WSJ Book Review: What Is Rank Without Wit? ("The Age of Conversation" by Benedetta Craveri)

Wall Street Journal ^ | May 13, 2005 | STEPHEN MILLER

[OESY]

In the second decade of the 17th century the Marquise de Rambouillet, bored by the hours she was obliged to spend at the French court, decided to invite some acquaintances to her Paris townhouse for weekly conversations about a variety of subjects -- the arts, the nature of the passions, the subtleties of the French language. Politics was not discussed because a guest might turn out to be a government informer. Thus Paris's salon culture was born, and it flourished for roughly 150 years.

Benedetta Craveri's "The Age of Conversation"... is a well-researched study of the French salon. Originally published in Italian, then translated into French..., the book offers shrewd portraits of intellectual society's leading ladies, or salonnières, and of the world they created.

The early salons were frequented mainly by aristocrats, but rank meant nothing without politesse and esprit. (The first means, roughly, a combination of civility and agreeableness; the second, incisiveness and wit.) At a salon it was important not to be earnest or pedantic. Montesquieu, who regularly attended a Parisian salon, said: "At Versailles you intrigue, in Paris you amuse yourself."...

Ms. Craveri's book focuses on France, but 18th-century Britain was also a conversational epoch. The major writers of the day -- Swift, Addison, Fielding, Defoe, Hume, Johnson -- not only conversed with an energy we can now hardly imagine but wrote extensively about conversation itself....

Ms. Craveri explores with subtlety the qualities -- of mind, language, deportment and finesse -- by which one would earn a better place at the table.... Hume thought it was essential for thinkers to "test" ideas in what he called the "conversible world."

Would that such testing were possible today. Bloggers, chat rooms and shouting TV pundits are probably not quite what Hume had in mind.

[OESY]

Mr. Miller's "The Rise and Fall of Conversation" will be published by Yale University Press early next year.



Benedetta Craveri's "The Age of Conversation" (New York Review Books, 488 pages, $30)