“we made a blame game of your game”: jean desmarets, the

Early Modern Women:An Interdisciplinary JournalVol. 12, No. 1 • Fall 2017

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“We made a blame game of your game”: Jean Desmarets, the Jeu des Reynes Renommées,

and the Dame des ReynesNaomi Lebens

A game of illustrious queens, the Jeu des reynes renommées (Game of Famous Queens), formed part of a series of four decks of playing cards published

in Paris beginning in 1644 (Fig. 1). The games were a collaboration between court author, playwright, and military secretary, Jean Desmarets (1595–1676), and the celebrated printmaker, Stefano della Bella (1610–64); the top halves of the cards were dedicated to della Bella’s images, while the bottom halves featured Desmarets’s text. Ostensibly, the games were produced as didactic tools framed to satisfy the educational needs of the boy-king, Louis XIV, following the death of his father in May 1643. The Cartes des rois (Game of Kings) provided him with models of past French kings to emulate and to avoid, the Jeu des reynes with good and bad models of queenly behavior from history and mythology, the Jeu de la géographie (Game of Geography) established France’s dominant worldly position, and the Jeu des fables (Game of Fables) familiarized Louis with the visual and verbal language of classical mythology.1

1 On the series as a whole and their complex publishing history, see Naomi Lebens, “Prints in Play: Printed Games and the Fashioning of Social Roles in Early Modern Europe” (Ph.D. disser-tation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016), 21–104; idem, “Changing Hands: Jean Desmarets, Stefano della Bella and the Jeux de Cartes,” Games and Game-Playing in Early Modern Art and Literature, ed. Robin O’Bryan (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, forthcoming); Orest Ranum, “Jeux de cartes, pédagogie et enfance de Louis XIV,” Les jeux à la Renaissance, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 553–62; Phyllis Massar, “Presenting Stefano della Bella,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 22 (1968): 159–76; and idem, “States of Della Bella’s Jeu de la Mythologie,” Print Quarterly 4 (1987): 411–16.

120 EMWJ Vol. 12, No. 1 • Fall 2017 Naomi Lebens

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121The Jeu des Reynes Renommées, and the Dame des Reynes

Desmarets dedicated the series, which he envisaged would include further games of cosmography, morals, politics, logic, and physics, to Louis XIV’s mother, queen regent Anne of Austria. He expressed the hope that the playing cards would act as an instrument of her authority, and support her in her “admirable efforts” to elevate Louis above all past French kings.2 Given France’s troubled history of regency, and the all-too-recent specter of the queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, as regent, this was a carefully calculated entreaty. Anne had been con-firmed in absolute royal authority as regent only after enlisting the help of the Parlement of Paris to overturn the will of her late husband, Louis XIII, which had envisaged a ruling conseil d’état, and she desperately needed to develop a workable model of strong female rule in opposition to Marie’s destabilizing example.3

Desmarets framed his dedication to the games precisely to fill this need, stressing that Anne wielded power in the appropriate womanly roles of mother and protector. As a mother, he explained, Anne had been given by nature the authority to take her son “captive” and keep him safe from the “troup of flatter-ers” that dominated court life and had so often caused great princes to become arrogant, voluptuous, and ignorant rulers.4 But Anne still needed to ensure that she was seen to be teaching Louis about appropriate gender roles in the perfor-mance of royal power. Desmarets’s innovative playing cards presented the perfect solution to this problem. Harnessed within the form of games that were to be published on the commercial marketplace, his project struck a difficult note in the delicate representational balance between queen as regent and king as child, as well as responding to the concerns of the wider public in the education and shaping of their future ruler.

The Jeu des reynes celebrated queens who excelled in their key supporting roles as mothers and wives of kings, so within the wider program of the games, it is entirely appropriate that it was the second to be published.5 The first had been

2 Only in later copies does this dedication appear, bound inside the 1664 edition of the games published by the bookseller Florentin Lambert. However, its address to Anne as queen regent (a position she held until 1651) makes it apparent that the document was coeval with the cards as they first appeared. Jean Desmarets, Les Jeux de cartes des roys de France, des reines renom-mées, de la géographie et des fables (Paris: Florentin Lambert, 1664), āiiij (v).

