.

“Oh, we are! You’re right, though, I’ll put his coins on my eyelids to soothe them.”

It always felt daring to flirt with the boss’s daughter at work, for all that she’d been flirting with me since I’d arrived six months back, and we’d kissed up in her room more than once. More than kissed, too, out in the fields outside the city where her mother wouldn’t overhear us, and some marvelous romps those had been. Sandrine was a warm and playful soul who didn’t seem the least vindictive. If we broke matters off tomorrow, it would be awkward, but I didn’t think she’d get her mother to send me off, especially when they’d just trained me up to make the ink and be quick at stitching bindings.

Still, all of that was part of the reason I kept on sleeping on Isabelle and Lucie’s spare mattress, instead of taking a room over the printshop.

Lucie worked at the cabaret around the corner, where we all loyally went for wine and mediocre food at breaks. Here, meanwhile, Isabelle operated the press, set type when Sandrine was busy, and generally acted as the foreman this shop didn’t officially have. That left Sandrine and Mme Barthélemy free to meet with clients and keep the budgets and all the other business of an owner and her only daughter, with Sandrine’s cousin Antoine doing apprentice work. But if Mme Barthélemy had had a living husband and a dozen daughters, I think Isabelle would still have ended up in charge of the shop floor. She’s that kind of person.

Just as I thought that, Isabelle herself thumped down a whole stack of freshly printed and folded pages next to me. I yelped. “Hey! Isa, you fiend, you print too fast! Here I thought I’d get the chance to take a break.”

Isabelle grinned her craggy slice of a grin, and mimed a thump on my shoulder. “You need faster fingers than that to get ahead of me, young chicken!”

I pretended to sulk about the blow that hadn’t landed, dramatically shaking out my fingers even though they weren’t actually sore, and she laughed. “Don’t fret, lunchtime’s not so far off. If you get through that whole stack, I’ll buy you a drink, how’s that?”

“Deal!” I wasn’t at all sure that I’d manage the stack, but I was willing to make a go of it. And for all that she looked like a belligerent wine cask in a dress and printer’s apron, Isabelle was a soft touch at heart; odds were good she’d buy me the drink even if I fell a little short, as long as I made the effort.

“Ugh!” said Sandrine. “I was going to offer to help you, but now I’d be costing you wine for it. Well, there’s no help for it, I’ll have to go start printing that play of Borel’s.”

I glanced over in some surprise, unspooling the first length of waxed thread. “Haven’t you already?”

She grimaced. “Well... I’ve been putting it off. Just in case, you know.”

Halfway across the room, Isabelle snorted. “That one! Wild as they come and then some. He’s part of that Romantic set our Sandrine loves so much, you know, the young ones. The Petit Cénacle or the Young France or whatever they’re calling themselves this week. Can’t help but push every boundary there is.”

“The censors are hemming and hawing about whether to approve his script,” Sandrine clarified. “Just because it has some soul in it! But they can’t stand real art, you know.”

“And meanwhile the actors are already cast!” Isabelle hoisted up the press bar. “But if the censors won’t get off their asses—” Wham, went the paper frame, down onto a fresh sheet of paper. “—then for all we know, we’re throwing away money every minute we spend working on the damn thing. Soul won’t pay the bills.” As she spoke, she hoisted the press up again—the job of a strong man in most shops, but as Lucie often said with a sly grin and a rather different meaning, who needed a man when you had Isabelle?

“Still, we’re throwing away money if I don’t get off my ass, too.” Sandrine shook out her arms, adjusted some infinitesimal shifting of her sleeve covers, and stood. “I finished that monograph and Isa’s already well launched on Favart’s pamphlet, so there’s nothing else in shape for me to work on but Borel’s eccentricity. On I go.”

On she did go, and on I went too, till my hands were starting to get sore for real. Sewing paper bindings is different than sewing shirts. More pleasant, in my experience, and easier on the eyes, but harder on the fingers. And all of our work accompanied by the steady slam of the press. Every so often Isabelle paused to let Antoine shift the racks around, with clatters and thumps, and then up the slams would start again.

I’d had to learn to tune it out. It hadn’t taken me too long, though. After the house burned down, after the fever took Dad away from me, I’d spent a few months living with my aunt and her shouting husband. She gave as good as she got—he’s an awful husband, as far as I could tell, but she isn’t much of a wife either, and the two of them just make each other miserable all day long at the top of their lungs—so it was a great relief when dear sweet Mlle Sophie Boudreau down the street offered me a letter of introduction to her old friend Isabelle, and the excuse to go earn my bread in Paris. Ten printing presses running top speed night and day would have been better than that house.

