Editor’s Note

Mon éventail est donc venu bien à propos. Ne l’avez-vous pas trouvé joli? Hélas! Quelle bagatelle! Ne m’ôtez pas ce petit plaisir quand l’occasion s’en présente.

(Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, 23 May 1671)

It was Madeleine de Scudéry who brought me to the fans, as she has brought so many of us to new places. In the ‘Histoire et Conversation d’amitié’ (1686) discussed by Laura Burch in the opening essay of this volume, characters describe a fan figuring a certain well-known map of the land of tenderness. The discovery of this surprising textual artifact was enough to send me somewhere I had long meant to visit: the Fan Museum in Greenwich, London.

The small permanent collection on display in the Fan Museum is perfectly pitched to strike joy in the heart of the early modernist. It features a number of the fans discussed here: the birthday of the Dauphin (Canova-Green), the death of Turenne (Stone), as well as Monsieur riding in front of the troops at Saint-Omer, his face beautifully made up and the surrounding riders displayed in pleasing perspectival counterpoint to his prancing horse (Figure 1). But there was more: I also discovered Pamela Cowen’s exemplary exhibition catalogue of seventeenth-century French fans, A Fanfare for the Sun King, showing some of the wonders of the private collection of Mrs Hélène Alexander, director of the museum, and of other museums in the UK and further afield.¹ The tube journey home was more than usually joyful.

FIGURE 1. The Victory at Saint-Omer, 22 April 1677. The Fan Museum, Greenwich.

Browsing these fans one discovers, of course, courtly celebrations, some of which are discussed in this issue. But for me there were other surprises, since these fans showed a wide range of scenes from women lounging at their toilette² to, more improbably, the garden at Port Royal,³ from the stage sets of the Comédie Italienne⁴ to Madame de Maintenon visiting her girls at Saint-Cyr.⁵ A recent exhibition at the musée Cognacq-Jay confirmed my sense that fans were not just a source for court representations. In that exhibition one late seventeenth-century fan showed a view of activities in and around the Seine in the 1680s: on one side of the image, women bathe dressed in demure white gowns, and just across the river we see the washerwomen scrubbing just such gowns to get them clean.⁶ This fan is not alone in using its careful arrangement of space to balance leisure and labour against each other: an entrancing fan from the Fan Museum’s Louis XIV exhibition depicts the celebrations on the Grand Canal at Versailles to mark the arrival of the Venetian gondolas, showing the strained muscles of the oarsmen alongside the more predictably gilded delights of courtly festivity.⁷ So many of these images called me to rethink things I knew or thought I knew about the period.

Of course there has been a good deal of scholarship on seventeenth-century fans already.⁸ But the work of fan scholars — art historians, antiquarians, collectors — has been rather isolated from French literary studies, even as in recent years early modernists have increasingly turned to the study of material objects and their deployment in texts.⁹ In putting together this volume, I wanted distinguished literary scholars who were not specialists of the fan to think about how these objects might change the way they read the seventeenth century. Each scholar has responded to one particular fan from the Fan Museum collection, and related that image to wider cultural concerns: the senses and signification (Cherbuliez), copying and reproduction (Newman), beauty (Goldsmith), death (Stone), the gift (Canova-Green). I’m grateful to them for their generosity in responding to my invitation, and for their powerful and elegant readings. I’m also grateful to Laura Burch for opening the volume with an essay on Scudéry’s textual fan, and to the fan historian Pierre-Henri Biger for closing it with an account of fan making and diffusion in seventeenth-century France, carefully adapted to the needs of fan beginners. The images that accompany each article can be seen in colour when articles are accessed online (http://www.maneyonline.com/loi/sfs).

These fans have elicited a range of theoretical approaches, with authors attending to questions of repetition, exchange, material and movement. In making art, write Deleuze and Guattari, we write with sensations at the same time that we make sensations themselves: ‘The material is so varied in each case (canvas support, paintbrush or equivalent agent, color in the tube) that it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins’.¹⁰ The fan has provided me much matter for thought for precisely this relation between material and sensation, between its presence as object and its imagined movements in the air. And in offering this volume of fan-forays, I like to imagine future movements in the work of early modernists. For those of you who want to go further, I encourage a visit to the Fan Museum (http://www.thefanmuseum.org.uk) for a leap into terres inconnues that turn out to be full of tenderness.

I want to thank the Fan Museum for their generous assistance and erudition as I put this volume together: special thanks to Hélène Alexander, Director, for allowing us to reproduce so many treasures and to Jacob Moss, Senior Curator, for his help with the images. Thanks to Christian Biet, Claire Goldstein, Chloe Hogg and Mia Jackson, conversations with whom bolstered my sense that these fans should be better known. I’d also like to thank Camille Muris-Prime for her diligent copy-editing and Eric Méchoulan for his friendly conversation along the way.

Notes

1 Pamela Cowen, A Fanfare for the Sun King: Unfolding Fans for Louis XIV (London: The Fan Museum, Greenwich/Third Millennium Publishing, 2003).

2 Cowen, 78 (private collection).

3 Cowen, 144 (private collection).

4 Cowen, 124 (private collection).

5 Musée du Berry, Bourges; Cowen, 106.

6 Château de Laàs, département des Pyrénées-Atlantiques, inv. 1049–1; in Le siècle d’or de l’éventail du Roi-Soleil à Marie-Antoinette ed. by Georgina Letourmy-Bordier and José de los Llanos (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2013), 58.

7 Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims; Cowen, 194.

8 For a sample of such recent work, see the thesis by Georgina Letourmy, La feuille d’éventail: expression de l’art et de la société urbaine — Paris. 1670–1790, PhD thesis, Centre Ledoux — Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2006.

9 In first responding to the fans, I had been chiefly inspired by the work of historians such as the scholars gathered in Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg’s Furnishing the Eighteenth Century, in the introduction to which the editors argue for placing furniture ‘in the social and cultural world it inhabited and helped to define’. Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past ed. by Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (London: Routledge, 2007), 2.

10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 166.