3 Katherine Crawford, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98–136.

4 Desmarets, Les Jeux de cartes, āiiij (v).5 The staggered publication of the games is described within published correspondence

included as front matter of the 1664 volume of the games. Ibid., 1–60.


the Cartes des rois (Fig. 2–3), which presented Louis with all sixty-five French kings, from Pharamond to Louis XIV, arranged on thirty-nine cards. Only those kings deemed worthy exemplars for the young ruler appeared alone, together with a description of their achievements. The rest were crowded onto joint cards around a defining character flaw, with the expectation that the young king would use the game to reflect on “the glory that virtue produces & on the shame and misfortune that accompanies vice.”6

The Jeu des reynes offered Louis a complementary spectrum of models of female royal behavior. As female rulers provided no basis on which Louis could model his own image, the selection was not as constrained by dynastic, genea-logical, or nationalistic concerns. Each given their own card, fifty-two queens selected from history and mythology are organized into four suits of thirteen different character attributes. Four queens each are characterized as happy (heu-reuse), unfortunate (malheureuse), capricious (capriceuse), skillful (habile), sociable (galante), shameless (impudique), good woman (bonne femme), cruel (cruelle), wise (sage), pious (pieuse), valiant (vaillant), celebrated (célèbre), or saintly (saincte). The attributes are also numerically ordered from lowest to highest; the heureuse queens are assigned the number “1” on through the pieuse queens, who are num-bered “10.”7 Only the vaillant, célèbre, and saincte queens, who represent the court cards of a regular deck, are left unnumbered.

The enumeration was by no means a simple scale from bad to good in terms of moral virtue, since at the bottom of the numerical hierarchy are the heureuse queens. Reflecting the unique ability of the number one or Ace card to move from low to high value depending upon the game being played, the queens selected for this position were all described as having advanced from relatively low origins to their high “happy” state. Queen Esther, for example, was a mere “Jewish girl” before her marriage to King Ahasuerus, which allowed her to petition for the safety of her people, while Roxanne, wife of Alexander the Great, was all the happier because before “she was nothing but the daughter of a Persian despot.” The following attributes in the scale move from least negative to most negative

6 Ibid., āivj (v)–āvj (r).7 The bonne femme cards were originally left unnumbered. Other initial mistakes include

missing attributes on the célèbre queens, the Queen of Sheba card labelled galante instead of sage, the St. Helen card labelled saincte instead of pieuse, and missing numbers on the Helen of Troy and Queen of Sheba cards. These were rectified in later states of the game.


Figure 2. Stefano della Bella, “Clovis le grand / Vaillant, sage . . .” from Game of the Kings of France ( Jeu des Rois de France), etching, 88 x 56 mm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


Figure 3. Stefano della Bella, “Raoul . . . / Louis le Jeune . . .” from Game of the Kings of France ( Jeu des Rois de France), etching, 87 x 55 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


and then from least positive to most positive.8 This is especially apparent when one appreciates the exact sense in which Desmarets conceived of his categories. In response to a published letter critiquing his selection of habile queens for the game, Desmarets explained that the way in which he applied the term was neither intended to signify the queens’ ability in government, nor their wisdom. Rather, it indicated their success in bringing their personal designs to fruition.9 This could have positive or negative consequences. Agrippina thus “brought the reign of the Empire to Nero her son,” a famously cruel emperor, while the French queen consort, then queen regent, Catherine de’ Medici, “always maintained power, in balancing the part of the Princes of the Blood with that of the Princes of Lorraine.” Habile was not a positive attribute, as uninhibited female agency was not understood as a positive influence.

The queens designated to have violated their roles as mothers and wives in the worst fashion were given the game’s most negative appellations of impudique and cruelle. The impudique Faustina was denounced for her desire to commit adultery with a lowly gladiator, while the cruelle Clytemnestra reportedly mur-dered her husband, Agamemnon, and even sought to kill her own son. Slightly less blameworthy on the scale were the powerful and manipulative galante queens, like Cleopatra and Poppeae Sabina, who employed substantial sexual influence over their royal partners to achieve their desired ends. Facing criticism for his choice of descriptor this time, Desmarets explained that the term galante had connotations of sociability that made it the proper term for queens who were not prostitutes, but rather willing lovers.10 In the numerical logic of the game, this attribute was chosen to follow from the habile queens, who achieved similar suc-cess in their personal designs, but without resorting to the same carnal methods.

The hierarchy of the remaining positive attributes in the game is more straightforward. Sage queens (unlike habile ones) are those who share their wis-dom with, or look for wisdom from their husbands or sons, while pieuse queens show proper devotion both to their family and to God. The court cards are unique in that both the vaillant and the célèbre queens are associated with mascu-

8 The bonne femme queens (who would occupy the number seven position) are the sole interlopers in the scale of increasingly negative attributes. This may have been the reason that it was initially decided to leave them out of the numerical sequence altogether (see note 7 above), rather than confirm their place among the most blameworthy queens.

9 Desmarets, Les Jeux de cartes, 52.10 Ibid., 51.


line virtues, such as military ability, heroism, and valor. But the disruptive poten-tial of their pseudo-masculinity is mitigated in both cases. The vaillant queens are distanced historically through their shared status as Amazons. While clearly unsuitable models for early modern queens, their ability as warriors enabled them to fulfill the traditional chivalric and military roles associated with the Valet or Jack in a deck of playing cards. The célèbre queens, Dido, Semiramis, Tomyris, and Zenobie, were also warrior queens with a shared attribute: they all owed their notoriety to repeated representations in literary and historical sources. In each case, however, Desmarets also took pains to describe how their heroic endeavors were undertaken for the sake of a husband or son.