I do earn my bread, too, and enough besides to send a few sous home to my aunt now and again. She did take me in, after all, and gave me a made-over dress to bring with me to Paris, and it’s much easier to feel sorry for her at a distance.

Especially since I’d landed so very much on my feet, thanks to Mlle Sophie. A place to stay, steady work, a girl to have some fun with, and a web of likeminded women who welcomed me in as another bead in the netting. (At this point, in fact, I suspected dear Mlle Sophie of having been a good deal closer to Isabelle than I’d originally realized, back when she’d moved to Paris in the heady years of the Revolution. I wondered how much of her kindness had been simple generosity to a neighbor, and how much recognition of a certain kinship between us. She’d sent me to Isabelle and Lucie, after all, and a single day in their home had made it clear to me how close the two of them were.)

To take my mind off my sore fingers, and stop myself watching the clock tick with glacial slowness towards our eleven o’clock break, I started to speculate about what Lucie’s cabaret might have on the menu today. It wouldn’t be anything fancy, being just a corner cabaret, but the owner didn’t like to bore himself by cooking the same thing every day.

At ten fifty, Mme Barthélemy came in like a stormcloud.

I hunched dutifully over my work, sewing away like a busy little ant. It’s not that I was afraid of Mme Barthélemy, for I got over that my first week, but I was the junior girl in the shop and she was the boss. Why would I put myself forward with her scowling away like that, hanging up her fichu and slapping down her things as if she wanted to be throwing them across the room, and both Isabelle and her own daughter in the shop to take on the matter instead of me?

Like any self-respecting busy little ant, of course, I pricked my ears as sharp as they’d go to listen.

“Maman! You look like Hernani himself.” Sandrine’s clever fingers didn’t pause in their work, but her brows drew together. “What on earth has happened?”

“If that’s Favart’s pamphlet you’re working on, drop it.” Mme Barthélemy untied her bonnet with a sharp jerk and flung it onto a shelf. “Our good idiots at the censorship bureau have forbidden it.”

I fumbled the pages I was holding, nearly sending the whole half-sewn pamphlet fluttering onto the shop floor. Memories of a Family of the Theater, with some Accompanying Witticisms stared up at me from the front page, by Antoine-Pierre-Charles Favart, with allusion to his Grandfather’s Memoirs. All those hours this morning, all those needlepricks, and the whole stack useless?

Sandrine let out a terrible oath. “We can’t print them?”

“Language, my dear. We can’t sell. We can print all we like, if we want to throw away money, but it amounts to the same thing.”

“That fluff?” I’d heard Sandrine irritated, and coquettishly mock-angry, but this was a deeper frustration than I’d heard for anything but political rants. “What about Borel’s play?”

“Oh, Borel! Never a word on him, yea or nay. Not that it matters much. Sorry, my darling, I know that you love him—”

“His work, mother, I love his work—”

“—but it’s a small print run and a short play, that one. You know it’s even odds the play won’t go ahead, especially with his name attached. But Favart! All his fans, all his father’s and grandfather’s fans, all that theater gossip, all those people who hated one Favart or another and would have bought the pamphlet to argue with! I was going to tell you to save the plates, I was sure we’d have a second printing at the least. And now, these idiots, they have their heads so empty of everything but kissing the king’s royal... fingers, they’ve decided that he’s a subversive radical. He mentions young ladies running wild, does he perhaps mean those demoiselles causing a ruckus down south in the Ariège? Perhaps he supports them! He writes of the Opera upholding its contract with the audience, ah! No doubt he’s making a sly reference to the Charter! Half a dozen more like that.”

“But those are so minor, surely he can just…” Sandrine faltered, no doubt remembering that we were well past the point of making any changes to the text. Silently, I lifted a stack of newly bound signatures and let them thump back down.

“Indeed,” said Mme Barthélemy, with an awful dry finality. “No doubt he will, but in the meantime, we’ll have to pulp the run. Put them away in the corner, Mylène, child. We’ll give it a few days. I doubt he can talk them round, but I suppose he’ll want to try.”

