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The Two Faces of Amérinthe: Literary Portraiture in Mademoiselle de Scudéry's Clélie

THERELATIVE HOMOGENEITY OFTHEportraits of dukes, countesses and princes that compilations like Divers Portraits (1659) and romances like Mademoiselle de Scudery's Clidie (1654-60) display occasions reflection upon the normative function of the portrait to resemble. The lack of variation in these texts labelled 'portraits' calls into question the very nature of the portrait as a distinguishing sketch, but the curious state of seventeenth-century verbal sketches that do not really portray an individual lays bare tensions inherent in depiction. Christopher Braider, in his article on the significance of the painted miniature in Moliere's Sganarelle, ou Ie Cocu imaginaire, sums up the 'peculiar difficulty' encountered by portraitists: 'reconciling the resemblance a portrait calls for with social, moral, or devotional ambitions in whose light mere resemblance [...J constitutes the worst of solecisms'.1 Harry Berger, in Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance, likewise studies the portrait's inherent tensions through the lens of the equivocal subject, or the basic reflex of both the self-portraitist and the sitter to replace the public fiction with his/her own fiction of self. In his book Portraiture, Richard Brilliant distils this complication in the form of a question: 'Who is the who that is being represented?'.3 To apply Braider's comments on the portrait as object, the related question 'what is the who that is being represented?' is also an appropriate query when faced with the enigmatic existence of the verbal sketch. The similarity in content of depictions from the mid-seventeenth century, when the literary portrait was a new, favourite salon game, highlights the agonistic dual roles of the portrait as a description of an individual and as an object with iconographic, moral and sociopolitical power. In short, when presented with the world of mainly 'perfectly polite' people with 'beautiful heads' exhibited in the portrait books of 1659, one wonders why the normative function of the portrait, 'de bien faire ressembler un portrait it son original',4 was largely effaced. Moreover, the absence of the portrait's primordial role brings to the forefront the weighty 'social, moral, or devotional' functions of the verbal sketch that Braider assigns the portrait. There were, however, other factors at stake in the fashioning of such texts: those related to the verbal portrait's diversionary functions within the salon world of the precieuses. One of the main perpetuators of this new mode in France, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, obviously took great pleasure in reading, writing and requesting portraits. Divers Portraits, which bears a coat of arms that establishes her as the primary editor, states in its anonymous preface that when presented with several