Afterword

Summary

In 1646 Jean Chapelain, urbane habitué of seventeenth-century salons and an elegant, graceful stylist who specialised in dialogue-treatises, wrote a little Dialogue de la lecture des vieux romans which purports to be a conversation between himself and two well-read friends. Chapelain is ambivalent: romances can, perhaps, be useful in informing the young about history, or language. But they are also problematic, in a society that values galanterie – and he turns, with some perplexity, to the Lancelot. Can one, he wonders, speak of the galanterie of Lancelot? He is doubtful if it is at all appropriate,

pour ce que je suis persuadé, qu'encore qu'il y puisse avoir de l'amour sans esprit […], il est toutefois malaisé qu'il y ait une galanterie où l'esprit n'ait point de part, et qui soit entièrement dépourvu de grâce.

[because I am convinced that there can be love without wit … but it is difficult to imagine galanterie where there is no wit, and no refinement.]

One must, of course, recognise, he agrees, that the term galanterie is ambivalent: on the one hand, it signifies l'art de plaire aux dames pour s'en faire aimer [the art of pleasing the ladies to acquire their love] – galanterie, in other words, as strategy or artifice, a literary or linguistic facility; on the other, however, it simply refers to l'amour qu'on a pour elles sans méthode et sans art [our love for them, uncomplicated by method or style].