I did as I was bid. Sandrine rounded on her mother and they started in again, both of them furious at the same distant, entirely uncaring men, and sniping each other for lack of a closer target. Isabelle and Antoine, equally silent, folded up the printed pages, stacked them up, and started in on the arcane and precise work of moving the trays of type and etched plates out of the press. I shuffled back and forth with armfuls of paper. I’d never be able to carry the same amount Isabelle could—my arms were strong, but my left leg had never grown quite straight, and it limited me—and each load felt twice as heavy as it should have, just from my mood. All that work! I don’t mind working hard, but when it’s for nothing at all, that gets to you.

I was just straightening the fifth and last armful when the clock tolled eleven. I stared glumly at the stacks of paper. I’d nearly finished; I would have, if not for Mme Barthélemy’s news. Isabelle would have owed me that drink.

Isabelle’s voice interrupted my dark thoughts. “All right, my chickens, the eleven o’clock break is sacred no matter what the censors are up to. Mylène, you’ve earned your wine, and our dear Jesus knows I want some of my own. Come along.”

And off we all stumped. The wine did help a bit, or at least drinking it in company did.

We rallied for the afternoon, of course. We had to; sitting around moping wouldn’t earn us our bread, nor Mme Barthélemy the coin to pay us with. Two or three months ago, we’d have had a backlog of lower-priority printing to go through, but things had slowed down, between censors’ cancelations and skittish authors. Still, any shop always has make-work tasks, so we had enough to scrabble together. When there were no signatures for me to bind, I scrubbed at ink smears and practiced my memorization of the font organizational system. Mme Barthélemy was out more than she was in, bustling about on errands I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask about. So was Sandrine, either accompanying her mother or sent off with some cryptic direction like “Sandrine, my dear, go talk to Josée down the way, and see how things are with her father.” Isabelle stayed to keep charge, trading looks and low incomprehensible comments with both Barthélemies whenever they were in. I scrubbed harder to keep from minding being left out.

At three o’clock, when I was running through the title case for a fifth time and making the same mistakes I’d made the last four, Mme Barthélemy stumped in and dropped her basket. “All right, everyone. Let’s save something for Monday. Off you go. I’ll pay you full wages for the day, but there’s nothing worth doing just now. Goodnight.” She undid her bonnet with a tired air of finality. I traded a look with Isabelle and Antoine, Sandrine being off on one of those mysterious errands still, and got to my feet.

“You run along,” Isabelle told me, still sitting. “I have an errand myself before I head home.”

All the way home, I stewed about it. (And I went the long way; there had been rioting over by Rue Saint-Denis this morning, and I wanted no part of that tangle or the mop-up.) It was strange to be walking home so early. That strangeness muddled up with the day it had been and made me feel a sort of formless prickliness.

This wasn’t a normal lull in business. I wouldn’t have known that back home, as the king’s edicts came slow to Normandy and all I knew of what was in the newspapers and pamphlets was what I read there. But in Paris, the king speaks and the streets know it on the instant. From Sandrine and Isabelle, and from keeping my ears open, and from a hundred little comments by a hundred different people, I had learned my way about in all sorts of new ways.

The general election hadn’t gone well for the king and his ministers, and Charles X wasn’t a king who liked to be balked, if any king does. The government was a thunderstorm. The censors were feeling a rush of power, or were urged to it by the king, and were kicking out like yearling bulls, reckless and eager to bruise all and sundry. And their kicks fell mainly on us, and the customers who came to us to send out their words for purchase.

It seemed so unfair. We were just little rabbits in the field. The customers who came to us weren’t all little rabbits—why, we had Favart, after all, and he’d been in the Paris Salon!—but they weren’t high and mighty, either. So why the bulls should have kicked at us so much I didn’t know.

Except I did. We weren’t rabbits, not really. Nobody in Paris was. Maybe we were goats, or dogs. Something that could band together and scare a cow—send even a bull running, or kill it, like old headless Louis, the king’s older brother—and they wanted to keep us bruised. Cattle dogs, Sandrine would have said, with that merrily ferocious grin of hers: cattle dogs that ought to be the ones doing the herding, if we’d only work together for it. Her talk frightened me.

But it was exciting, too. And maybe not all of it right, but… maybe a little bit right.

I took my thoughts home, to the apartment where Isabelle and her Lucie had first loaned and then rented me their spare mattress in the corner of their sitting room. I buried them in the busyness of feeding their little caged canary and tidying up—I always tried to make myself useful, because I wanted Isabelle to keep liking me well enough to keep sharing a small shop floor with me, and because I knew Isabelle and Lucie were giving me a very good deal on the rent, and because anyway I liked to be busy. Dad had taught me that.