At the top of the game’s hierarchy, the saincte queens display a triumphant affirmation of the traditional feminine virtues of modesty, piety, wisdom, and goodness. As French queens, their association with the highest female attribute in the game is also an open demonstration of national sentiment. Anne of Austria, of course, features here, in a card that shows her seated in a unicorn-drawn chariot between her two children (Fig. 4). Louis, the young king, is fully visible to her right. He is crowned, wearing his coronation robes and holding the orb and scepter of state. Philippe, duke of Anjou, is partially obscured by the figure of his mother. However, his presence here is an announcement of Anne’s role in securing the Bourbon dynasty. The viewer is reminded that she has fulfilled her familial duty, providing not only one, but two male heirs.

As has been mentioned, the carefully constructed emblems of queenship in Desmarets’s game were later subject to a published critique. A letter, suppos-edly written by a “noble Breton woman” shortly after Christmas Eve, 1644, and the author’s response dated January 10, 1645, were very likely published soon afterwards as an independent pamphlet series.11 In the letter, the correspondent, who identifies herself as a Dames des reynes, expresses her astonishment that her celebrated compatriot, Anne of Brittany, was not included in the game. Extolling Anne’s many virtues, she argues that this French queen (as opposed to the many foreign queens included by Desmarets) might easily have presided over the célèbres, vaillantes, pieuses, sages, bonnes, habiles, or heureuses. This oversight on Desmarets’s part turned her initial praise of the game’s design to bitter reproach. It was also the catalyst for a new game in which the Dame des reynes and her company carefully evaluated all of Desmarets’s selections in the Jeu des reynes. The

11 Rpt. in Desmarets, Les Jeux de cartes, 1–60.


Figure 4. Stefano della Bella, “Anne d’Austrische,” from The game of queens (Le jeu des Reines renommées), c. 1644, etching, 88 x 54 mm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


body of the letter is an account of this exercise. Notably, only the saincte French queens, including Anne of Austria, were left uncontested in principle. The single critique levelled at Desmarets for this category was that the name “Batilde,” as used by some historians, should be preferred for queen Bardour as it was deemed more elegant.

Through the Lettre d’une dame des reynes, the Jeu des reynes is assimilated into an elite culture of adult game-playing and transformed into an oral parlor game of the kind described in Renaissance handbooks including Innocentio Ringhieri’s Cento giuochi liberali e d’ingegno (1551) and Girolamo Bargagli’s Dialogo dei giuochi (1572). Parlor games were intellectual diversions involving philosophy and knowledge, typically played in small companies; they were based on riddles, stories, charades, and questions, and used to test one another’s wit and learning and to display one’s own. This refined context for the Lettre is made explicit by a reference in its opening pages to Charles Sorel’s Maison des jeux, a French handbook of parlor games mimicking Italian models, published anony-mously in Paris in 1642.12 The Dame des reynes noted that one of her company of players eagerly awaited Desmarets’s Jeu des fables because she hoped to use it as a prop for the “Game of Novels” described by Sorel, which involved a company of players composing an improvised novel. There is obvious similarity between this envisaged repurposing of the Jeu des fables based on Sorel’s game and the ludic activity of the Dame des reynes and her company with the Jeu des reynes. As she announced to Desmarets in her Lettre: “we made a blame game of your game.”

Desmarets acknowledged the shift in context for the reception of his game in his response to the Dame des reynes, remarking:

I would never have believed, Madame, that we would owe it to exam-ine this pastime so rigorously; & not having anything but the instruc-tion of the King for its object, I had thought that it would suffice to present him with the images of some Princesses of whom we have spoken the most, some of them good, some of them bad. 13

He insists, however, that his game stands up to this new challenge and that he found “all [of ] the [company’s] complaints fallible & easy to destroy.”

12 Charles Sorel, La Maison des jeux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1642).13 Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, 39.


Another level of game-play is hinted at in the opening lines of Desmarets’s response, where he airs the suspicion that the Lettre was, in fact, written by some “scholarly man” (homme savant) assuming the persona of a Breton noblewom-an.14 It is possible that his suspicions were raised over the nature of the Dame des reynes’s principal complaints. One key cause for concern she identified is the frequency with which Desmarets chose queens whose glory rests on accounts in which truth is embellished by fiction. Zenobia is singled out as a queen who owes “the measure of her renown” to Desmarets’s own historical fiction, Rosane.15 Similarly, she contends that Desmarets’s choice of Dido is undermined by the fact that she owes her fame to Virgil. This could be contrasted with a long list of queens, slighted by Desmarets, whose factual histories are so incredible that they are often “taken for fables,” such as the Goth queen, Amalasonte, or the Swedish queen, Margaret, daughter of King Valdemar.16

