the rococo as a dream of happiness

9
The Rococo as a Dream of Happiness Author(s): Rémy G. Saisselin Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1960), pp. 145- 152 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428280 . Accessed: 02/04/2014 12:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 94.224.50.97 on Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:28:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Rococo as a Dream of Happiness

The Rococo as a Dream of HappinessAuthor(s): Rémy G. SaisselinSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1960), pp. 145-152Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428280 .

Accessed: 02/04/2014 12:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 94.224.50.97 on Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:28:56 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Rococo as a Dream of Happiness

REMY G. SAISSELIN

The Rococo as a Dream of Happiness

LET US FIRST SAY that the word Rococo hardly existed in the 18th century, the pe- riod with which it has come to be associated, though there is evidence to show that the word was used in artistic jargon at the very end of the 18th century. But generally, con-

temporaries of that style would use the term

gout moderne, gout du temps, or genre pit- toresque to refer to that decorative art and that style which we have come to call Ro- coco. Later on the term Rocaille was also used to designate this style, and it was from this term that the word rococo supposedly originated. For a long time then rococo was a slang word. It gained official admittance into the Dictionnaire de l'Academie fran- aaise only by 1842 where it is written that:

"Rococo se dit trivialement du genre d'orne- ment, de style et de dessin qui appartient a l'ecole du regne de Louis XV et du com- mencement de Louis XVI. Le genre rococo a suivi et precede le Pompadour, qui n'est qu'une nuance du rococo."' In France even today it still is not quite admitted or at least taken too seriously as a term. German art historians were the first to use the term in an objective sense and apply it not only to a decorative style but to a general style. Soon this general style was variously inter- preted: as embodying, in the flourish of its curves and the serpentine line, a general spirit of liberty, an interpretation so wide

R51 i\ G. SAISSELIN is assistant curator of research and publication in the department of education at The Cleveland Museum of Art and assistant editor of this Journal. His article "Valery: The Aesthetics of the Grand Seigneur," appeared in the Fall 1960 issue of the JAAC.

as to include the art of practically the en- tire 18th century.2 Or it could be regarded as the last universal European style.3 Con- trasted with other styles, or viewed in the context of the general development of styles, it has also been called the ultimate phase of the Baroque, in which case it would be to the Baroque what Flamboyant Gothic was to pure Gothic. Thus Herbert Read has been able to write that the ".. Rococo is really the re-emergence, after the foreign imposition of the Renaissance, of the north- ern spirit in art, first fully typified in the Gothic."4 This is an idea of Worringer's; it is highly stimulating and one wonders what German art historians would have done without this too neat opposition of the art of the North and that of the Mediter- ranean to play with. Unfortunately this op- position does not account for everything. One may wonder whether the Gothic is an art of the North to begin with. And as for the 18th century and the Rococo, one can argue quite well that this style is really a re-emergence of the style of Alexandria, a neo-hellenistic style.5 This Hellenistic paral- lel is as suggestive as that of the Flamboy- ant, and it is the one we shall attempt to follow up here, not so much in terms of stylistic similarities as in spiritual kinships.

It is clear that we must somehow cease to pay too much attention to existing interpre- tations if we wish to understand the spirit of the Rococo. And so we shall leave the art historians and consult the Goncourt broth- ers who did much to bring the art of the 18th century back into favor. Opening their book on French Painting of the 18th Cen-

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146 R1iMY G. SAISSELIN

tury one is struck by the first sentence: "The great poet of the 18th century is Watteau." It is no longer, we see, a question of stylistic development with which we are dealing, but rather of a vision, of a dream. The student of literature might at first be surprised to find that Watteau is called a poet. But when one thinks upon it, and more, when one reads the poetry written at the time Watteau was living, and then one goes out and looks at one of his paintings, one is soon con- vinced that the Goncourts knew what they were saying. Even Voltaire, considered a

great poet in his day, and a friend of phys- ics, saw that something was wrong with the

poetry of his day. "The superiority which a dry and abstract physics has gained over belles lettres begins to anger me," he writes. "... I have loved physics as long as it did not seek to dominate poetry; but now that it is crushing all the arts, I shall look upon her as but a tyrant of bad company."6 He was right as concerned poetry; he was wrong as concerns painting. Poetry did take refuge in painting. The much discussed topic of the relation of poetry to painting was no mere academic discussion among pedants, it was pertinent to the problems of the times, for both poetry and painting were