I buried my thoughts, but I didn’t stop thinking them.

Later that evening, I sat by the window with Isabelle in her squashy chair drawing—she’s a terrible artist, if I’m being scrupulously honest, but she knows it and she likes to draw anyway, so where’s the harm?—and Lucie at the table putting her hair in rollers.

Sandrine had stopped by earlier on her way to a salon at M. Victor Hugo’s place, but only briefly. She’d tried to entice me along—but Mylène, anyone who’s anyone will be there! Talking of real things, important things! It’s good to know such people, my dear, especially with everything going on Paris now. You really ought to—but I’d refused. She’d taken me to one some time ago and it had made me feel like a sluggish provincial with mud for brains to be surrounded by all those witty uproarious theatrical radicals, all outrageous fashion and political opinions.

Besides that, my leg was hurting, and I was peeved on top of that. I’d been hoping she’d stay in for a bit of a cuddle, especially as she’d been running errands for her mother after work all week. So we’d half-quarreled—or maybe more than half—and she’d left in a huff a little while ago.

I was trying to read. But it was hard to focus on much this evening, somehow. It had been even before the sunset started to steal away the sunlight. I put the book down and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.

“Is the light fading, Milou? Come over here, I’ll get a lamp.” Lucie is the sort to nickname everyone upon a day’s acquaintance, and warm enough to make the habit endearing instead of annoying.

“The light’s fine,” I told my sleeves. “It’s my brain that’s fading. Ugh.”

“You shouldn’t take little Sandrine’s enthusiasms to heart. She thinks everyone ought to enjoy everything she does, that’s all, but she’ll listen when you say you don’t.”

“It’s not that,” I said, though it was, a bit. I didn’t like feeling like a mud-for-brains, especially around her, and I didn’t like coming second best to a stupid salon. “She says it’s real things, all that stuff they talk—and the plays and the poems and all—and she’s probably right, she knows so much—and their politics, too, it’s not that I disagree, mostly, but twelve citations and three puns for every opinion, even the wrong ones—ugh! If that’s real things I’ve never had a real thought in my life.” I lifted my head and sent them an apologetic grimace.

“I went to see Hernani, you know,” Isabelle volunteered. Hernani was the most uproarious of the theatrical uproars, shattering every rule of theater in sight, the darling of Sandrine’s artistic circles. Everyone at that salon I’d been to had quoted it constantly. “In March or so. Couldn’t see what the fuss was about, to be honest.” She shrugged.

“It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, really,” I agreed, with a quiet thrill of transgression. Sandrine loved it so much that it seemed a sin to admit that I found the language beautiful but the way it discarded classical strictures almost too daring and the plot absolutely idiotic. Even aside from the fact that it was nearly impossible to hear the actors over the audience. All the Romantics yelled out lines and jokes and callbacks, and all the classicists yelled out insults, and sometimes they actually fought each other in the aisles about it, and the actors yelled grimly over the whole thing. You got double the show for your money, at least, I’ll say that.

Isabelle made a face. “All that stomping and swooning and dying in each other’s arms for no good reason. And I’m old, call me a relic if you like, but I rather like the classical unities. You go to a play and you know what will and won’t be in it. Real life gives us all the chaos I need. But these young artists, they think if you just make your art wild and free enough, put every emotion you’ve got into it, you can build a better world out of that.”

“And you think they’re fools.” I tried not to sound glum, but I was feeling it, even though I’d been resenting those same young artists a moment before. Why does everyone of a certain age feel the need to tell the young that they’re starry-eyed fools?

“No,” she said.

I goggled. She shrugged again, more expressively this time. “Well, maybe they are, but maybe I am for thinking it. It doesn’t matter. If they do manage that better world, I’ll be the first to thank them with all my heart! And plenty of them are doing a good deal more than art, you know, for the cause. You can write a play that makes no damn sense and help a wanted man out of the city and stand ready for a barricade, all three. The play’s not the point. The point is, none of us know how to get to a better world, or we’d have done it already. Even the Revolution—it overthrew so much that was old and awful, the people took great strides forward in ‘89, but it had its bad sides too. The ones who rail about it aren’t all wrong. We’re all blindfolded in a dark room, trying to fumble our way to the exit, trying to tear off the blindfold so that if we stumble across some light we can see it.”

