watteau's chinese cabinet

Playing Games with Otherness: Watteau's Chinese Cabinet at the Château de la MuetteAuthor(s): Katie ScottReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 66 (2003), pp. 189-248Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026316 .

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PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHERNESS: WATTEAU'S CHINESE CABINET AT THE CHATEAU DE LA MUETTE*

Katie Scott

for Rene Demoris

July 1731 the widow Chereau and Louis Surugue, important print-sellers on or just off the rue Saint Jacques, announced in the pages of the Mercure de France the

imminent publication of a series of thirty 'Figures chinoises' etched and engraved after paintings by Antoine Watteau at the chateau of La Muette (Fig. 1).1 The scheme reproduced- very possibly Watteau's largest and most ambitious decorative ensemble- did not survive long.2 In the absence of preliminary drawings, modelli or copies, these prints constitute the primary, indeed, virtually the only, evidence of the Chinese cabinet or closet's history and original appearance, modern scholarship having, until recently, largely failed to add to our knowledge of the scheme.3 The

* I should like to thank for their generous help and support the curators at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, for giving me unrestricted access to the Claude III Audran and Antoine Watteau drawings in their collection; and the AHRB for funding much of the research. For their acute and always constructive criticism which has contributed immeasurably to the improvement and scope of the text I thank very warmly the editors of the present Journal and the anonymous readers to whom the manuscript was sent for comment. Versions of the essay have served as the song for my supper at a number of conferences (University of Warwick, The Clark Library) and seminars (RCA/V&A, Courtauld Institute of Art) and I would like to thank for their critical comments and suggestions on these occasions the following friends, colleagues and students: Caroline Arscott, Jonathan Bennet, Maxine Berg, Rene Demoris, Stephen Deuchar, Juliet Carey, Nancy Collins, Janice Mercurio, Sarah Monks, Mary Sheriff, David Solkin, John Styles, Carolyn and Michael Thorneloe, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and Joanna Woodall. My warmest thanks are reserved, however, for Paul Crossley, without whose encouragement and generous critical attention the essay would not have seen publication. For their painstaking preparation of the text for publication I also thank Jenny Boyle and Uschi Payne.

Abbreviations: A.N. = Paris, Archives nationales BnF = Paris, Bibliotheque national de France.

1. Mercure de France, July 1731, p. 1780. The sale of the prints was confirmed by a later announce- ment in the same periodical (November 1731, p. 2623): at the Deux Pilliers d'Or, 'toute la suite des Figures chinoises, gravees d'apres les Peintures d'Antoine Watteau, qui sont dans le Cabinet du Roy, au Chateau de la Meutte [sic], en 30. morceaux ...' The suggestion of F. Kimball, The Creation of the

Rococo Decorative Style (1943), New York 1980, p. 139, that the paintings may not ever have been installed, probably arises from knowledge of the July announce- ment alone. The prints were commissioned from Michel Aubert, Edme Jeurat and Francois Boucher. The scheme was later published in the so-called Receuil Julienne, Jean de Julienne's project to reproduce Watteau's ceuvre. In 1726 appeared the first volume of the Figures de differents caracteres after Watteau's drawings, followed by a second volume two years later. These formed the first part of the Receuil. Concurrently Julienne had initiated the reproduction of the paintings (for which he obtained a privilege in 1727), the fruit of which continued to appear regularly until 1734, the individual prints or sets of prints, like the panels for La Muette, advertised at corresponding intervals in the Mercure de France. These were then gathered together in two further volumes and, along with the Figures, collectively entitled L'CEuvre d'Antoine Watteau... grave [sic] d'apres ses tableaux et desseins originaux. It sold for 500 livres. The standard history of the enterprise is still that of E. Dacier, J. Vuaflart and A. Herold, Jean de Julienne et les graveurs de Watteau au XVIIP siecle, 4 vols, Paris 1921-29. I have made use of the copy of the Receuil in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.

2 . The date of the creation of the cabinet remains uncertain and is discussed in some detail below. La Muette underwent considerable rebuilding and remodelling from 1737 and the cabinet almost dis- appeared at that time. See C. Tadgell, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, London 1978, pp. 160-61.

