Honnêteté, the seventeenth-century French discourse and set of practices revolving around refined aristocratic politeness, pleasing social performance and apparently effortless good taste,Footnote 1 has become the dominant framework for understanding salons as social formations from this period into the nineteenth century. Social and cultural historians emphasize its constraints on Enlightenment salonnières such as Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert, the subject of this essay, and voice skepticism that these women could pursue serious, independent, or oppositional intellectual agendas.Footnote 2 Meanwhile, feminist historical and literary scholarship continues to rehearse oversimplified depictions of Cartesian rationalist egalitarian feminism (emblematized by François Poulain de la Barre and premised on a purportedly rigid substance dualism), with one well-received study arguing that Lambert's feminism problematically deviated from this tradition.Footnote 3 Feminist and salon scholarships have wrongly presented Lambert's feminism as weak or misguided, however, because they do not situate and analyze it within a broader understanding of Cartesianism, sensibility, honnêteté, and salon society.Footnote 4 Careful, contextualized study of Lambert's thought shows instead that contemporary feminist impulses could make excellent sense within non-dualist formulations, and that honnêteté need not limit women's intellectual agency. I will argue that this honnête salonnière advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) and honnête thought, and that she did so because this approach best served her needs within the honnête salon society in which she functioned.Footnote 5
Extending intellectual history's rigorously contextualized analyses to the often fugitive writings of salon women can correct reductionist tendencies in viewing salonnières. Being “a Cartesian” in Lambert's day, for example, did not necessarily—or even normally—mean that one discounted the mind's embodiment.Footnote 6 Cartesian frameworks buttressed feminist and misogynist outlooks, highlighting bodily influence to their own purposes.Footnote 7 Lambert fits well within this “big tent” Cartesian tradition, and differences between her and Poulain are caricatured when this is not appreciated. Here I will show how a closer analysis of Lambert's intellectual relationship with one key figure of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thought leads to a better understanding of this Cartesian woman's honnête intervention into the mixed-sex philosophical and aesthetic debates of her day. This figure was Nicolas Malebranche, Cartesian philosopher, honorary member of the Académie des sciences, and Oratorian priest.
I examine Lambert's gendered epistemology and thought on women's taste, as revealed primarily in her Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes, to show how she was carefully reconceiving and rewriting Malebranche's already highly gendered physiologically based Cartesian epistemology from within the social and intellectual vantage points of feminism, honnêteté, and her Malebranchian salon.Footnote 8 To do so, in part, she drew on elements of Poulain's feminist thought, but not what we celebrate as his sexless-mind position. Rather, Lambert was drawn to those of his claims that were grounded in gendered embodiment and sensibility, and that emphasized the honnête values of pleasure, delicacy, and sentiment. Showing that two fellow Cartesians—one a feminist—whose work Lambert knew, were, decades before she wrote, portraying the female mind as sexed because embodied, clears her of the charge of initiating a trend towards sexual differentiation said to depart in nature from (an overly simplified) Cartesian dualistic rationalism.Footnote 9 Moreover, Lambert's nuanced position as a mondaine intellectual interlocutor of these more famous male Cartesians reveals how complex, meaningful and contingent in their impact for feminism could be the historical interconnections between Cartesian affiliations, sensibility, honnêteté, and biologically based theories of gender, as understood and deployed by men and women in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Lambert worked creatively within these cultural parameters, to her own ends. Functioning within the joint opportunities and constraints of honnêteté, this salonnière, who idealized and personified honnête moral virtue and refined politeness, was not circumscribed by honnête norms into conservatism, superficiality, fearful detachment from intellectual debate or a silent, trapped, or willing accommodation of the Malebranchian, at times misogynistic, positions of her male guests. Rather, in bonding honnêteté with physiological sensibility Lambert revealed a more radical potential for asserting gender equality through honnêteté. Her use of honnête tropes in emphasizing aspects of Malebranchian physio-psychology and modern theories of sensibility furthered goals that were at once both feminist and honnête.
Yet the complexity of Lambert's feminist retort to Malebranche's philosophy of mind and her importance as his major feminist interlocutor have been overlooked, although she clearly disagreed with him, and managed an important salon with known Malebranchian links during a period when Malebranche was widely read and known. The recent claim that Lambert “accepts Malebranche's limitation of female intelligence to matters of taste” is typical.Footnote 10 Only Linda Timmermans, to my knowledge, correctly interprets Lambert's response to Malebranche.Footnote 11 With due credit to their many other valuable insights into Lambert's thought, literary and feminist scholars downplay or overlook her pushing back against him,Footnote 12 portray her as departing from an overly simplified Cartesian rationalist tradition rather than situate her within its full complexity,Footnote 13 or anachronistically deny her physiological essentialism, the recognition of which causes them considerable discomfort.Footnote 14
And yet the contributions of feminist literary scholars have been invaluable to our understanding of early modern women's thought, by developing sophisticated interpretations of aristocratic women's publishing strategies and showing how deep, often oppositional, engagement with philosophical and social issues was veiled in early modern women's writings, buried in non-scholastic genres, camouflaged in fictional form or by the kind of playful style Lambert herself employed.Footnote 15 If intellectual historians followed this lead, being more attentive to salon women's ideas and the literary and rhetorical forms with which they expressed them, they could advance the historical understanding of these honnête women, while doing greater justice to ephemeral, scanty, or nontraditional intellectual-history sources. Cultivating sensitivity to salon women's rhetorical strategies and maneuvers, and to their intellectual affiliations and divergences (however muted by honnête decorum), would correct presumptions that honnête style transparently reveals pro-absolutist values or limited intellectual engagement (readings not usually applied to the writings of honnête men who frequented salons).Footnote 16 We would then better comprehend these women's relationships with various Enlightenment currents; be better placed to clarify the evolving, complex, and unfixed nature of the influence of honnêteté over them qua salonnières; and perhaps gain an enhanced understanding of how honnêteté may or may not have inhibited, or fostered, salon intellectual culture more generally. This kind of intellectual history could yield a more nuanced assessment of salon women's intellectual potential, positions, activities, and interventions, while enriching our growing understanding of the impact of social location and gender identity in particular Enlightenment debates, as these were lived and thought through.