I thought about that, and about Sandrine’s fierce certainties. She was so much surer about all her convictions than I’d ever been in my life. “How do you know when you’re going right, then?”

Isabelle made an eloquent who knows? face. It was Lucie who spoke up.

“You look at the people you’re with,” she said, and smiled. “If they’re people you trust to steer to a good end, then you’re probably doing all right.”

On Sunday I went to mass, as always, and made confession. I didn’t tell the priest anything that wasn’t his business—my prickly unsettled feelings about the haze of rumor and riot in the air, the exact dimensions of my friendship with Sandrine—but it always does me good. You feel your sins washed away, and you sit and hear the holy Latin rolling over you, and that washes you clean too. Sandrine calls me a provincial for it, and I suppose all her artistic radicals would too, but I don’t see why there’s anything provincial about trusting in God.

On Monday morning there was a stormcloud charge to the air. It felt as if all my prickling had spread outside my head to the whole of Paris, or at least the whole of our neighborhood. Usually on the walk to work I just feel tired and grumbly (and stiff too, until I’ve walked a few blocks and gotten everything in my bad leg moving again), but that day I was wide awake and jittery. Everyone around me seemed to be casting quick glances and passing whispers, but I couldn’t quite catch why.

I’d only just settled into my chair and started to lay out my tools when there came a quick commotion of running feet, followed a youthful yell. “Madame!” the kid cried, skidding to a halt between the two typesetting stands. “Madame Barthélemy!”

Jacques, it was, old M. Daigneau’s grandson from three blocks over. Every printer in Paris had a few children running notes around town, be they relatives or neighborhood urchins or both, and in these unsettled days every printer was keeping ears to the ground. Daigneau’s is a bigger shop that can handle more bulk work, and Barthélemy’s does better fine work, so there are notes and runners going back and forth all the time. We see a lot of Jacques.

“Now then, Jacquot, what’s the fuss?” Mme Barthélemy strolled over. She gets worked up herself, but when someone else is worked up instead she turns into a lump of imperturbable stone, and that was in full force now. “Word from your granddad?”

“It’s the king!” Jacques cried, nearly vibrating with his excitement. The atmosphere galvanized, just at the word, and I fumbled a needle. Anything the king did was news, and unlikely to be good. “He’s altered the Charter by decree, him and that rat Polignac. Sent out ordinances. Just this morning—Grandpa got it from the folks at Le National. He’s suspended freedom of the press, that’s one of the ordinances.”

“Suspended it?” That was Isabelle, sharper than I’d ever heard her, and on her heels Sandrine demanded, “Temporarily? Or permanently?”

Mme Barthélemy lifted her hand to shush them, and they shushed. “Well, child?”

Jacques fumbled in his vest and pulled out a newspaper: Le Moniteur universel, and without seeing the date I knew it had to be this morning’s first printing. He shoved it at her. “Suspended, that’s all it says! See for yourself, Madame. Grandpa says to tell you it’s time.”

Mme Barthélemy gazed down at the paper in her hands. “Well then,” she said. “Well then.”

The hair was up on the back of my neck. I felt as if I was still in a dream, and simultaneously so full of nervous energy I might explode out of my skin at any moment. I flicked my eyes at Sandrine surreptitiously, and saw her whole face shining. Isabelle looked like a mountain all by herself: stolid, huge, all looming power.

It dawned on me that perhaps not all of those errands they’d been running had been to customers; I felt as if I’d been standing on a hillside for months, and only just realized it was a volcano.

She folded the paper and tucked it away in her basket with small, unhurried motions. She patted the kerchief she kept over it back into place. “Well then,” she said one more time, as if to herself, and then raised her voice. “All right, my girls. Shop’s closed today. There’s no point in the press without its liberty, now is there? Mylène, Antoine, home you go. There’ll be fighting in the streets before long, if I make my guess. I hope I’m wrong but I’m sure I’m not. Sandrine, Isa, here we go, my dears.”

I found my voice. “I’m coming too.” It came out thick and halting—I hadn’t known I was going to say it until I did, but I meant it—so I cleared my throat and said it again, clearer. I couldn’t be shooed home from this. We provincials have voices too, loud as anybody else.

“Oh, Mylène, I knew you would!” cried Sandrine, but Isabelle made a sharp hushing gesture.