3. The most sustained and speculative discussions of the possible appearance of the scheme are to be found in Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), 1, pp. 25-26; M. Roland Michel, Watteau: An Artist of the Eighteenth Century, New York 1984, pp. 279-80; and

JOURNAL OF THE WARBURG AND COURTAULD INSTITUTES, LXVI, 2OO3



190 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 1 . Figures Chinoises et Tartares peintes par Watteau Peintre du Roy, title-page, 1731, engraving (© Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Cabinet des arts graphiques)

first part of this essay therefore necessarily involves detective work; initially a review of the evidence and search for further clues, secondly a speculative reconstruction of the whole by the assembly of some of its possible parts. 'Archaeology' over, I embark in part 2 on a close reading of the cabinet which takes chinoiserie, a genre of decoration combining ornament and figure often regarded as trivial, seriously. The

principal goal is to identify the ideological forces which shaped this particular manifestation of the 'other' in the waning years of Louis XIV's reign, and to suggest the role played by Chinese exotica in the formation of new identities in a 'post- absolutist' world.4 Part 2 begins and ends with making: I recognise, at the outset, that the lightness of chinoiserie - a lightness which is interpreted both formally and meta-

phorically-was in fact built into the genre, and argue that it originates from the

specific conditions of invention and production associated with an elite workshop; I conclude by noting that this intrinsic fragility left chinoiserie open to appropriation or re-working - specifically, in this instance, a re-working by, and perhaps for, socially-

M. Eidelberg and S. A. Gopin, 'Watteau's Chinoiseries at La Muette', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, cxxx, 1997, pp. 19-46. Otherwise the scheme gets rather summary treatment from Watteau scholars; see e.g. D. Posner, Antoine Watteau, London 1994, p. 59. It has been of much greater interest to those concerned with chinoiserie; see H. Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, London 1961, pp. 89-90; O. Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration, Oxford 1977, pp. 80-82; M. Jarry,

Chinoiserie: Chinese Influence on European Decorative Art, iyth and 18th Centuries, transl. G. Mangold-Vine, London 1981, p. 13; D.Jacobson, Chinoiserie, London !993'PP- 62-64, 68.

4. The phrase 'post-absolutism to describe cultural change during the period when the state apparatus of the ancien regime remained yet intact is coined by J. Caplan in In the Kings Wake: Post- Absolutist Culture in France, Chicago and London 1999-



PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHERNESS 1 9 1

aspiring women. In the discussion framed by these 'makings', the witty structure of chinoiserie is analysed in the light of Freud's work on jokes.5 I argue that, by combining passages of innocent play and tendentious ridicule, the genre can be situated historically between the ages of discovery and colonialism. More specifically, I try to show how contradictions in proto-colonialism were manifest at the turn of the century, in a clash between discourses on Christian and trade missions. With the ascendancy of the latter, chinoiserie evolved from betokening a performance, a passage of identities, to a material object- a development that finds its parallel, I suggest, in the displacement of status from blood to capital, and more generally, of the power of the court to that of the city.

The ordering concept, prevailing theme and recurrent leitmotif of these several discussions is that of play. More than a conceit, play functions to facilitate the raising of historical questions through the visual. 'Playfulness' has often been used to describe the 'gout moderne' of the early eighteenth century and to characterise its relation to the established conventions of classicism predominant when absolutism was most absolute, that is, in the previous century.6 'At play' also describes, quite literally, the state in which the social elite of the ancien regime assumed its legal identity and lived out its life.7 At another level, Nobert Elias has argued that we should think about the perpetuation of court society in terms of game playing, a social model that is dynamic and allows for a degree of transformation in reproduction.8 The politically and socially adventurous played with and for identities which were theirs neither by nature, nor by convention, nor by (divine) right. In so far as they did so successfully they transformed the rules by which status and power were traditionally attributed. Play is thus an aesthetic, an historical condition and a social model. In an effort to keep all three in view I have, not altogether seriousnessly, assigned the sections of this essay the names of familiar games. 'Cluedo' denotes the skill of establishing what we know, and willingly acknowledges the part played by guesswork in all such endeavour. The design process is labelled 'Origami', for its use of folding and its reliance on iterative processes and mirror-play. 'Charades' suggests that, for the ancien regime, the 'other' assumed the nature of a performance, and hints at its comic flavour. 'Roulette' alludes to the stakes played for in the markets for status and luxury commodities. Only the last section, cDecoupage\ or the art of cutting-out, literally as well as metaphorically describes an early eighteenth-century pastime:9 prints were cut up and pasted onto furniture, their motifs mixed and re-combined in heteroclite assortments. By assuming the part of producer, the

5. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, transl. J. Strachey, ed. A. Richards ( The Penguin Freud Library, vi) , London 1 99 1 .