Such an approach reveals that although Lambert never directly stated what came to be an essentially materialist position about women's leadership in taste, and never took on Malebranche more than obliquely, she was no more intellectually constrained by honnêteté than was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who deployed its polite conventions to frame the emerging discourse of an early eighteenth-century scientific culture seeking respect and status and to solidify its newly prominent Academic niche, while containing its disputes over calculus and cosmology.Footnote 17 When Lambert made disclaimers about being led astray to sow flowers on the altar of Love (236–7) or invoked authorial modesty, we should no more read these at face value than when assessing other protective strategies used by provocative Old Regime authors—like Fontenelle—who wished to avoid trouble with the censors or in polite society.Footnote 18 Their gender, and often their rank, were additional but not insurmountable constraints on salon women, like those faced by other writers; all had to maneuver, negotiate their expression, and find ways to further their individual goals. The Old Regime salonnière, in short, should no more be reduced to honnête politesse, than should Diderot to the quest for funding the Encyclopédie.
Moreover, honnête style, for Lambert, Fontenelle, and many others, was a tool at least as much as a restraint. Polite refinement, lightness and playful presentation were distinguishing stylistic features of those who, like them, identified as Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in a deliberate quest to differentiate themselves from what they portrayed as a stodgy, pedantic Republic of Letters and a misogynist Ancient party. Seriousness and playfulness were intimately intertwined in early Enlightenment writings and in the Enlightenment salons, with a mingled balance of these qualities ideally cultivated by both sexes.Footnote 19 Seeking to cultivate the polite public by enveloping the serious in the honnête and pleasurable was a deliberate and considered tactic in the early Enlightenment strategy of Lambert's neo-precious salon.Footnote 20 Fontenelle, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, Montesquieu, Marivaux, and other members of this “forum for an ambitious project whose goal was to effect a collaboration between the feminine and mondain public, academic institutions, and certain influential political milieus, towards the triumph of modern ideas,” wielded the seductive arms of a new préciosité for their own pleasure and to win this public's approbation.Footnote 21Honnête, précieuse playfulness deliberately fused with serious philosophical ideas, graciously escorting them to the receptive attention of a polite public, just as the modern aesthetics of galanterie, sentiment, and pleasure of early eighteenth-century music, theatre, decoration, painting, and architecture expressed aristocratic resistance to or disdain for absolutist power mechanics and even social conventions about rank and gender, a similarly oblique yet legible approach designed to protect the composer, artist or noble commissioner of a Parisian hotel.Footnote 22
In Lambert's case, the privately circulated manuscript essay playfully and delicately expressed feminist disagreement with certain members of a Malebranchian circle with scientific and masculine egos at stake, while balancing aristocratic, feminine, and religious proprieties. I am skeptical that Lambert was exceptional or the last among eighteenth-century salon women in mastering such delicately oppositional communication. Closer study of other salon women's intellectual relationships and rhetoric may well reveal more of the complexities of their thought, if we are sensitive to the situatedness of their ideas and language within the many streams of Enlightenment philosophy and science as well as the particular conventions of honnête social formations like salons. More such analyses should be attempted before drawing further conclusions about “the Old Regime salonnière” as a category.
LAMBERT AND HER SALON
Born into the comfortable milieu of the noblesse de robe in 1647, beneficiary of an excellent literary and moral education, and a wealthy widow after a 1692 legal victory against her dead husband's military family, the marquise de Lambert opened her Parisian salon in the best honnête and précieuse tradition late that year or in early 1693. In establishing her salon, it is well known that Lambert idealized the mid-century era of préciosité as a golden age and sought to emulate the cultural and moral refinement represented by earlier female paragons of honnêteté; she also yearned to discuss and influence serious intellectual matters of public import. Launched in the difficult late reign of Louis XIV, witnessing the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, the Regency's excesses, the collapse of Law's System and the early years of the Enlightenment, the salon's agenda and guest lists were honnête, literary, and intellectual. The Modern leaders Fontenelle, whom Lambert likely met between 1687 and 1695, and la Motte, the major Modern antagonist during the Quarrel's last phase over Homer, were the key male figures; other regulars included Bouhours, Boulainvilliers, Fénelon, Claude Buffier, Crébillon père, Montesquieu, Marivaux and Du Bos. Until her death in 1733 (when her guests migrated to madame de Tencin's), Lambert's salon seamlessly honored the précieuse tradition and was the first of the great Enlightenment salons, “cradle of the Encyclopédie.”Footnote 23
With its hostess's interests in la morale and modern science, and its distinguished and forward-looking guest lists, Lambert's salon became an important forum for the encounter of honnête values with the newest theories of psychology, sensibility and aesthetic reception, serious interests of the membership. New publications and the habitués' works-in-progress on these and other subjects were read, discussed, and extracted for the gazettes.Footnote 24 Guests and hostess wrote on taste, women's cultural influence, the psychology of pleasure or beauty, or engaged in the Quarrel that shook up received notions of taste and beauty, fostered the development of notions of aesthetic relativism and tolerance, and affected the salon personally, as did Regency transitions and the fallout from Law's System, in which they invested (and lost). Many of their writings, including Lambert's, would circulate before a broader public. One of the important influences on these writings was Malebranche's thought on taste and the female mind.Footnote 25
Lambert, femme cartésienne and dame malebranchiste, had read Descartes and Malebranche, considered the Méditations essential reading for the formation of honnêtes gens, and in her Avis d'une mère à sa fille recommended the study of “the new” philosophy to her daughter, for “it gives you precision in the mind, untangles your ideas, and teaches you to think justly” (111). Before opening her salon, she had attended the salon of madame de la Sablière, where Cartesian and scientific ideas had been discussed. She owned and cited Malebranche's De la recherche de la vérité and had read his Traité de morale. One of the great contributions of Roger Marchal's magisterial study of Lambert is to draw attention to Malebranche's importance to the marquise and her milieu; Marchal sees Lambert's thought frequently evincing Malebranchian influence on matters ranging from knowledge acquisition and mental force to political theory.Footnote 26 Lambert's interest in Descartes and Malebranche in this period was not unusual. Cartesian influence was omnipresent in her lifetime in educated French circles, and is widely evident in the views of her habitués, including women like the duchesse du Maine, who ran her own Cartesian salon, and Maine's confidante, the baronne de Staal-Delaunay, who attended both gatherings.Footnote 27 Malebranche (1638–1715) was “the reigning philosopher of the epoch,” the best-known and most important Cartesian thinker at the time. His work was extraordinarily popular with early eighteenth-century honnête, literary, and scientific society, especially during the Regency.Footnote 28 “Honnête society,” explains Marchal, “appreciated his efforts to clarify the first principles of la morale and to adapt the new philosophy to analyses of the human heart.”Footnote 29