“Mylène,” she said. “Are you sure? It’ll get messy today. Bullets and barricades and blood in the gutters, kind of messy. No shame to want out of that.”

Sandrine’s shining pretty eyes or not, I made myself return Isabelle’s steady gaze. I swallowed. “I’m sure. I’ll leave if ever I’m not. But it’s not right—it’s not right, that the king should think he can overturn elections and the press and all just to suit him. I’m not trotting off home. And you all know what you’re about, don’t you?”

Isabelle nodded at me, solid and steady. I trusted her, I realized; I trusted her to lead the way to a barricade across the Rue Saint-Denis, if it came to that. Mme Barthélemy sighed, but she was smiling faintly down at her basket too, and Sandrine beamed right at me, bright as the July sunlight stretching over the roofs of Paris.

Show Notes

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LHMP, podcast

A Summary, For Completeness' Sake

Tuesday, July 16, 2024 - 21:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

What it says on the tin.

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LHMP #441 Rackin 2005 Afterword

Full citation:

Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. “Afterword” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Although this collection does have one paper addressing female homoeroticism on stage, I have covered it primarily as background reading for exploring role-playing and stage theatrics as a context for romance tropes involving female couples.

Afterword

The afterword sums up the conclusion of the collection that the “all male stage” is a myth and an aberration, being true only of certain specific times, contexts, and locations. Women are absent from the stage only when “the stage” is very narrowly and carefully defined. The concept holds true in England only for a narrow range of time between the rise of private professional companies (displacing the earlier tradition of guild-sponsored plays) and the entrance of women into those companies at the Restoration. It never applied to amateur theatricals, court masques, or local seasonal theatricals. And while other countries had specific theater genres that specified an all-male cast, the prominence of those contexts was more limited than in England and gave way to a mixed-gender profession earlier.

Time period:

16th c

Place:

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The Joke's On You

Monday, July 15, 2024 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Did you know that books of jokes and amusing tales were a popular staple of early modern English literature? In addition to published collections, people put together their own, like the one discussed in this article. Although "teller of jokes at private dinners" may not fall in the usual image of dramatic performers, at least this article is vastly redeemed by an anecdote illustrating that ordinary women were wearing mascjuline clothing for active pursuits on occasion. And though the subject was made the butt of a joke here, the joke was not about the clothing, but hinged on a chance for sexual innuendo.

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LHMP #440 Brown 2005 Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange

Full citation:

Brown, Pamela Allen. 2005. Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Brown - Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange

“Jest books” and collections of short humorous tales were a staple of the 16th and 17th centuries. [Note: the genre has its roots even earlier, such as Walter Map’s 12th century “Courtiers Trifles.”]

This article looks at one particular example of this genre of recorded vocal performance that has far more evidence for female performance of jests than usual. The book is also unusual in the proportion of original contemporary material as opposed to “reprints” from previously published joke books.

The book was compiled by Nicolas L’Estrange, and includes an index where each anecdote is attributed to a specific person—presumably, the originator. The author’s mother, Alice, features prominently, and in all about 15% are attributed to women. [Note: that this is an unusually high proportion is telling.] Whether or not these attributions reflect authorship, or simply note “informants” (to use a sociological term) one can certainly class them as a type of “performer” on a private, domestic stage.

As noted, Alice L’Estrange is the most commonly cited, not simply among women, but overall. Much of the content is political satire with royalist sentiments (the collection having been compiled largely during the interregnum). The jokes are often scatological or bawdy, shedding interesting light on the private behavior of “respectable” women. Many make reference to class and ethnic stereotypes, and may use dialogue in dialect. Over half of Alice’s jests involve a female narrator or subject.

As an example of the type of jest source to Alice L’Estrange, I offer the following because it also has an interesting peek at contexts for women wearing male garments in the early 17th century.

The Bury Ladyes that usd [to go] Hawking and Hunting, were once in a great vaine of wearing Breeches; and some of them being at dinner one day at Sir Edward Lewkenors, there was one Mr Zephory, a very precise and a silenc’t minister, (who frequented that house much) and discourse being offered of fashions, he fell upon this and declaimed much against it; Rob[ert] Heighem a Joviall blade being there, he undertook to vindicate the Ladyes, and their fashion, as decent and such as might cover their shame: for says he, if an Horse throwes them, or by any mischance they get a fall, had you not better see them in their Breeches then Naked? [S]ayes the over-zealous man, in detestation of Breeches, O no, by no means[!] By my troth Parson, says Rob[ert] Heighem, and I commend thee for’t, for I am of thy mind too.