supposed to depict the same type of subject matter and evoke the same dreams. Fonte- nelle, one of the poor poets of the times, but a good writer and a fine and acute thinker, wrote that the eclogue should depict pas- toral mores and evoke a world without trav- ail, ambition, or violent agitations of the heart. "And like the dream of Fenelon, that of Fontenelle evoked a chimerical world, a sort of fete galante dominated by a simple and beautiful nature where appeased pas- sions would leave room for pure love."7 One might as well be speaking of the world of Watteau, and it is with this passage and this dream that we come to some of the primary elements of the Rococo world: a nature simple and beautiful, tranquill, appeased passions, and love called tenderness. This was the dream of happiness of the genera- tion of the Regency, that interregnum be- tween the death of Louis XIV and the per- sonal rule of Louis XV.

One might say that the entire 18th cen- tury dreamt of happiness. It is not for noth-

ing Monsieur de Talleyrand was able to say that "Those who have not lived before 1789 do not know how sweet life can be." Even the Revolutionary Saint-Just could pro- claim that happiness was a new idea in

Europe. He and his fellow Jacobins turned the dream into a nightmare. From dream to

nightmare, such might be called the history of the 18th century. But in the beginning, with the Rococo, the dream was a princely dream, spoiled, alas, by the bad taste of the

bourgeoisie and the pedantism of the phi- losophes and finally by the romantics seek-

ing an absolute happiness. The men of the Regency period did not

make that mistake. Their concept of hap- piness was built on certain limitations and one may say that the Rococo begins with a series of renunciations: of the sublime, of the Grand Golit, of ambition, or power. The Rococo refuses heroism and tragedy and the 18th century is a century of poor tragedy because the men of the time were not dis-

posed to espouse a tragic vision of life. It was thus an age of comedy finally to end in one of poor melodrama. And it was also an

age of petits genres, the century in which even the word petit was a' la mode.

The Rococo thus symbolically begins with the renunciation of Versailles: the court is quit for the city, for town houses, and chateaux in the country. Louis XIV was an excellent representative of the Baroque, the very image of majesty. This we cannot say of Louis XV, called the Well-Beloved in the early part of his reign. He was, however, in a certain sense, quite apt to represent the Rococo, being un roi jouisseur, but also in- telligent, and consequently bored.

The happiness dreamt by this generation was, as I have indicated, a princely happi- ness; it was also one of sceptics and epicure- ans, and founded upon the possible rather than upon dreams and expectations impos- sible of realization or fulfilment. One need, to ascertain this, but read through the vari- ous essays and intimate writings of women like Madame de Lambert and men like Fon- tenelle, Marivaux, Montesquieu who all be- longed to this Regency generation. Happi- ness, in their mind, is ever construed with a profound knowledge of human nature. It was a generation with few illusions if one

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Rococo as a Dream of Happiness 147

is to judge by this conversation between Madame Du Deffand and Pont-de-Vesle, one of the habitual callers at her salon:

Pont-de-Vesle?-Madame?-where are you?-At the corner of your fire place.-With your feet on the andirons, as one may be in a friend's home?- Yes, Madame.-It must be admitted there are few acquaintances as old as ours.-That is true.-Fifty years.-Yes, fifty years and more.-And in this long interval, not a cloud, nor even the appear- ance of a quarrel.-That is what I've always ad- mired.-But, Pont-de-Vesle, could not this be be- cause we have, au foud, always be indifferent one to the other?-That might well be, Madame.8

It is perhaps because of such lucidity, such lack of illusions, that certain art critics and

essayists have been able to discern in the faces of Watteau's characters a certain air of sadness. This may not be unfounded, for the dream of the Rococo was the expression of art and not the expression of an age. What matters is that, despite the indiffer- ence noted above, and the lucidity, Madame Du Deffand did receive Pont-de-Vesle for

fifty years. One expected not too much of men, but one enjoyed company. The hap- piness of the Rococo was also one of socia- bility. And as Fontenelle wrote, "The safest is to count on simple pleasures, such as tran-

quillity of life, society, the chase, reading, etc." And finally, it came down to this: "The greatest secret for being happy, is to be well with your self." Madame Du Chatelet, Vol- taire's mistress, said much the same thing at greater length:

In order to be happy, one must be rid of preju- dices, be virtuous, have tastes and passions, be susceptible of having illusions, for most of our pleasures are due to illusion, and unhappy he who loses this ... One must begin by saying to oneself that in this world we have nothing else to do but to procure ourselves sensations and agree- able sentiments.9

Obviously one of the requirements of art for a society holding such views would be to provide a means whereby ennui might be avoided. This is precisely the explanation of art given by the Abbe Du Bos, the aesthe- tician of the Rococo: "The soul has its re- quirements as does the body; and one of man's greatest needs is to have his mind oc- cupied."10 It was a commonplace of the 17th and 18th centuries to say that art ought to please and instruct; for the Regency there

can be no doubt as to where the emphasis lay. The Rococo is an art of pleasure meant to banish the ennui of a very lucid and

sceptical aristocracy. After 1750 the empha- sis will be more and more upon instruction and less on pleasure. Art will thus tend to become moralizing. One of the features which distinguishes the Rococo is that it is non-pretentious and that it shows no com-

plexes. One may wonder how one can become

happy when extreme scepticism prevents comforting illusions. The answer lies pre- cisely in art, and in making of life itself an art; the Rococo is also a style of living. The Abbe Du Bos saw very well that art could

provide a way, not only of escape from en- nui, but also of founding a happiness which would not be followed, as in real life, by pain:

If real and true passions procure the soul its most acute sensations but only at the price of ill effects, since the happy moments they make us live are followed by sad days, could not art man- age to separate the ill effects of most passions from that which is most agreeable in them? Could not art, so to say, fashion creatures of a new nature? Could it not produce objects capable of exciting passions within us the moment we feel them but incapable of causing real harm and true afflictions afterward? Poetry and painting have succeeded in doing this.11

It was art then which was to give life a new form, one less constraining than that of the Grand Style and this new form needed a new setting.

The stage of courtly drama was thus left for that of the intimate comedy of manners. This further required a new architecture, namely that of the Hotels particuliers, town or country houses, less imposing than Royal Palaces, but more comfortable and inti- mate. Thus appeared the apartment, the most important architectural problem of the period and of the new type of building. It required that the interior plan be altered. While under the reign of Louis XIV one of the most imposing aspects of the interior was the grand staircase, situated usually in the center of the building, it could now be put at one of the extremities, since one no longer tried to impress people with the pomp and ceremony of a royal descent. The insistence in the new Rococo architecture

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148 RE MY G. SAISSELIN

will thus be less on exterior show than on interior comfort. In the apartment itself great care will be given to decoration, but also to the disposition of the rooms them- selves, a disposition based upon the require- ments of comfort, reason, and humanity. I mean thereby that though the architects were men of reason, they constructed for men rather than for bureaucrats. The inte- rior decoration was made to evoke a world of grace, charm, finesse, intimacy, playful- ness, and pleasure. It is thus through this new creation, the apartment, that we pene- trate into the world and the spirit of the Rococo, and into its art of living.

Indeed the development of manners, of greater civility, of social modesty is reflected in the new architecture. It is no longer the custom to receive guests in the bedroom, while one is still in bed, a common practice in the Grand Siecle, a time when the bed- room was one of the important rooms. In its social function then, the bed-room is now replaced by the salon. The bed-room proper is replaced by the boudoir. New rooms are the private study, and later on in the cen- tury, the permanent dining room. As for the decorations, these are usually in the form of chimney pieces, painted panels, over- doors, easel paintings representing scenes of a life of ease, pastorals, contemporary life- in short tableaux of a life of ease and hap- piness. Let us not forget that this was the time when even names could be revealing of this dream world since even princes and kings could call their chateaux Mon Repos (Ludwigsburg in Wiirttemberg), Mon Bijou and Sans Souci (in Berlin and Potsdam), la Gloriette (Vienna), Le Petit Trianon, and Bagatelle.

