mistrust and misconception: music and literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century france

Mistrust and Misconception: Music and Literature in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-CenturyFranceAuthor(s): William BrooksSource: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 66, Fasc. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1994), pp. 22-30Published by: International Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/932623 .

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22

Mistrust and Misconception: Music and Literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France

WILLIAM BROOKS (BATH)

I

One English poet likens music to the food of love.' Another reflects that poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.2 These comments from the wrong side of the English channel neatly demarcate my period. Shakespeare's words, so far as one can be precise, date from the year 1600, and Wordsworth's from the year 1800, and ironically remind us of what was not the case in France, where (this paper will suggest) music and literature co-existed but never conjoined.

The purveyors of literature were highly suspicious of music. The dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-84), for example, believed that music prevented the words from being heard, and was useful in a theatrical context only where there was stage machinery, because it concealed the noise made by the machinery. Accordingly, he makes use of

[...] un concert de musique, que je n'ai employe qu'a satisfaire les oreilles des spectateurs, tandis que leurs yeux sont arr&tes a voir descendre ou remonter une machine [...] je me suis bien garde de faire rien chanter qui fht necessaire a l'intelligence de la piece, parce que communement les paroles qui se chantent etant mal entendues des auditeurs [...] elles auraient fait une grande obscurite dans le corps de l'ouvrage, si elles avaient eu a les instruire de quelque chose qui fiUt important.3

Dramatic music in France in the mid-seventeenth century was mostly Italian in origin; and when French opera finally came into its own in the 1670s, it was an expatriate Italian who was responsible. It was in opera that literature and music met, rather than in any other artistic context, but music was regarded by the literary establishment at best as the background to what was felt to be really important: the words and the story. '[I1 faut] laisser l'autorit6 principale au Porte pour la direction de la Piece. Il faut que la Musique soit faite pour les Vers, bien plus que les Vers pour la Musique; c'est au musicien a suivre l'ordre du poete', said the outspoken critic Saint-Evremond in 1684.4

Although Saint-Evremond excluded Lully, saying that he alone was more knowledgeable about 'les passions' and 'le coeur de l'homme' than playwrights,

A version of this paper was given to the Conference of the Society for French Studies, Queen's University Belfast, in April 1992. William Brooks is Reader in French in the University of Bath.

SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night, 1600-1; WORDSWORTH, preface to Lyrical Ballads. The ballads themselves were first

published in 1798 but the preface was added two years later. CORNEILLE, Examen (1660) of Andromnde, in: Writings on the theatre, ed. H. T. BARNWELL (Oxford 1965), p. 144. This

may have been an extreme view, but the general mistrust of machine effects can easily be overlooked owing to our familiarity with the hyperbolical accounts of many commentators. See W. BROOKS, Lully and Quinault at court and on the public stage, 1673-86, in: Seventeenth Century French Studies, 10 (1988), pp. 101-121.

Sur les op&ra, in: Oeuvres en prose, ed. TERNOIS (Paris 1962-69), vol. 3 (1966), p. 155.



William Brooks: Mistrust and Misconception in Literature in 17th and 18th-century France 23

his injunction still amounted to fair comment. In the indigenous French tradition, music had for a long time served as the background to something else, notably in court ballets, a form of entertainment traceable back to the 1580s; and it later had an analogous accompanying purpose in many a French equivalent of water music and fireworks music done for the court at Fontainebleau, Versailles, Trianon, and other places during the last thirty years or so of the life of Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715) - not to mention in such

compositions as Lalande's symphonies pour les soupers du roy (1703-27). Operas themselves were performed in unstaged versions, one or two acts at a time, while the king ate his supper.

Strictly speaking, opera was not called by the unipartite term opera, of course. It was tragtdie lyrique, tragedie en musique, or even tragtdie mise en musique, appellations which, setting aside any debate about which element is the more important, clearly reveal a duality of elements, not a fusion. Not that members of the public concerned themselves much about such niceties. The earlier, Italian, operas had been performed only at court, and only favoured guests attended - though they did not necessarily appreciate the compliment, for there were complaints about the waiting time before performances began, the interminable duration of the works, and the cold, cramped conditions in the auditorium., Now, however, a sense of novelty sent the public flocking to the opera, whatever it was called, at first in converted real tennis courts such as the 'jeu de paume de Bel-Air' near the present-day Luxembourg Gardens, and then from the winter of 1674 in Moliere's old theatre in the Palais-Royal, where Lully's Acad6mie royale de musique welcomed them, relying upon them for much of its income. By the mid 1670s, the poet La Fontaine (1621-95) could ob- serve wryly that 'Le Franqais / N'a que pour l'opera de passion qui dure'. He describes the street outside the Palais-Royal, 'les jours de l'opera, de l'un a l'autre bout, / [...] rempli de carrosses partout', and he characterizes the opera audience as all-embracing:

l'abbe, [le] brave, [le] commis, La coquette [qui] s'y fait mener par ses amis; L'officier, le marchand ... On ne va plus au bal, on ne va plus au Cours: Hiver, etd, printemps, bref, opera toujours, Et quiconque n'en chante, ou bien plut6t n'en gronde Quelque recitatif, n'a pas l'air du beau monde.6

The literary establishment did not like the new fashion, and loftily condemned it for its perceived lack of artistic rigour, though sour grapes played a part in inspiring their criticisms. La Fontaine, Racine (1639-99), and Boileau (1636-1711) were all rejected by Lully as librettists, and Boileau counter-attacked, con- demning opera because 'la musique ne saurait narrer',' thus implicitly averring

BROOKS, Lully and Quinault, pp. 102-103.

Epitre a M. de Niert (1677), in: Oeuvres diverses, ed. P. CLARAC (Paris 1958), p. 619. Au lecteur, preface to Fragment d'un prologue d'opdra (c. 1678-79), in: Oeuvres completes, ed. F. ESCAL (Paris 1966), p.

277.



24 William Brooks: Mistrust and Misconception in Literature in 17th and 18th-century France

that narrative was at the heart of creative literature, not texture or depth or emotion. Boileau's view, which echoed (or even defined) the view of the literary establishment of his day, was that literature (as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement) could and should scorn musical accompaniment, meaning opera.

Whatever we may think of his negative pleading, in one sense Boileau's analysis was right. French music was not narrative. There is no evidence that its practitioners or its proponents wished it to be; they readily agreed that music needed the support of words in order to tell a story. Even so, operatic music could certainly be descriptive, whether conjuring up the shiverers in the frozen wastes in Lully's Isis (1677) or the winds and the storms of Marais' Alcyone (1706) or Rameau's Abaris (Les Boreades) (1762): notwithstanding the change of idiom, such descriptions of the natural world would not have shamed nine- teenth-century composers of symphonic poems. The only other serious music reliant upon words was sacred, written not just by the best-remembered composers such as Lully (1632-87), Charpentier (died 1704), and Andre Campra (1660-1744), but by many others besides, though the surge in demand for such works which occurred towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV fell away ab- ruptly after his death.

Despite that, however, and despite whatever Boileau might think, the public's appetite for music grew. It manifested itself, for example, in a vogue for public concerts of orchestral music and songs, such as the 'concerts spirituels' which began in the Palais des Tuileries in 1725.8 Half a century later, music's continuing popularity was again confirmed by the formation of the Opera-co- mique (effective 1762; officially entitled thus from 1780) from the various disparate elements that had preceded it, but literary intellectuals still, it seems, regarded music as a separate and opera as an inferior art form. Indeed, in 1775 Figaro, employing the hyperbole proper to satire in general and to Beaumar- chais (1732-99) in particular, typifies this attitude when he remarks, 'Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'etre dit, on le chante' (Le Barbier de Seville, Act I, Scene 2).

II

On one level, music and literature did co-exist. As noted already, literature could be used, being 'set to music' in the form of librettos, which the composer treated as the narrative raw material providing him with the pretext for strictly musical effects. The authors of literary narrative could also use musical functions for their purposes: the false music master in Moliere's Malade imaginaire (Cleante, in Act II, Scene 5; first performed 1673) - not a new device but tradi- tional from Italian comedy - reveals nothing about music but much about the relationship between the characters; and when Beaumarchais renews this comic and dramatic device a century later in Le Barbier de S1ville (III, 2-4), the function of the music and the false music master has not changed, for the playwright's

This series and the shorter-lived 'concerts franqais' (from 1727) were founded by Anne-Danican Philidor (1681- 1728), not (as several commentators unwisely state) his better-known half-brother Francois Andr6-Danican Philidor, who was born only in 1726.