[My commentary: The backbone of the joke is that in his zeal for disapproving of cross-gender clothing, the uptight parson is tricked into proclaiming his desire to be an “upskirt” Peeping Tom, which the trickster then heartily supports as an outcome. Setting this aside, we have several observations. Well-born women might choose to wear breeches under their skirts when participating in horseback activities such as hunting and falconry. The implied purpose of this fashion (since the breeches would normally be hidden) is modesty in case of accident during this active pursuit. One could speculate that breeches might also enable a woman to ride astride. Women’s underpants were still a novelty in this era (perhaps more common in southern Europe). When riding side-saddle, the skirts would prevent contact with the saddle, but if riding astride, one might want breeches for comfort. But viewing this anecdote in the context of the “hic mulier” controversies around cross-gender fashions, we can see how religious disapproval of anything resembling cross-gender behavior can take no consideration of even a higher moral purpose in adhering to strict rules. Though, of course, the parson may also disapprove generally of women participating in active sports. And many of the cross-gender fashions criticized in pamphlets are clearly just fashion statements, though perhaps with an underlying layer of masculine power being fashionable.]

Time period:

Place:

cross-gender roles/behavior

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Whose Voice?

Sunday, July 14, 2024 - 10:30

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This takes care of the less pertinent articles in the collection. There's one more article that to post from this collection, but it has enough interesting bits to get its own day.

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LHMP #439 Smith 2005 Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads

Full citation:

Smith, Bruce R. 2005. “Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Smith - Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads

This article discusses the gendered aspects of ballad performance, both in terms of who is singing, and in terms of the gender of the “persona” of the song. The “female impersonation” of the article’s title refers to male performance of songs representing a female “voice.” This is connected very tangentially to the practice of male actors performing female parts on stage. Like the previous two articles, I did not consider it very relevant to my interests.

Time period:

16th c

Place:

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Presence Through Absence on the Stage

Sunday, July 14, 2024 - 10:20

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Interesting, but not pertinent to my present purposes.

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LHMP #438 Howard 2005 Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I

Full citation:

Howard, Jean E. 2005. “Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Part V Beyond the “All Male”; Howard - Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I

This article examines the symbolic and philosophical implications of the exclusion of female bodies from the English professional stage, while presenting female characters, as seen through the lens of how Queen Elizabeth I was depicted on stage. Such depictions of women in general relied on stereotypical signifiers. This would apply ever more strongly for depicting a queen as queen (since obviously, there was no actual queen on stage). Though interesting, this article is also out of the scope of my interest.

Time period:

16th c

Place:

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Margaret Cavendish and the Theatricality of Activism

Sunday, July 14, 2024 - 10:10

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Margaret Cavendish is a fascinating person and even has her own tag in the Project. but this article isn't directly relevant to my interests.

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LHMP #437 Crawford 2005 ’Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the like’: Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition

Full citation:

Crawford, Julie. 2005. “’Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the like’: Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Crawford - ’Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the like’: Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition

Margaret Cavendish was known as a playwright—though for reading consumption rather than stage performance—but not as a theatrical performer herself. But both her plays and her political activity can be seen as having significant overlap in communicating her views and promoting her husband’s positions. Both served as petitions for the ear of those in power to convince them of her opinions and wishes. However, as with the previous article, I feel like this one stretches the scope of the collection beyond what is of interest to my purpose.

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Margaret Cavendish

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Legal Defense as Theater

Sunday, July 14, 2024 - 10:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

I did warn folks that there are a handful of articles in this collection that both strain the book's premise and aren't pertinent to the background research for the "Stage and Actresses" tropes episode. This is one of them. In fact, I think I'm just going to throw up a handful today and get them out of the way.

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LHMP #436 Parolin 2005 The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel

Full citation:

Parolin, Peter. 2005. “The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Part IV Beyond the Stage; Parolin - The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel

This article frame is the legal defense of the Countess of Arundel against espionage charges in Venice as a sort of theatrical performance. As context for this, the author reviews the countess’s experience performing in masques at the court of James I. The article feels like it’s stretching the premise of the collection a bit, and feels fairly speculative, using the phrases “might have,” and “must have” a bit too often for confidence.