Let us note in passing that these new rooms are indicative of precisely the type of happiness sought: the salon, for the pleas- ures of conversation, society, and hospital- ity; the study, for the pleasures of the mind. As Voltaire wrote to Madame Du Deffand, "Study has the good quality of making us live quietly with ourselves, delivering us from the burden of our leisure, and prevent- ing us from leaving our home to run about saying nothing and listening to gossip from one end of town to the other." As for the dining room, it was reserved to the pleasures

of the palate. We must not forget that it was at this time that French cuisine was per- fected and that this age was not only one of art amateurs, but also of amateur chefs. We may mention in passing, the Duc de Riche- lieu, inventor of mayonnaise, the Duc de Praslin, creator of the candy known as the pralines, and Madame de Pompadour, in- ventor of the filet de volaille a la Bellevue. We must also not forget that the art of ar- ranging the dinner table, the succession of the dishes, were also governed by aesthetic considerations.

As for the boudoir, it is an innovation which merits a digression. For it was the room consecrated to the deity of the period, Woman, and the new cult of the lady which Stendhal quite rightly called, I'amour-goult, a later, more material, and more piquant version of courtly love. A good deal of the subject matter of easel painting, interior decoration in the form of panel painting, and etching, was this latest version of love, called then galanterie. This is closely tied to the idea of happiness we are examining and it is as stylized as other forms of art and as such inseparable from the Rococo as a gen- eral style. Needless to say, it is far from be- ing platonic. Diderot put this very well when he said that platonic love would be possible only when men and women ceased to have bodies. It may well be that one can discern in Watteau a certain element of spirituality, but one may say too that this spirituality might be a form of melancholy due to the recognition that pure love, pure happiness, are impossible. In the work of Fragonard love is frankly sensual and de- void of any metaphysical overtones. The Goncourts say that the central theme of his work is really the bed. What saves him from vulgarity is "the lightness of his touch." It is of this type of love that Chamfort could write that "Love is an exchange of two phantasies and the meeting of two epi- dermi." The situation is little different in Boucher. There one may find a more mytho- logical element, but as the Goncourts point out, their parnassus is that of Ovid, and the deities of Boucher end up by looking like the pretty parisiennes of his day. We are dealing with a conventionalized love and conventionalized woman. Galanterie was

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Rococo as a Dream of Happiness 149

meant to be a game. Love too was but a dream, for in this world where one knew that one had to have illusions in order to be happy, which in fact comes to mean that one has ceased to have any, even love was an artfully constructed illusion. The sad- ness in the eyes of Watteau characters comes perhaps from this. One need but read Cre- billon fils to be aware of this lack of illusion about love. Describing the actual situation in one of his licentious novels, and we may say it was probably close to the truth be- cause there is much evidence to support him, he wrote: "You told a woman three times she was pretty, that was all that was needed; she believed you the first time, thanked you the second, and usually re- warded you at the third. Often it was not even necessary to talk" (Les Egarements dit coeur et de la raison). Marivaux, a much finer writer and psychologist points out the same phenomenon in subtler ways:

If you tell a woman you find amiable and for whom you feel love: Madame, I desire you and you'd do me great pleasure by granting me your favors, you insult her: she calls you a brute.

But tell her with tenderness: Madame, I love you and you have a thousand charms in my eyes; she listens to you, you make her happy, you are speaking the language of a gallant gentleman. Yet it is saying the same thing.1

The point, however, is precisely to give form to desire. Marivaux and his generation, and he is the man who, I think, most resembles Watteau, thus knew that society rested upon certain conventions hiding a not too pretty reality. Their idea of love was too a dream, a flight from the real, if you wish, and it is this type of conventionalized relation which becomes the subject of innumerable paint- ings and novels.

But for this type of love, a new woman had to be found. I have already pointed out that grandeur was renounced. This is also true of women: the forbidding deity of the Grand Siecle, the grande dame and the grande passion, are given up for the pretty girl with the gentle and mischievous smile. Furthermore, new aspects of feminine beauty are discovered, or rather, uncovered. "The Venus of the dixhuitieme extends the range of the nude in one memorable way: far more frequently than any of her sisters,

she shows us her back" (The Nude, p. 140). Thus said Sir Kenneth Clark; he might have added that the beauty of the feminine leg was also discovered. We may further say that the charms of the neglige are also ex- ploited. There is an excellent example of this new facet of feminine beauty in the Paysan parvenu of Marivaux. The hero is describing his meeting with Madame de Ferval:

I found her reading, lying upon her sofa, her head resting in one hand, in a very clear and proper state of deshabille somewhat negligently arranged.