While Lambert's reputation as gatekeeper to the Académie française is celebrated, there were also important reciprocal ties between her salon and the Académie des sciences through their overlapping malebranchiste membership, which should be better known.Footnote 30 Indeed, Malebranche's broader influence on developments in mathematics and physics extended well beyond géomètres and physiciens through vehicles such as the Mercure galant, which pitched mathematical publications to the polite public. This development was fostered by Fontenelle, tireless proponent of Cartesian physics, who began his literary career in Paris with the Mercure before becoming a key member of Lambert's salon. In general, the importance of mathematics to mixed-sex honnête culture and the fusion of Malebranchian analytic clarity with honnête self-cultivation and clear speech were very salient in the 1690s.Footnote 31
Malebranche was the center of arguably the dominant group in the Academy following its 1699 reorganization, when he was brought in as an honoraire, along with a critical mass of fellow malebranchiste mathematicians which maintained its influence well beyond the Regency.Footnote 32 Two powerful lambertins – Fontenelle, the Academy's perpetual secretary since 1697, and Bignon, its president since 1691 (and the most influential figure in the Academy admissions process) – led this reform, which placed new emphasis on the public visibility of the academicians' work. Malebranche, Fontenelle, and especially Bignon were all key players in Academic admissions patronage and coalition-building. Fontenelle's new academic éloges and annual histories of the academy's work, designed for legibility to the polite public and marked by the precious verbal style of the salon (and apparently subjected to salon vetting and input), publicized Malebranchian physics and mathematics.Footnote 33 Bignon, likewise keenly interested in rendering scientific knowledge chic, also presided over the directorship of the Journal des savants, the official philosophical and scientific journal (to which Lambert subscribed), itself being reformed in the early decades of the century.Footnote 34 The lambertin malebranchiste Academicians included the abbés Christophe-Bernard de Bragelonne and Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, two of the most influential lambertins;Footnote 35 Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, Malebranche's mathematics student from 1698 to 1702 and protégé, and eventually Fontenelle's successor as Academy secretary (equally faithful to his public-outreach project);Footnote 36 and the Modern abbé and géomètre Jean Terrasson.Footnote 37 Institutional and personal ties of friendship, patronage, intellectual exchange, and instruction connected this “Malebranche circle,” which introduced and began to use the infinitesimal calculus in France, to each other and to this dominant intellectual figure. Coming and going in various overlapping networks, as habitués chez Lambert they formed the salon's scientific Malebranchian core, while Montesquieu, Bignon, Terrasson, and the abbé Nicolas-Hubert de Mongault were also connected through their Oratorian educations. Their welcoming hostess, fellow malebranchiste, was no mathematician but sought the same precise insights into truth and mental force as did they and Malebranche.Footnote 38
Indeed, Lambert used Malebranchian psychology against him to argue for women's special access to this truth-attaining mental force. Accordingly, I focus neither on mathematics nor on the other more studied areas of Malebranche's oeuvre, but on his treatment of taste and his gendered epistemology. These areas of his thought were important enough to Lambert to take on; here we can delve deeper into an important aspect of her malebranchisme. There is evidence of Malebranchian influence on the writings of the lambertins in these areas as well.Footnote 39
MALEBRANCHE ON FEMININE AND EFFEMINATE MINDS
Malebranche's importance to contemporary thought on taste and gender has not been well understood. These aspects of his thought are found in his best-known work, De la recherche de la vérité, his multifaceted consideration of the mind and of epistemological and cultural blocks to avoiding error and attaining truth. There he attacked taste, considered as a function of the senses and the imagination; all three by definition meant falseness and error in Malebranche's ascetic epistemology. In an intrinsically gendered critique, he dismissed taste as a bodily distraction hindering reason and clear perception. Although Malebranche acknowledged women's dominant cultural role in the salons and over literature, he irrevocably linked this to denying them intellectual prominence and rational capabilities, by classifying these salon activities, the literary domain, and taste itself as superficial and misleading. This analysis has almost been lost to us within his magnum opus, whose concerns extended far beyond those habits of mondain and honnête society targeted in his treatment of taste. Yet Malebranche's mechanistic theory of the faculty and his gendered psychology more generally were influential on the lambertins and beyond.
Malebranche developed an extensive mechanical explanation of taste and its variability in terms of the strength, consistency, and moisture content of cerebral fibers, differentiated by age and sex, and the amount, quality, and activity of animal spirits in the blood, which fluctuated due to climate, food, and alcohol intake and internal nervous stimulation. This was by far the most complex modern physiological explanation for taste to date, and its basis in embodiment was meant to undermine mondain beliefs about the standards and mysteriousness of taste, a faculty portrayed in honnête discourse as invariably dissociated from bodily function, and immediately and effortlessly in accord with reason. Malebranche deliberately undermined taste by linking it to body and brain, specifically to female and effeminate bodies and brains, and by physiologically explaining its fluctuations and variations. His gendering of taste and the imagination importantly departed from Descartes in Les passions de l'âme, reminding us (along with Poulain's and Lambert's different spins on what they and Malebranche agreed were women's more sensitive brains) of the potential for wide-open Cartesian interpretation of Descartes.Footnote 40
One year after Poulain's (falsely emblematic) proclamation that “the mind has no sex,” Malebranche proclaimed the female mind, embodied in the brain, to be negatively affected by the sexed body, making women less-than-rational creatures of their dominating and dissembling taste, imagination, and senses.Footnote 41 He was, in fact, joining Poulain in gendering sensibility, but to a different end. The “delicacy” of women's “brain fibers,” declared Malebranche, made them especially receptive to sensory impressions, giving
them great understanding of everything that strikes the senses. It is for women to set fashions, judge language, discern elegance and good manners. They have more knowledge, skill, and finesse than men in these matters. Everything that depends upon taste is within their area of competence.