justification for the device still lies in the purely dramatic aspects of the words given to the participants, their actions, their interplay, and the comedy all this

provokes. On another level, however, although music and literature acknowledged

each other's existence in these ways, there was no fusion of the two art forms. Writers did not involve music itself in their works. Mostly, they simply ignored it whilst ostensibly commenting upon it. Polemical works by literary writers which purported to discuss music did not, in fact, do anything of the kind. La Fontaine's remarks, for example, quoted above, were about audience reaction, whilst elsewhere in the same poem he writes scathingly about performance - yet he was supposedly criticizing opera as a genre. Charles Perrault's defence of Lully's opera Alceste, which provoked a brilliant if ill-focused attack by Racine, is actually about the style and shape and substance of the libretto.9 Neither of these writers mentions the music, and such omissions are commonplace and, one suspects, wilful.

This acceptance of musico-literary apartheid or separate development, char- acterized on the literary side by a Boileau-like mixture of disdain and igno- rance, helped to ensure that literature failed to achieve symbiosis with music at the highest intellectual levels. For example, Voltaire (1694-1778), a man who consciously occupied the highest intellectual levels, never considered the idea of symbiosis, singling out for praise Lully's librettist Quinault (1635-88), rather than the musician: instances abound in his letters, for example to Marmontel, 19 June [1763], and to Mme du Deffand, 26 Nov. 1775.1o It is tempting to wonder whether this arose because Voltaire, a librettist himself, was obliged to make compromises with poetic and dramatic priorities just like Quinault, La Motte (1672-1731) and Danchet (1671-1748) before him. He complained often enough, objecting for example that '[j'ai] a mettre en quatre vers tout ce qui est en huit, et en huit tout ce qui est en quatre'. Of Rameau (1683-1764) he added, quite simply, 'il est fou', and he observed that in a few hundred lines the poet could not be expected to develop the character and dramatic tension that he requir- ed."1

It was only at the lowbrow end of the spectrum that symbiosis or fusion occurred (indeed, had never ceased to be) - madrigals and love songs: things to which the 'author' and the 'playwright', still less the 'intellectual', would not stoop. Consider, for example, the old song sung by Alceste in Le Misanthrope:

Si le roi m'avait donne Paris, sa grand'ville, Et qu'il me fallht quitter L'amour de ma mie, Je dirais au roi Henri:

PERRAULT (1628-1703), Critique de l'opdra ou examen de la tragddie intitulde Alceste, ou le triomphe d'Alcide (1674), in: Recueil de divers ouvrages en prose et en vers (Paris 1675), pp. 269-310; RACINE, Iphigenie, preface (1675). These texts and others are soon to appear in: La Querelle d'Alceste, ed. by W. BROOKS, B. NORMAN, and J. ZARUCCHI (in press). 10

11 In: Correspondance, ed. T. BESTERMAN (Paris 1977-93), vol. 7 (1981), p. 283; and vol. 12 (1988), pp. 314-315. Letter to H6nault, 14 Sept. 1744, in: Correspondance, vol. 2 (1977), p. 913.




Reprenez votre Paris, J'aime mieux ma mie, au gue, J'aime mieux ma mie.

Moliere (1622-73), Le Misanthrope (1666), Act I, Scene 2

When Alceste sings it, he is not just antagonizing or chastising the appalling Oronte and rejecting the appalling Oronte's appalling sonnet - he does it because 'la passion parle la toute pure', and because '[c'est] ce que peut dire un coeur vraiment 6pris'. In other words, he (that is, evidently, Moliere) uses a

simple musical example to emphasize the paramountcy of emotion in poetry, a feature apparently forgotten since the days of the sixteenth-century poet Ronsard and his contemporaries.

As an integral part of a text, music operates in that area which is personal and private, or which intrudes upon or illuminates an aspect of the personal and the private - 'emotion recollected in tranquillity', to recall the example of

lyric poetry, to which must be added that of introspective novels. On the other hand, the purpose of music in what one might call the outward-looking or ex-

planatory functions of literature, the polemical, the ceremonial, the celebratory, the philosophical, the didactic, the narrative, the analytical is rather to act as an

emphasizer, a loud-hailer, a descriptor - in other words, just as Boileau and Voltaire understood it, as a background to the real message.