Imagine a skirt not quite pulled down to the feet, allowing even a small sight of the most beautiful leg in the world; and the leg of a woman is a beautiful thing.

One of these tiny feet had lost its slipper and this sort of nudity had much grace.

I lost nothing of this touching posture and it was the first time that I fully learned to value the foot and leg of a woman . ..

This could readily be a Fragonard or a Boucher. One is tempted to say that one of the technical problems of the painters will now be so to dispose the woman in a draw- ing or on a canvas as most advantageously to put these newly discovered charms into value. It is this sort of literary and pic- torial libertinism which provided those marvelous titles of 18th century prints and paintings, the subjects of which correspond to the stock scenes of the novel and the stage, scenes which make up what one might call the "comedy of love and chance," to borrow a title from Marivaux: the dream of love, the fountain of love, the sacrifice of the rose, the love pledge, the dangerous kiss, the hidden kiss, the stolen kiss, the amorous kiss, not to speak of other variations on the same theme possible of treatment not only in pastoral settings but also in interiors. The high point of the genre seems to have been reached in The Swing of Fragonard where, we may say, the technical problem of showing off the leg has been felicitously solved.

Needless to say with such women and such an attitude love has ceased to be tragic to become an amusing and piquant pursuit. As Montesquieu put it in The Temple of Cnidls: "Love has removed from his quiver

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Page 7: The Rococo as a Dream of Happiness

150 RPMY G. SAISSELIN

the cruel traits which wounded Phedre and Ariadne..."

Love had to please, and so had women too, rather than be difficult. And it is to their glory and credit that they succeeded in making life rather pleasant. It would be an injustice to the ladies of the period to think of them in purely libertine terms. The role of women in society, their intelligence, wit, grace, must not be overlooked. It is not for nothing that La Tour should have por- trayed Madame de Pompadour as he did: in an interior, harmonizing with it, at a desk, with books, showing a lovely foot. It is a portrait not only of a lady, but also of a certain mind, a spirit. With Boucher she

seems a little more sensual. In any case the woman of the 18th century was no blue stocking. There are other paintings which offer us a glimpse into this feminine world, as in the Love letter of Fragonard, or the Music lesson, another stock scene reminis- cent of the Barber of Seville. It is in such scenes too that we may glean the essence of Rococo intimacy and happiness, and it is perhaps this sort of image which might give credibility to Talleyrand's sweetness of life.

It was this femininity, inseparable from the aim and desire to please, which made of the women of the 18th century such excel- lent hostesses. Again we may call to mind the Middle Ages and the century of Alienor

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Fig. 2. Nicolas Lancret,

The Declaration of Love (Courtesy of

The Cleveland Museum of Art,

Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection)

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Rococo as a Dream of Happiness 151

of Aquitaine, an age in which, as Henry Adams put it, "The superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact." In the 18th as in the 12th century, women taught men how to live. In France manners and fine living were the result of feminine in- fluence and the men were the first to admit it.

One might go on at length about the women of the Rococo. Let it suffice for the

present to say that in appearance woman had herself to be an approximation to a work of art. The Rococo extends even to the art of applying cosmetics and the dispo- sition of beauty spots. The manner of using rouge was a matter of great discretion since it was supposed to be expressive of your self as well as your social position. Thus there was rouge de cour, rouge de femme de qual- ite, rouge de bourgeoise, and rouge de cour- tisane. The beauty spots were even more

eloquent and promising of delight: in the corner of the eye it was called assassin, on the forehead it denoted majesty, in the fold of the smile it denoted playfulness, on the cheek it announced the bearer to be galante, while near the lips the bearer might be said to be either naughty, precious, or coquet- tish. All this may seem most frivolous to us who live in a serious age of superproduction and consumption, but such frivolity hurt less than the seriousness of Jacobin virtue and it tended, for a time at least, to remove the banal from life and to make of the latter a dream.

It may seem that I have overstressed this feminine element, the playfulness and the frivolity of the Rococo. But this I have done because I see in it the essence of this princely dream of happiness, a dream which may take the form of a yearning for a quiet life in the country, exemplified in a pastoral scene, or the love of conversation and so- ciety, but also, a dream of love as removed from reality as would be platonic love. The Rococo was a dream of happiness possible of realization only in and through art. It was short-lived.