In consequence, however, women were “normally . . . incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover” and of “abstract” thought. Superficial thinkers distracted by
a trifle . . ., the style and not the reality of things suffices to occupy their minds to capacity; because insignificant things produce great motions in the delicate fibers of their brains, these things necessarily excite great and vivid feelings in their souls, completely occupying it.Footnote 42
In spite of disclaimers about women being so little taken seriously they could never hinder the quest for truth, Malebranche displayed obvious anger at salon women's abilities to make and break the reputations of writers and thinkers based on what he considered superficial matters of taste and manners, and not the validity of men's ideas. He was caustic about “effeminate” men with “soft minds” who also judged by taste and appearance, dissuaded by “the dirty and ragged collar” instead of using reason to understand “the philosophical or reflective manner of speaking” and “elegant demonstrations” of a speaker.Footnote 43 Although he attacked several cultural contexts that disrupted the search for truth (including the authority of classical authors and the milieu of pedantic scholarship), Malebranche's critique of taste was largely situated within this disgruntled analysis of the literary and intellectual influence of elite, mixed-sex honnête salon and court society. Here the philosopher was pushing back against the softening effects on the Republic of Letters of sexual mingling and of the new breed of intellectuals' cultivation of the polite public, which were ushering in the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century.Footnote 44
LAMBERT'S HONNÊTE AND FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE LEISURED FEMININE MIND
Lambert's feminist and honnête repudiation of Malebranche
These assaults on superficial taste, women's cognitive capabilities, their honnête influence, and the men they softened did not go unnoticed by Lambert. The latter, perhaps feeling rebuked for many of the things she held dear, by a philosopher many of whose moral values she shared, possibly felt the need to justify her values for her own Christian peace of mind.Footnote 45 For although she frequently warned against worldly pleasures and dissipation, her honnête stance was deliberately moderate, compared to Malebranche's. Lambert recognized the need to balance worldly duties with solitary spiritual obligations, and was consciously receptive to pleasure and sensibility as necessary for happiness, while aware of their dangers (AF, 105–6). Undoubtedly, Lambert's feminist sensibilities and honnête investment in the cultural practices which Malebranche disparaged factored into her decision to counter him with a spirited defense of the property of taste, women's literary activities, their way of thinking, and their tasteful leadership—all central premises of honnêteté. This she accomplished in her Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes, likely written during the Regency (1715–23).Footnote 46 But above all, Lambert's anger at views like Malebranche's over women's intellectual capacities motivated this writing. Correspondence between Lambert, Maine and la Motte reveals that such misogynist judgments had been aired in Lambert's salon by “the abbé Mongault and members of his sect” and that “for long” Lambert felt she owed “vengeance to our sex against you other Scholars” espousing such opinions.Footnote 47 The Réflexions was this vengeance; of the English translation (from the flawed unauthorized edition) lacking the sections censuring men's restrictions on women's learning, Lambert lamented, “The manuscript on women is so disfigured that one can't know what it is; they've removed the beginning and the ending which explain why it was written.”Footnote 48
In the Réflexions, Lambert grafted modern Malebranchian scientific epistemology onto the honnête and feminist tradition that praised women's cultural contributions. Using the new physio-psychology, she supported the central premise of honnêteté which she so valued, in which taste was a key quality that helped justify women's critical participation in the polite literary public and their cultural leadership in the salons. With women's sensibility, taste, and imagination as the lynchpins, this psychologically modern epistemology supported her traditional (by the 1720s) notions of aristocratic women's cultural leadership and influence, fusing with her own précieuse feminism and sensibilities. Her feminist honnête epistemology of sensibility also buttressed and shielded her claims for women's educational access and intellectual equality.
Fairly early in the Réflexions, Lambert, rather unusually, footnoted Malebranche, describing him as a “very respectable author” who “accords to the fair sex all the pleasures of the imagination: ‘That which is of taste is,’ he says, ‘within their province, and they are judges of the perfection of language.’” Dryly concluding, “The advantage is not mediocre” (219), she subsequently elaborated on taste's nature and vast purview:
Taste is of a great extent; it gives finesse to the mind, and makes you perceive vividly and promptly, with no cost to reason, everything that is to be seen in each thing. This is what Montaigne was trying to say when he assured that women have an “esprit primesautier.” In the heart, taste gives delicate feelings, and in the commerce of the world, a certain attentive politeness, which teaches us how to manage the amour-propre of those with whom we live . . . taste depends on two things, a very delicate sentiment in the heart, and a great justice in the mind. We must therefore avow that men do not know the greatness of the offering they make to the ladies, when they accord them the spirit of taste (220–21).
In her earlier Avis d'une mère à sa fille, Lambert, emphatic on the importance of managing and conserving tastes and pleasures, had testified to taste's importance for human happiness (105–6), arguing, “We must economize our tastes; we hold to life only through them” (106). And in her Réflexions sur le goût, she noted, “Taste has an extensive empire, for it extends over everything” (241).Footnote 49 Taste, then, for Lambert, was no trivial property, and inasmuch as she had just invoked Malebranche, her claims on taste's behalf which followed in her essay on women must be read, at least partly, as an explicit defense of honnête values in opposition to Malebranchian asceticism.
As such, her targeted audience (chosen habituésFootnote 50) would have understood them, recognizing Lambert's invocation of Malebranchian authority (while eliding his negative cognitive ramifications) for the disingenuous maneuver it was. More than likely, Malebranche's ideas had been placed on the salon agenda and mooted, at least sometimes, when women or taste were discussed. This is supported on several levels. In the early modern French salons, writings in progress were jointly read, discussed and modified, and we have explicit testimonials that communal writing was the case, at least sometimes, in Lambert's gatherings.Footnote 51 Lambert's obvious knowledge of the Recherche's passages on taste is clear enough. Equally clear are this group's shared interest in taste, psychology, physio-psychology, and women's social influence, as evinced in its published writings and in correspondence attesting to such discussions;Footnote 52 its Malebranchian culture, members, and contacts;Footnote 53 Malebranchian influence in their own writings on taste;Footnote 54 and Lambert's influence over the discussion agenda and sharing of the Réflexions manuscript with some of her circle.Footnote 55 So although Lambert passed over them upon mentioning Malebranche, his derogatory conclusions on the epistemological limitations of the female intellect would thus have leaped to her circle's minds. Well-understood honnête conventions made her understated exposition comprehensible, but Malebranche's attack, her text reveals, was at stake. Three paragraphs after invoking him, she depicted a now gallantly unnamed opponent clearly enough: “Those who attack women have claimed that the action of the mind, which consists in considering an object, is much less perfect in women, because the sentiment which dominates them distracts and carries them along” (221). With her target, Malebranche (and fellow travelers like Mongault), clear to her habitués, Lambert moved on to demolish his arguments.