Desmarets rejected the claim that his treatment of characters in novels, or that by Virgil and other poets, is ahistorical. He further defended the right of poets to “embellish their adventures with fables.” In the preface to Rosane, Desmarets had described historical fiction as a “sweetness which amuses.”17 Charming the human mind (l’Esprit humain) by mixing history with “strange stories” and “admirable adventures” made it more persuasive: while the reader’s imagination was happily occupied conjuring elaborate mental pictures, their judgment perceived whatever moral lessons had been “skilfully mixed” among the histories. Historical truth amounted to “a list of human accidents,” and it very rarely supplied examples of perfect people. However, in historical fiction, the author’s invention could supply history’s deficit. This made it both more useful than history as a didactic tool and more pleasing than history as an expression of the novelist’s fantastical art. In the same vein, he would later present his games as an “agreeable & easy means, to make tasteful to Louis the most noble & most necessary Sciences for Kings.”18

14 Ibid., 30.15 Jean Desmarets, Rosane: Histoire tirée de celle des romains et des perses (Paris, 1639).

Zenobia, the virtuous warrior queen, was deployed in Rosane to represent the value of the “active life.” On the allegories in Rosane, see Hugh Gaston Hall, Richelieu’s Desmarets and the Century of Louis XIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 60.

16 Desmarets, Les jeux de cartes, 12–13.17 Desmarets, Rosane, “Preface,” ā (r-v).18 Oronce Finé de Brianville, Jeu d’armoires de l’Europe pour apprendre le blason, la géographie

et l’histoire curieuse, dédié à Monsieur d’Hozier (Lyon: Benoist Coral, 1659), xxii.


Charles Sorel (1602–74), French historiographer and anonymous author of the Maison des jeux, held a different view on the status and purpose of fiction in relation to history. As he saw it, fiction’s principal purpose was pleasure and historical realism should only ever be used in a work of fiction to help it achieve that specific end and not as a means of education, which was the realm of history proper. Gabrielle Verdier has argued that Sorel’s assimilation of novels into the sphere of game-play through the “Game of the novel” in the Maison des jeux crys-talized his key association of imaginative literature with pleasure.19 It is apparent that the author of the Lettre d’une dame has adapted Desmarets’s Jeu des reynes in a similar fashion: by using it in the context of a refined parlor game, it has been neatly divorced from its original didactic function.

It is possible that Sorel was the homme savant that Desmarets suspected of penning the Lettre d’une dame. The specific reference to the Maison des jeux in the text, together with the character of the complaints it levelled against Desmarets, make him a plausible candidate. This argument is strengthened by the fact that Sorel would go on to direct a pointed critique against didactic games aimed at teaching children in his guidebook, De la perfection de l’homme (1655).20 At a time when Desmarets was widely credited with inspiring a wide range of educational games based on the model of his innovative playing cards, Sorel accuses such games of debasing high and complex subjects that do not belong to the sphere of play.21 Perhaps, through the Lettre d’une dame, he took it upon himself to situate Desmarets’s game in a more appropriate context: the festivities of an adult com-pany at leisure on Christmas Eve.

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19 Gabriel Verdier, “Fiction as Game: Sorel’s La Maison des Jeux and the Dilemma of the Novel in the Seventeenth Century,” The French Novel: Theory and Practice, ed. Michel Butor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 13–14.

20 Charles Sorel, De la Perfection de l’Homme, où Les Vrays Biens Sont Considérez, et Spécialement Ceux de l’Ame, avec Les Méthodes des Sciences (Paris, 1655), 376–77.

21 The exceptional privilege Desmarets received for his games protected his association with the “invention” of didactic playing cards as the genre developed, as later booksellers, like Benoist Coral, were forced to apply for his permission before publishing other educational games, like Oronce Finé de Brianville’s hugely successful heraldic playing cards, the Jeu d’armoires (1659).


For the infant king bereft of his father and closest male royal role model, Desmarets framed his game of queens to ensure that Louis XIV would be equipped with an awareness of proper gender roles in the performance of royal power. Released onto the commercial marketplace, however, Desmarets’s game would prove adapt-able for a wider range of players. The battle of exemplary queens staged by the Dame des reynes and her company in the Lettre d’une dame rendered the Jeu des reynes into an intellectual parlor game in which Desmarets’s judgment came under question. For the homme savant Sorel, one possible author of the Lettre, the key issue at stake was the purpose of play. Sorel deemed the principal purpose of play to be pleasure, to whose sphere belonged both fiction and games. In contrast, the business of kingship was a grave matter and thus unsuitable to attempts to make it agreeable, easy, and palatable to the young monarch.

“we made a blame game of your game”: jean desmarets, the

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