We shall not attempt here to set limits to it and to fix with precision the point and time it ceased to be taken to heart. In some ways it survives. Certainly Rococo elements continue to show themselves in matters of

taste, in furniture, interior decoration, the desire for comfort, long after the spirit is no longer in fashion. It has been pointed out that the Rococo and the new Neo- Classic style are contemporaneous. Thus it is that certain works will retain certain stylistic elements which are of the Rococo, but which in spirit are another matter.

To see a change coming one need but look at a Greuze and a David, and read Diderot's Eulogy of Richardson, and also Rousseau. Greuze and David, at first view, might not have much in common. But they are different faces of the same bourgeois coin. Both are literary painters, both are Rousseauistic, both preach, both moralize. One may see here the triumph of philoso- phy over art, of the pen over the brush. One is no longer concerned merely to please and to induce the viewer to dream: one is sup- posed to weep with Greuze and to have no- ble and virtuous thoughts connected with the fatherland with David. The aim is to move to social action. The dream of happi- ness is still there, but it is no longer princely; it is no longer the dream of epicureans and princely sceptics, but of men of conviction and so it is that happiness taken seriously will turn from a dream into a nightmare.

It is quite true that in terms of social analysis the Rococo has been associated with the nouveaux riches of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean you can call it a bour- geois art. For you can be bourgeois and imi- tate or espouse the values and tastes of the nobility. The Rococo is the last style of an aristocracy and one of its best features is that we are concerned not with an aristoc- racy of race alone, but also of the spirit. It was the art of gentlemen and intelligent women. The art represented by Greuze and David on the other hand announces not only a new style, but also a new type of man, come to replace the gentleman as a model worthy of universal imitation. That is why we may say that both Greuze and David are Rousseauistic, for the Citizen of Geneva, after all, was both a sentimental petit bour- geois as well as a litterateur enamored of a Rome which existed only in his preferred latin authors. The new type of man is the virtuous and useful citizen. At this point it is no longer possible to talk of the Rococo.

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152 RPMY G. SAISSELIN

We are here touching upon the end of a world, the dissipation of a dream, the dis- solution of a society, and the death of an ideal and of values which had intermittently held men's attention and esteem since the Hellenistic period. We have reached the be- ginnings of Romanticism, at least in France, and so it might be proper, though not quite Rococo, to end upon a note of romantic nostalgia. Talleyrand was not the only man to regret the Old Regime. There was also the Prince de Ligne who reminisced upon it and wrote of it in terms evocative of the atmosphere and the feelings suggested by the Embarkation for Cythera:

I saw Louis XV retaining still the air of Louis XIV and Madame de Pompadour with that of Madame de Montespan. I saw three weeks of en- chanting festivals at Chantilly, spectacles and sojourns at Villers-Cotterets, where all that was most amiable in society was gathered. I saw the magic voyages of Lille-Adam; the delights of the Petit Trianon, the promenades on the Terrace, the music at the Orangerie, the magnificence of Fontainebleau, the chase of Saint-Hubert and of

Choisy. And I have seen all diminish and perish completely.l3

1 Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1943), pp. 4-5.

2Max Osborn, Die Kunst des Rokoko (Berlin, 1929).

3Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (Penguin Books, 1959).

4Read, op. cit., p. 112. 5Jean Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et l'Antiquite

(Oxford U.P., 1957), p. 101. 6 Voltaire, Lettres choisies, ed., R. Naves (Paris),

I, pp. 116-117. 7Antoine Adam, Histoire de la litterature fran-

caise au XVIIe siecle (Paris, 1956), V, pp. 225-226. 8 Grimm, Correspondance litteraire, philoso-

phique et critique, ed., M. Tourneux (Paris, 1877- 1882), XII, p. 152.

9 Quoted in Paul Hazard, La Pensee europeenne au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1946), I, p. 28.

10 L'Abb6 Du Bos, Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture (Utrecht, 1732), I, p. 4.

n Du Bos, op. cit., I, p. 14. 12 Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux,

Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1781), IX, pp. 537-538. 13 Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne, Memoires, ed.,

E. Gilbert (Paris, 1914), p. 123.

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