Her praise for women's taste was, then, part of a more extensive feminist epistemology responding to misogynist deployments of the sensibility and sentiment so important to honnête culture. In the Réflexions, Lambert attributed women's cognitive, communicative and tasteful superiority to feminine sentiment and imagination, and sensibility became the lynchpin of a gendered psychology whose conclusions were the polar opposite of Malebranche's. Sensibility was so important within Lambert's thought that she later would go so far as to explicitly revise the cogito, “I am, however, a sensitive being. I feel, therefore I am: there you have the demonstration of my existence.”Footnote 56
Lambert reversed Malebranche's conclusions by arguing that heightened feminine sentiment provides a faster and more accurate route to truth than laborious reason alone. In her honnête epistemology of the leisured feminine mind, which closely echoed honnête dogma on the instantaneous and labor-free judgments of tasteFootnote 57 (recall that she had just described taste as enabling a holistic discernment costing reason nothing), she took on the Malebranchian claim that women's minds are too distracted by sentiment to be able to focus attentively on the truth. “Attention is necessary, it gives birth to enlightenment, so to speak, draws together the ideas of the mind, and makes them all at once accessible,” she acknowledged, “but in women, ideas offer themselves up of their own accord, and arrange themselves more by sentiment than by reflection: nature reasons for them, and spares them all the costs.” Far from harming the understanding, sentiment “furnishes new spirits, which illuminate in such a manner that ideas present themselves more vividly, more clearly and in a more disentangled manner, and for proof of what I say, all the passions are eloquent” (221). This declaration directly contradicted Malebranche's argument that women, with their softer cerebral fibers, were dominated by the superficial senses and imagination and could not access their reason to penetrate to truth. Lambert here brilliantly appropriated to her purposes the Cartesian language of clear and distinct ideas and the increasingly important and favored property of sentiment, even invoking the animal spirits, whose presence was heightened during times of extreme emotion, and which were central to Malebranchian physio-psychology, to subvert his arguments. For Malebranche, who had carefully specified that some women might not have delicate brain fibers and that different combinations of fibers and animal spirit levels and activity could result in “strong, constant women” and “feeble, inconstant men,” had concluded that “most women's and some men's [brain fibers] remain extremely delicate throughout their lives,” and therefore that most women were usually cognitively weak.Footnote 58 Although Lambert did not address female brain matter, by invoking the heightened presence of the spirits in women's minds she could argue for women's cognitive superiority from within Malebranche's physio-psychological framework.Footnote 59 She was also correcting some of his logical lapses in discussing the workings of the spirits, and while invoking their traditional connection to the passions, referenced a more persuasive and pleasant way of reaching truth over thorny reasoning.Footnote 60
In Lambert's analysis, the body's input clarifies, eases and speeds access to truth, and, without reasoning's “costs,” is favored over long, unpleasantly laborious contemplation. This is a remarkable inversion by an aristocratic lady of the reigning mind–body hierarchy that so informed contemporary political theory and justifications of corporate society and privilege, which associated bodily labor with vile status, one Lambert managed by focusing on sensibility's effortless immediacy and by imagining a subtle physiological hierarchy (see below).Footnote 61 Without needing to name him again, Lambert explicitly denied Malebranche's basic premise that women's sensibility blocked their access to truth, claiming, “We proceed as surely towards the truth by the force and warmth of the sentiments as by the extent and justice of reasonings, and through them we always arrive more quickly at the end in question than through les connaissances” (221). Sentiment, not reason, was here paving the faster, smoother, better-lit path to truth and mental clarity. Far from muddying up women's cognition, sentiment gave them a distinct advantage: “in women, ideas offer themselves up of their own accord, and arrange themselves more by sentiment than by reflection: nature reasons for them, and spares them all the costs.” Critically, this was an honnête advantage, for it was aristocratically effortless, instinctual, and innately refined, sparing women reasoning's costs.Footnote 62
As such, its strategic component should be appreciated, for this argument would let women efficiently present intelligent observations and reasoned judgments as natural and effortless, with no whiff of the femme savante, laboring over books, calculations, or reasoning. Although Lambert herself, protector and organizer of a tightly focused bureau d'esprit, was given to attentive reflection, writing, and meditative withdrawal from worldly frivolities, this is little to be guessed at in this presentation which effectively veiled women's cognition with the attractive mantle of leisure, sentiment and sociability. Her honnête claim that women could achieve reason and clear and distinct ideas, grounded in sentiment in deliberate opposition to the base labor of reasoning, was a fine anti-pedantic rebuke both to those who denied women reason and to others who critiqued their intellectual interventions as exceeding the bounds of femininity or their social rank. Lambert maneuvered deftly, using the tropes of honnêteté and scientific ideas of sensibility to assert a feminist cognitive equality, and to protect that cognitive power from counterattack as too manly or pedantic. Her honnête strategy of grounding her intellectual feminism in effortless sensibility, not in the laborious reasonings of the unsexed mind, helped her legitimize women's “innocent” (214) intellectual contributions to salon society, their studies, and their writings, without exposing them to the damning charge of pedantry.
Deploying sensibility: an aristocratic and human quality
This feminist epistemological intervention can only be appreciated if we bypass contemporary academic or feminist distrust of essentialism and contextualize Lambert's choice to repudiate Malebranche by valorizing the sensibility and sentiment he had accorded them. Her preference to embrace qualities that for Malebranche undermined women's intellectual abilities, instead of espousing an equally plausible Cartesian feminism founded on the unsexed mind, made sense for her as an honnête feminist who had experienced the cultural rehabilitation of physiologically based sensibility and sentiment that took place over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These decades of crise de conscience saw the rise to prominence of an all-encompassing discourse of sensibility, a “complete rewriting of the language of the emotions, the most extensive such revision ever accomplished in modern times.”Footnote 63 The honnête and scientific embrace of organic affective sensibility were changes to which Malebranche remained (increasingly marginally) resistant. But this was an entirely convincing way of understanding human nature for honnête society, which Lambert and others wholeheartedly adopted. So much so that by 1719, the lambertin Du Bos, in his seminal Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, was easily embracing sensibility as a universal human quality, arguing that the only purpose of art was to touch the heart, pleasing through feeling. While classical theorists had also valued art's ability to prompt emotion, they had linked this to reason, downplaying any physical element of sensibility; but for Du Bos, such pleasures were not rational but explicitly and completely grounded in organically based sensibility.Footnote 64 That he could theorize aesthetic pleasure in terms of an irrational but valorized sensibility indicates a major cultural shift in attitudes over the previous several decades. This shift made possible, plausible, and desirable the embrace of physiological sensibility by an aristocratic and mondaine theorist of taste like Lambert, whose mature ideas about such matters were formed in this period.