Accordingly, one does not find music embedded in the stuff of literary crea- tion in this period because, thanks to Oronte and Boileau, there were no lyric poets,12 no personal poets, no one to write about individual emotions. That gen- eralization is perhaps somewhat harsh towards certain non-establishment fig- ures such as the poet J.-B. Rousseau (1671-1741) or the novelist Prevost (1697- 1763); but it remains true that, for over a century, mainstream literature was didactic, analytical, and intellectual. Amongst its conspicuous peaks were the

analytical characterizations of Racine (Esther and Athalie notwithstanding), the social commentary of La Bruyere (1645-96; the half-dozen references to music in his Caracteres envisage it as a separate art, or as performance, not as a partner for literature), the historical work of Saint-Simon (1675-1755) and the polemics of Montesquieu (1689-1755), the subversive didacticism of the Encyclopidie (1751-65) - indeed everything that either prefigured or constituted the enlight- enment, defined as the pursuit of the rational. Boileau, outdoing even that scourge of lyric poets, Malherbe (1555-1628), sternly advocated technical cor- rectness. Voltaire's pernickety commentaries on the plays of Corneille ignore the power of the dramatist and promote technical improvements. Jean-Franqois Marmontel (1723-99), Charles Coll6 (1709-83) and others reworked seventeenth- century tragedies and comedies to make them more socially and morally cor-

12

I do not seek to comment in detail on the sixteenth century, in which the circumstances were different. On the one hand, there were originally only six melodies to which almost all the sonnets of Ronsard could be sung (may I thank Dr S. J. Bamforth for alerting me to this) - hardly an illustration of symbiosis, although many of the sonnets were set separately later: see RONSARD, Les Amours, ed. H.&C. WEBER (Paris 1963), pp. lxiv-lxvi. On the other hand, the emotional and lyrical qualities of the poems of such sixteenth-century poets as Sc~ve, Du Bellay, and Ronsard himself are conspicuous.




rect - thus, for example Rotrou, Venceslas [1648], trag6die retouchde par Mar- montel (Paris 1759); and Quinault, La M&re coquette [1665], revue, corrigee, et augmente* par Coll6 (Paris 1769).13

III

Now whilst literature, in seeking to educate and enlighten, kept music at arm's length, what was happening in the musical world? For many years, it was racked by debates over the relative merits of French and Italian music: argu- ments about the use and style of ornamentation, about the use of ballet scenes in opera, about the importance of harmony (as opposed to melody), and about rhythm, the pro-Italians favouring strict barring against the French preference, in recitative at least, for barring in accordance with the natural rhythm of the language. (We must not, in assessing these ideological squabbles, overlook the dimension of national self-assertiveness in the pro-French stance.) The French- dominated Acad6mie royale de musique with its privileges kept out Italian opera for ninety years from 1662 to 1752, with only two trivial exceptions. Lo- renzani's pastoral opera, Nicandro e Fileno, to a text by Vivonne & the duc de Nevers, was given at Fontainebleau in September 1681, and II Giocatore, by Sodi, at the Academie royale de musique in June 1729, but after the latter aberration enfin Rameau vint - his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, was performed in 1733 - and for more than two decades was the new French champion.14 More and more, the watchword was technical progress, whether that of Frangois Couperin (1668-1733), who explored the capabilities of the harpsichord (his Art de toucher le clavecin appeared in Paris in 1716), or Rameau, who in his work on harmony and acoustics was committed, like intellectual literary writers, to the concepts of education and progress. Having achieved a commanding reputation as a composer of harpsichord music, cantatas and motets, his next con- quest was to be opera. And what operas! Operas dominated by the music (Coll6 complained that '[Rameau] sacrifie les pontes a sa musique. [...] Ii a toujours immole les pontes. [...] II lui faut un valet de chambre-parolier')5 - operas in which Rameau seeks principally to perfect his harmony according to rules which he had himself worked out and published a few years previously (Traite de l'harmonie riduite ai ses principes naturels, Paris 1722). Indeed, Rameau's success in deducing music's scientific principles led the encyclopedist and philosophe d'Alembert (1717-83) to praise him for having 'r fl6chi avec beaucoup de succes sur la theorie de [la musique]' thereby formulating 'des lois plus cer- taines et plus simples' and turning music into a science fit for the attention of 13

Marmontel, of course, also wrote librettos for Grdtry (1741-1813) and for Piccinni (1728-1800), the arch-enemy of Gluck. His best-known is probably that of Zjmire et Azor, set by Gr6try and first given in 1771 at Fontainebleau.

