Précieuses

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The literary style called préciosité ("preciousness") arose from the lively conversations and playful word games of les précieuses the witty and educated intellectual ladies who frequented the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet, a Parisian refuge from the dangerous political factionism and coarse manners of the royal court during the minority of Louis XIII. One of the central figures of the salon, Madeleine de Scudéry, wrote voluminous romance novels that were suffused with feminine elegance, exquisitely correct scruples of behavior and Platonic love that were hugely popular with a largely female audience, but scorned by most men.

The précieuses are remembered through the filter of Molière's one-act satire of them in Les précieuses ridicules, (1659) a bitter comedy of manners that brought Molière and his company to the attention of Parisians, after years of touring the provinces, and attracted the patronage of Louis XIV, and which still plays well today. The two provincial young ladies reject the suitors proposed by their father as insufficiently refined, only to fall in love with the suitors' valets, disguised as wits. In the provinces, the young ladies' Parisian pretensions were worth mockery, and in Paris, their puffed-up provincial naiveté and self-esteem were laughable, and Molière pleased all possible audiences.

[edit] References

• Howard, Patricia, "Quinault, Lully, and the Precieuses: Images of Women in Seventeenth-Century France." in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, editors, pp 70-89. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.