While Malebranche continued to distrust and repudiate taste, the imagination, and the senses in his several revisions of the Recherche between 1674 and 1712, physiological affective sensibility had fast become the conceptual beneficiary of a changing outlook on human nature.Footnote 65 In mondain discourse from the mid-seventeenth century, sensibility had come to be seen as necessary to the honnête homme, whose compassionate acts could otherwise be suspiciously regarded as inauthentic.Footnote 66 Sensibility was here configured as a highly elite quality, as in Madeleine de Scudéry's definition of tenderness in Clélie (1660–61) as “a certain sensibility of the heart, which is hardly ever found supremely, except in individuals who have a noble soul, virtuous indications and a well-turned mind; and which makes it so that when they feel friendship, they feel it sincerely and ardently.”Footnote 67 Similarly, a 1680 “Description de l'honnête-homme” stated that he “fulfils all duties; he is a good subject, a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a good citizen, a good master; he is indulgent, humane, helpful and sensitive to the misfortunes of others.”Footnote 68 As early as 1704 in the abbé Gamaches's Système du Coeur, this aristocratic sensibility was being universalized as a socially indispensable human quality, while retaining its cachet of refinement and excellence. Gamaches described sensibility as the quality which places and maintains us “in the dispositions where we must be for the interests of society,” and portrayed reason as dependent upon sensibility:
It is [sensibility] as we see, which makes the firmest link of society, which aids us in our duties; without it we would never be able to be sure of fulfilling them, and if reason did not borrow its aid, it would hopelessly wish to involve itself in our conduct,Footnote 69
he declared. Sensibility as indicator of man's innate sociability, foundation of society and virtuous behavior, and necessary support of reason, would become the received Enlightenment (and Revolutionary) view, one Lambert explicitly promoted in the Réflexions, where, having already noted women's greater sensibility, she argued,
Sensibility is a disposition of the soul which it is advantageous to find in other people. You can have neither humanity nor generosity without sensibility. One sole feeling, one sole movement of the heart has more credit with the soul than all the maxims of the philosophers. Sensibility aids the mind and serves virtue.
“The persuasion of the heart is above that of the mind,” she declared, for nature had so designed our imaginations and hearts to control our conduct (221).Footnote 70 In this period Du Bos likewise made the point that “nature wished to place in [the human heart] this so prompt and so sudden sensibility, as the first foundation of society.”Footnote 71 Clearly, le monde was easily embracing sensibility as the primary human social bond and foundation for taste by the time Lambert wrote the Réflexions.
By this point, sensibility and sentiment were widely attributed to mechanical movements or influences of the spirits, whether in “the organs” or in the nervous and cerebral fibers. Various members of Lambert's salon were espousing such theories of sensibility and taste, without Malebranche's anxiety.Footnote 72 Lambert, an admirer of women writers such as Scudéry and Lafayette who had helped launch sensibility's vogue, like her making it their study, surely found great appeal in its aristocratic origins and cachet and its new broadly human focus, in accord with her circle's hopes for a more compassionate regenerated government weaned away from absolutist excesses.Footnote 73 Moreover, her choice to defend against Malebranche's attacks by embracing the contemporary physiological theories that explained sensibility allowed her to make honnête claims about women's great importance to modern civilization that rested on seemingly solid physiologically established refined female sensitivity. Honnête theorists had always emphasized women's heightened abilities at pleasing conversation, delicacy, and refined, gentle feeling; for Lambert to embrace the physiological origins of these abilities made perfect sense in this early eighteenth-century scientific climate.
Employing Poulain
In espousing physiological sensibility as the foundation for a feminist Cartesian epistemology, Lambert also seems to have drawn on the feminist writings of Poulain.Footnote 74 Poulain's take on sensibility in his 1673 On the Equality of the Two Sexes provides additional evidence that Cartesian feminists pursued their goals by other than dualist means, and further explains why Lambert did not attack Malebranche's misogynistic epistemology with the Cartesian critique of the unsexed mind or confront him on other logical grounds – both available options.Footnote 75 All three Cartesians argued that the mind was sexed and sensible in its cerebral incarnation, but Lambert identified with Poulain's interpretation of what this meant for female cognition and was likely drawn to him because of his sympathies with honnêteté.Footnote 76
Poulain is invariably taken to epitomize the notion that Cartesian feminism was based on the unsexed mind. But although he did famously claim that “the mind has no sex,” his was no deracinated rationalism. Some aspects of his feminism tapped into other and earlier feminist seventeenth-century discourses, including their honnête variants, as when he wrote on women's beauty or delicacy. Those of his feminist arguments that referred to women's minds and bodies were not limited to mind–body separation. Not only did he emphasize anatomical or physiological identity between the sexes as a rationale for equality,Footnote 77 but he also invoked women's physiologically based superiority of sensitivity. He thus called attention to the “natural attributes” of a woman's “lively mind” to explain women's superior mental qualities—rapid and accurate perception, “discernment and correct thinking,” “imagination, memory, and brilliance”—and eloquent, fluent speech.Footnote 78 Women's sense organs, he commented, “are usually more sensitive, which is an advantage.”Footnote 79 Moreover, he asserted,
We cannot dispute that those men who are most coarse and heavy are usually stupid, and that, on the contrary, the more delicately built are always the cleverest. Experience is too widespread and uniform for me to have to appeal to reason to argue further,
contended this famous debunker of prejudice, who then concluded, “Therefore, since the fair sex is of a more delicate disposition than ourselves, women would be sure to be at least our equals if only they applied themselves to studying.”Footnote 80 Citing women's “high, lofty, wide foreheads . . . normally a sign of imagination and intelligence,” and “verve and . . . good memories,” Poulain claimed,
All this means that their brain is constituted in such a way as to receive even faint and almost imperceptible impressions of objects that escape people of a different disposition, and it is easily able to retain these impressions and recall them to mind whenever they are needed.