Twelve Italian operas were given at the Academie royale de musique in 1752-53. They are listed, with dates, by S. Prrou, The Paris Opgra (Westport, Conn. - London 1985), vol. 2, p. 564. It is, incidentally, a curiosity that the Stuart court at Saint-Germain in the twenty years or so following the English revolution continued to favour Italian music in apparent defiance of the prevailing French fashion. The Stuart court's interaction (or lack of it) with the French court in matters of musical taste in this period has yet to be evaluated.

COLLe, Journal et mimoires, may 1757, quoted by E. HAERINGER, L'Esthitique de l'opdra en France au temps de J.-Ph. Rameau (Oxford 1990), p. 65.




philosophers.16 Music as science, in fact, paralleling literature's pursuit of the rational and the enlightened.

In this blissful state of self-satisfaction, neither art needed the other very much. Things began to change, however, almost in spite of the continuing squabble over which of French and Italian music was technically 'better'. Some- one with no interest in the sterile debate for its own sake asked the impertinent question what is it for?, and therewith opened up the quite other issue of the emotional vocation of music. The questioner was an amateur musician (loathed on that account by the status-conscious Rameau), a music teacher and music critic, largely self-taught: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), who had earlier come to the attention of Paris artistic circles with a review of one of Rameau's operas with libretto by Voltaire, no less: Les Fetes de Ramire (1745) a revision of the same duo's Princesse de Navarre.17

Rousseau does not deny music's ability to describe and is not interested in combating or confirming Boileau's view that music 'ne saurait narrer'. At first sight, moreover, his intervention seems no more than a contribution to the squabble, in which (in a work first published in 1761) he puts the pro-Italian ar- gument in the words of the tutor Saint-Preux. 'Rassemble,' Saint-Preux tells his pupil, Julie, 'rassemble avec soin [...] ta musique franqaise, fais un grand feu bien ardent, et jettes-y tout ce fatras' (which he also calls 'tant de glace'). Now, why does Rousseau say that? He does so, to challenge the emphasis on harmony, for which he holds responsible the French (and Rameau in particular), and which - perhaps with exaggerated vehemence, the better to achieve his ef- fect - he calls 'un vain son qui peut flatter l'oreille et n'agit qu'indirectement [...] sur l'ame' because 'l'impression des accords est purement m canique et physi- que - qu'a-t-elle a faire au sentiment? [...] La seule harmonie n'a jamais rien su dire au coeur'. Instead of this mechanical construct, Rousseau, through Saint- Preux, wants music to be 'le lien puissant et secret des passions avec les sons' and 'l'Tnergique tableau des mouvements de l'ame', and he adds: 'Que l'accent du sentiment anime les chants les plus simples, ils seront interessants'.18 Even the misanthropist Alceste might grudgingly have agreed.

The point is, of course, that whilst Rousseau's target may have been chosen carelessly (why blame harmony?), he none the less condemns music for having no contact with the individually emotional, with the passions. Whereas he uses words such as ame, sentiment, coeur to indicate the purpose and the ideal field of application of music, French music had become functional. Composers had spent a century in glorification and the pursuit of technical brilliance - glo- 16

Discours priliminaire de l'Encyclopddie (1751), in: Oeuvres compl&tes (Paris 1821-22, repr. Geneve 1967), vol. I, pp. 80- 81. D'ALEMBERT returned to this theme in his Elments de musique thdorique et pratique suivant les principes de Rameau (Paris 1752). 17

See R. NIKLAUS, A Literary History of France II: The Eighteenth Century (London 1970), p. 192. Voltaire had also

p8rovided the libretto for Castor et Pollux (1737).