Time period:

Place:

Italy

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Depends on What You Mean by Stage and Acting

Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 19:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This article points out that the position "women didn't act on the English stage until the Restoration" leans heavily on some very specific definitions of "act" and "stage." In particular, it erases non-commercial performances such as masques performed by ladies of the court.

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LHMP #435 Gough 2005 Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays in France and England

Full citation:

Gough, Melinda J. 2005. “Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays in France and England” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7

Publication summary:

Gough - Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays in France and England

When we think of dramatic performance by courtiers, masques tend to be the first image, but this article examines the performance of stage plays by the English court under Henrietta Maria, Queen to Charles I. The queen was French and imported French attitudes and expectations to the sphere where she could set the rules. In particular, she greatly increased women’s performance on the court stages, and amateur women’s theatricals became a regular feature of the court.

But to understand that dynamic, we must look at the French court’s interactions with professional actresses, including those from Italy. Henrietta Maria’s background was rooted in the court of her mother, Marie de Medici, in which young women of the court participated in theatrical performance as part of a broadly cultured and cosmopolitan social context.

Unfortunately, we have a little direct evidence for the specifics of her theatrical activities there. As an example—though one, Henrietta Maria was too young to have participated in herself—the article looks at the 1611 performance at the French court of Bradamante, directed by and starring Henrietta Maria’s older sister Elizabeth, who was 9 years old at the time. Elizabeth modeled her performance on that of celebrity Italian actresses, who regularly toured France. These precedents enabled aristocratic women performers to be praised for their performance skills, rather than being criticized for immodesty. They were seen as adding to the prestige and magnificence of the court.

Elizabeth was the instigator of the staging of Bradamante, not simply assigned the role. This was no casual “showing off the kids.” Her mother, the queen, only permitted the performance with the requirement that Elizabeth know and perform her part suitably. (Bradamante is an Amazon character featured in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.) The title role included androgynous cross-dressing, and the performance included girls playing male parts, all familiar tropes from Italian commedia.

There is a discussion of the evidence for various Italian troupes playing at the French court of Maria de Medici, as well as other mentions of performances by court ladies. This would be part of an array of entertainments presented for special occasions. (Ariosto was popular source material for short plays and interludes.)

Why were Italian actresses the inspiration for performance by court women rather than French actresses? French actresses had been participating on local stages as early as the 15th century (there is documentary evidence of a tradesman’s daughter performing in a mystery play in 1468), and by at least 1545 there is evidence for professional performance by women. But women did not regularly perform professionally in Paris until the 1610s. This difference may be related to genre distinctions, with Paris focusing on bawdy farce, which was more hazardous to an actress’s reputation. The introduction of women to the Parisian professional stage accompanied the performance of more elevated works. Even so, Parisian actresses didn’t achieve the same respect and status as Italian ones, well into the mid-17th century. Therefore court women looked elsewhere for models that would situate them as part of an intellectual tradition, rather than one associated with loose morals.

Correspondence by foreign visitors to the French court note Henrietta Maria’s theatrical performances at a time when it must have been part of “showing her off” for potential suitors in the 1620s. There’s a reference to Henrietta Maria later staging a performance for Charles I’s birthday of a play she had previously performed in Paris. The plays she staged as queen were typically performed by her ladies-in-waiting (and herself). Women performing in court masques and visiting foreign actresses had been part of the English performance scene since the reign of Elizabeth I. Queen Anna (wife of James I) was particularly active in promoting a female masquing tradition at the court.

Though masques typically involved dance and acting but not verbal performance, a rare early example of female vocal performance in masques was a 1617 performance by a girls’ school in honor of Queen Anna. So the change that Henrietta Maria brought was not formal performance as such, but an expanded scope and variety of the types of roles and performances women engaged in.

The article details various performances that Henrietta Maria directed and participated in. As the queens “troupe” were all female, these performances often involved cross-dressed roles. English commenters tend to overlook the actual skill of the performances and instead grumbled about the propriety of women—to say nothing of the queen—appearing on stage at all. In contrast, foreign correspondents in England made more favorable comments. (This contrast may speak to why historians have tended to treat Henrietta Maria’s performances as trivial and amateurish, taking their tone from stuffy English disapproval.)

Henrietta Maria sometimes used plays as political activism or commentary, choosing subjects, and even the language of performance as a message to political rivals or allies. She demanded professional standards from her troupe, delaying performances if they were not up to snuff, and bringing in well-known stage actors to coach them.

Time period:

Place:

France