The warmth that accompanies this disposition brings it about that objects make a more lively impression on a woman's mind, which then takes them in and examines them more acutely and develops the images they leave as it pleases. From this it follows that those who have a great deal of imagination and can look at things more efficiently and from more vantage points are ingenious and inventive, and find out more after a single glance than others after long contemplation. They are able to give an account of things in a pleasant and persuasive way . . . Footnote 81
Poulain even spoke of women's great facility in conversation—due to “their bodies [being] formed by their distinctive temperament so that they preserve a clear impression of objects they have seen,” their effortless recall, expressive facility, ability “to summon up their ideas at the slightest pretext” and “insightful minds [that] allow them to make connections easily”—as “the only link that binds people together in society.”Footnote 82 The parallels to Lambert's arguments are clear.
Certainly, Cartesian desexed rationality bore promise for women, and situating reason in the unsexed mind was appealing to some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminists. However, we need to recognize that for women, the claim, recognition, or appearance of this kind of rationality always came with the very real danger of those women's cognitive acts being branded masculine, desexed, or pedantic; these were the standard critiques deployed against women who appeared too intellectual for men's comfort, such as the Hellenist Anne Dacier, still being attacked decades after her death. Lambert was acutely aware of this threat, particularly barbed for aristocratic women.Footnote 83 One person's clear and distinct reasoning was another's bearded pedantry, and it was thus tricky to invoke the unsexed mind to justify women's cultural role in the salons; honnête women's minds were supposed to be sexed. The embodied sensibility that Cartesian epistemology did not ignore, on the other hand, had enormous potential for synergistic overlap with honnête values, once the problem of bodily vileness was solved through sensibility's rehabilitation. Thus to honnête feminists it came to be at least as compelling as, or more compelling than, dualistic rationalism alone, as Poulain and Lambert show. Tapping into this to make her case against Malebranche for women's cognitive and sensitive superiority, Lambert was seeking to avoid risking the irreparable loss of the leisured feminine mind.
Remaining honnête
Lambert's honnête deployment of sensibility, justifying women's emotional insights, cultural leadership, and immediacy of judgments, ingeniously repudiated Malebranche. Still, the latent relativism inherent in physiological sensibility presented a major challenge to her honnête beliefs. For as much as she valued sentiment and sensibility, embracing them as explanatory mechanisms for taste complicated her understanding of the latter, requiring that she reconcile her belief in superior feminine taste and in honnête aesthetic standards more generally, with this new, highly variable, psychology of sensibility. How did she circumvent this tension?
Just like Malebranche, Lambert presented “arbitrary and variable” taste as a function of organically based reception, emphasizing the dynamic nature of the relationship between receptive individuals and the objects surrounding them.Footnote 84 “Nothing is fixed when it comes to tastes,” she declared, “everything comes from the disposition of the organs and from the relationship which is found between them and objects” (220).Footnote 85 She distinguished between “agreeable” qualities (judged by taste), and “estimable” ones, “real and . . . intrinsic to objects” (judged by reason) (223).Footnote 86 She further explained,
The agreeable qualities, which shake the soul, and which give such sweet impressions, are not at all real nor proper to the object; they are due to the disposition of our organs and to the power of our imagination. This is so true that the same object does not make the same impressions on all men; and that often our sentiments change, without anything having changed in the object. The exterior qualities cannot be lovable by themselves; they are so only because of the dispositions which they find in us. (223–4)Footnote 87
The view that taste was changeable and situated in the body's sensitive organs was supported by taste's ineffability: “what makes us believe that taste comes more from sentiment than from the intellect [esprit] is that one cannot give a reason for one's tastes, because we do not know why we feel” (220).Footnote 88
In spite of organic uncertainty and variability, Lambert did not abandon the honnête belief in standards of taste, maintaining, “As there is in each thing only one sole truth, . . . there is only one good taste in each thing, without which nothing can please to a certain degree,” and echoing the honnête chevalier de Méré in claiming, “there is . . . a justice of taste, as there is a justice of sense.”Footnote 89 Lambert's physio-psychology, in fact, enabled her to defend standards of taste and avoid aesthetic relativism, without (in the fine honnête tradition) subordinating taste to reason or rules. Rather than rationalizing taste, her solution was the kind of physiologically based hierarchy of sentiment and sensibility that Poulain had deployed in elevating women over men. Emphasizing the areas in which women, by virtue of their natural endowments, excelled, allowed her to reconcile her honnête belief in standards of taste with the Malebranchian view that taste was a function of organic constitution. Good taste was, then, not arbitrary per se, but individuals would vary in their ability to attain it, depending not on their reason, but on their natural constitutional endowment of sentiment and sensibility. Women, with their elevated levels of sensibility and active imaginations, were the obvious beneficiaries as judges of taste, as Malebranche himself had stated. That they could excel in taste judgments meant for Lambert (unlike Malebranche) that there were indeed correct judgments of taste to be made. So, although people might possess taste arbitrarily depending on their degree of sensibility (and in this way, taste could be said to be relativistic), a standard of good taste existed that could be attained by those with the appropriate level of refined sentiment, based on their physiological constitution. Such logic was never directly and explicitly expounded by the honnête Lambert, who likely wished to avoid any appearance of pedantic oppositionality or outright materialism, but it becomes clear through careful comparison of her claims about sensibility and taste as organically based, about taste as derived from sensibility, about women's superiority of taste and sensibility, and about the justice of taste. It was also made implicitly, through reference to those who lacked the appropriate levels of refined sentiment and who therefore erred. Lambert thus said, of taste, “one cannot convince those who make mistakes. As soon as their sentiment does not avert them, you cannot instruct them . . . It is nature which gives it; it is not acquired” (220).Footnote 90 You either possessed taste, or you did not; if the latter, your error followed from a lack of natural physiological sensibility.