Julie, ou La Nouvelle HIloise (Paris 1960), pp. 106-107. In a note, the editor (R. POMEAU) relates Rousseau's attack to the events of the 'guerre des bouffons', which erupted in Paris in 1752-54 after the performance of Italian operas at the Opera. Rousseau had attacked the French tradition even while his own Devin du village was enjoying success in the early 1750s. D'ALEMBERT supplies a revealing and witty account of the episode in De la libert6 de la musique (1759), in: Oeuvres compl~tes I, pp. 515-46.




rifying God, glorifying Louis XIV, and most recently Rameau glorifying Ra- meau. It is surely no accident that, in a famous work by another philosophe, Denis Diderot (1713-84), the personification of mediocrity is the nephew of Rameau, and it is more than coincidence that the nephew, a man who for all his failings is at least a human being, deplores the lack of passion in the dry poetry on which French operas were based - including his uncle's. 'J'aimerais autant avoir a musiquer les Maximes de La Rochefoucauld ou les Pensees de Pascal,' he says; and then, echoing Saint-Preux: 'C'est au cri animal de la passion, a dicter la ligne qui nous convient. [...] Ii faut que les passions soient fortes: la tendresse du musicien et du porte lyrique doit tre extreme.' Indeed, Rameau's nephew advocates that there should be 'point d'esprit, point d'6pigrammes, point de ces jolies pens es. Cela est trop loin de la simple nature'.19

In parallel with the literary establishment's passionless posturings, uncle Rameau and his French satraps had likewise divorced music from emotion. For a century, the trend had been increasingly to devalue the poet's contribution. Rameau accelerated this process, and it probably culminated in the Encyclopidie, which contains the claim that the librettist '[doit] se soumettre en tout au musicien: il ne peut pr tendre qu'au second r81e'.20 The foreigner Lully set French opera in motion. It took another foreigner, Gluck (1714-87), gently to apply the brakes. Gluck, who came in 1773 with his reputation already made, shuttled back and forth between Paris and Vienna for the rest of the 1770s. Untrammelled by the role of guardian of the grand French operatic tradition, more beholden perhaps to the milkmaid than the politician in his patroness Marie-Antoinette, it was he who began once more to subordinate scientific principles to simplicity of expression and dramatic integrity, to move music's centre of gravity away from the public and the stylized and back towards the emotional, to write good tunes, and even to admit in his prefaces (those of Alceste, 1767, and Paride ed Elena, 1770, for example) the unthinkable idea that the purpose of music might be to express the emotions of poetry - thus echoing the words of Saint-Evremond, written nearly a century before.

What we see in Rousseau's comments, which narrowly pre-date Gluck's ar- rival in France, is a plea for the fusion of music and literature, though Rousseau scarcely practises what he preaches. He promotes from the outside, as a com- mentator, a view of music as an agent of the emotions; he does not achieve, nor even seek to achieve, a musical quality in his writings. They lack even that su- perficial interweaving of a musical construct that one finds in twentieth-century authors as diverse as Duras and Duhamel, and we shall certainly not find in- extricably woven into the emotional fabric a sonate de Vinteuil or even a celebra-

19

Le Neveu de Rameau written c. 1761-76, in: Oeuvres romanesques, ed. H. BtNAC (Paris 1962), pp. 470-471. Article Poome lyrique, in: Encyclopddie ou dictionnaire raisonnj des sciences, des arts et des mitiers (Paris - Neuchatel

1751-65), vol. XII, p. 826. Certain important librettists resisted this development, notably MARMONTEL, who in the article Opera, also in the Encyclopddie, expressed the opposite view: 'L'art du musicien est de donner A la melodie des inflexions qui rdpondent A celles du langage'. In his memoirs, he went further, observing that 'en g6ndral, la fatuit6 des musiciens et de croire ne rien devoir A leur

porte', cited by M. CARDY, The Literary Doctrines of Jean-Franpois

Marmontel (Oxford 1982), p. 122.




tion of 'le son du cor, le soir, au fond des bois';21 moreover, there was soon to be another thrash of polemical patriotism in music with 'Ca ira' and Rouget de Lisle's nationalistic marching song. Perhaps, therefore, it is no irony that the most ceremonious and jingoistic setting of the 'Marseillaise' was made, thirty years after my terminus ad quem, by the man who in the very same year sent the poet marching to the scaffold.

21 M. PROUST, A la recheche du temps perdu (1913-27), passim, and VIGNY, Le Cor (1825), in: Oeuvres compl~tes (Paris

1948-50), vol. 1, p. 85.



mistrust and misconception: music and literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century france

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