Women's cultural authority
This admission that “one cannot convince those who make mistakes” raises a further potential complication for Lambert's honnête vision. The physiologically based argument that nature doles out differing doses of sensibility and taste implies that honnête women might not, after all, be able to model correct tastes to others, which would mean an enormous loss of their purported cultural influence and leadership in polite salon society. “One can thus draw an intelligent person towards one's opinion, and one is never sure to draw a sensitive person towards one's taste: one has no ties, no attractions, to draw him or her towards one,” she admitted.Footnote 91 But this issue does not in fact seem to have worried Lambert, for whom it did not call into question elite women's leadership in taste. She continued to maintain that “delicate society” could “perfect” taste if it were initially present,Footnote 92 and she upheld the view that sensitive women, like the imagination itself, had extensive and forceful powers of persuasion through their dominating and pleasing imaginations and sensibility (219, 221–2). In this, she inverted Malebranche's warnings of just such (false) persuasiveness, recalling Sablière to make the point:
One sole feeling, one sole movement of the heart has more credit with the soul than all the moral judgments of philosophers . . . A lady, who was a model of agrément, serves as proof of what I am advancing. One day they asked a man of wit among her friends “what she was doing and what was she thinking in her retreat.” “She has never thought,” he replied, “she only feels.” Everyone who knew her agreed that she was the most seductive person in the world, and that her tastes, or rather her passions, made themselves masters of her imagination and her reason, in such a way that her tastes were always justified by her reason and respected by her friends. No one who knew her ever dared to condemn her except after ceasing to see her, because she was never wrong in company. This proves that nothing is as absolute as the superiority of the mind that comes from sensibility and from the force of the imagination, because persuasion always follows from this. (221–2)
What Lambert was describing here was an immense power of social influence and persuasion through the mental force of the imagination, which could be wielded to important effect in salon society. Sensitive, imaginative, tasteful, forcefully intellectually endowed women could thus exercise dramatic powers of persuasion, as honnête discourse had long insisted, over those whose sensibilities were not flawed. The tasteful primacy of these honnête women was now figured as a function of their highly active, organically based sensibilities and imaginations. An inability to draw a person toward good taste indicated only that that particular person's sensitive organs were, sadly, naturally unresponsive and inadequate for the task, and implied nothing negative about the persuasive powers of the honnête salonnière—“It is nature which gives it [taste]; it is not acquired”; only “perfect[ed]” by “delicate society” (220).Footnote 93 Thus, for Lambert, the honnête woman's cultural role as perfecter of taste through her “delicate society” was not undermined by her espousal of a materialist psychology which in other hands led towards aesthetic relativism.
Revealingly, Lambert spoke of honnête social processes of seductive persuasion and of perfecting taste, not of a directly didactic model of women teaching or governing taste. As she described it, the experience of being exposed to a lady's passionate expression of her tastes was seductively pleasurable, able to sweep others up in its emotion. In this view she remained well within the spirit of honnête society, whose investment in the art de plaire and the communality of taste judgments was traditional, important, and explicit. One envisions a multilateral process of mutually seductive and pleasurable persuasion that would eventually result in the group's ever more refined and polished delicacy of taste, a vision derived from honnête discourse and reflecting the Modern and early Enlightenment focus on progress, modernity, and civilization with regard to letters, sociability, and commodités.Footnote 94 Female figures still played the key role in this communal refinement, with Lambert invoking, in the Réflexions, only women (in general, and particular named individuals) as models of taste and intellectual refinement, as well as men's remarks attesting to this (Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, and Malebranche). With the modern physio-psychology of sensibility, imagination, and taste based in the organs and spirits as the foundation for her vision of honnête persuasion, Lambert was also building upon earlier and contemporary understandings (including Malebranche's) of the sometimes fraught contamination of the passions, giving her own honnête social psychology of this group dynamic.Footnote 95 Her vision was entirely positive, though, nicely referencing communal salon judgments with its focus on delicate refinement and the ultimate “perfecting” achieved through such persuasive practice.
In Lambert's thought, the older honnête belief in women's superior taste was combined with more recent theories of the imagination and sentiment that grounded feminine taste in sensibility. Spurred by her honnête and feminist values to a sophisticated response to Malebranche, this dame malebranchiste took what for him had been damning organic evidence of female cognitive inferiority and of the epistemologically misleading nature of sensitive taste, reworking this as further proof of women's tasteful superiority while arguing for effortless feminine cognitive excellence, defending the honnête property of taste itself, and justifying women's taste leadership to man. She did all this while reconciling her honnête belief in a “justice of taste” with contemporary fluctuating physio-psychology, and while embracing as hopeful for humanity the organic sensibility in which women excelled.
Opposing her guests
Some lambertins, like Fontenelle, Montesquieu, and Terrasson, continued to espouse the honnête view of cultured women's primacy in taste and manners, invoking their special civilizing and tasteful influence.Footnote 96 But a preliminary study of writings on taste by Montesquieu, Du Bos, Terrasson, and Buffier has not revealed that they sought to reconcile physiological sensibility and honnêteté as Lambert did (apparently she did not, in this matter, wield the honnête persuasion she so idealized). Instead, these men embraced the Malebranchian physiological model of sensitive taste, using organic and mechanical terms and concepts like fibers, organs, temperament, shaking, and lassitude, without Lambert's honnête synthesis. They also placed a new emphasis on tolerating organically variable tastes, often embracing the relativism that Lambert still largely avoided. Undoubtedly, Malebranche's physio-psychology was a strong factor in shaping the ideas on taste of these lambertins.
We might well find ironic this fostering and transmission of Malebranchian physiological theories of taste within and beyond Lambert's salon. She had created this venue for the commerce of minds as brilliant and influential as those of the malebranchistes of the Académie des sciences, Marivaux, Montesquieu, and Du Bos, yet the formulations of her male guests mostly lacked her honnête gloss and synthesis. Moreover, Malebranchian psychology would later be deployed to argue against women's influence on French taste. But this irony is not at issue, for I am not arguing that Lambert wielded some kind of facile influence over her guests, but that this honnête hostess could and did repudiate Malebranche and the misogynists of her Malebranchian circle like Mongault. Although she did not always persuade, did not choose to emphasize egalitarian rationalism, and would never have adopted a pedantic style of serious disputation, her honnête values did not determine her to retire quietly to her corner and seek never to challenge convention. Nor was it Lambert's emphasis on feminine sensibility that should be blamed for leading towards “a devalorization of women.”Footnote 97 Working within the cultural and intellectual parameters of her time and situation, this honnête salonnière and femme cartésienne ably and independently asserted her position and agency in the early Enlightenment debates over women's cognition and taste, as she astutely, and even brilliantly, saw fit.