6. See e.g. P. Minguet, Esthetique du rococo (1966), Paris 1979, pp. 238-50; on the dialogue between the grotesque/arabesque and the classical tradition see T. E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, London and New Haven, CT 1985, pp. 58-65; K. Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris, New Haven, CT and London 1995, pp. 137-45.

7. See Le jeu au XVIIP siecle (colloque 1971, Centre Aixois d'etudes et de recherches sur le

XVIIIe siecle) Aix-en-Provence 1976; T. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France, Baltimore 1993; and idem, 'The Libertine's Bluff: Cards and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France', Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxin.4, 2000, pp. 505- 21.

8. N. Elias, The Court Society, Oxford 1983. 9. Charades, as we understand them today, were

introduced in the late 1 8th century and roulette at the beginning of the 19th century.



i92 KATIE SCOTT

consumer displaced meaning from one set of signs onto another of his or her own

choosing, thus resisting the passage from sign to referent engineered by the original. Similarly, the relationship of explanation between the 'games' or discursive fields sketched out here falls somewhat short of the straightforwardly linear; it too is rather one of displacement, of lateral moves in which meaning is drawn across from one set of signs to another in a mise en abyme. The essay is thus open to re-readings in which the connections between sections, their sequence and interplay, are dramatically re-produced.10

1. Cluedo: (Re) searching Watteau's Chinese cabinet

The legends beneath the prints tell us that they were executed after paintings 'tire du cabinet du Roy' at La Muette.11 However, since no trace of the paintings is to be found in the archives of the Maison du Roi,12 most scholars have concluded that the scheme originated not with Louis XV, but with one of the chateau's former tenants. Situated on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the sixteenth-century, single-storey hunting lodge had not always been so fully in the crown's possession.13 Under Louis XIII and Louis XIV it had been attached as a perquisite to the office of Capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre which, from 1705, was assumed byJoseph-Jean-Baptiste Fleuriau d'Armenonville, at that time an intendant des finances.14' However, the privilege was his for little more than a decade. In 1716 the Regent, Philippe d'Orleans, offered the estate to his daughter Marie Louise Elizabeth, duchesse de Berry,15 who

10. The connections between origami and decoupage have already been mentioned in the text. Additionally, there are links between origami and roulette, in both of which chance plays a part - at the elbow of producers in the first instance and in relation to consumers in the second- a link which could be explored further. Finally, bringing together charades and decoupage draws attention to questions of gender that in the present sequence are only peripherally evident.

11. Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3), pp. 20-21, have argued that the term 'Cabinet du Roi' has been misinterpreted by modern scholars and that it means not a specific room but simply 'collection'. While I accept this as a possibility I would like to note that when used in this way the royal collection was imagined in its totality and locations (at La Muette) were mostly omitted. The mention of La Muette thus suggests to me that we are indeed dealing with a space, a room, and not a collection.

12. Roland Michel (as in n. 3), p. 279, notes that the absence of documentation concerning the scheme contrasts oddly with its fulsome publication by Jean de Julienne for his Receuil of Watteau's posthumously-engraved ceuvre (for which see above, n. 1).

13. The standard monograph on the chateau remains Amable Charles Fraquet, comte de Franque- ville, Le chateau de la Muette, Paris 1915. Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3), pp. 21-21, provide a more detailed history of the period relevant here.

Importantly, they draw attention to a painting of the chateau by Pierre Denis Martin the Younger (1722- 23, Musee National du Chateau de Versailles) which clearly shows its central, single-storey corps de logis with Mansart roof and its flanking two-storey wings.

14. A.N.M.C. XXXIII/407, 26 October 1705: contract of sale between Theophile de Catelan de Sablonnieres and Joseph-Jean-Baptiste Fleuriau d'Armenonville for '[les] charges de Capitaine des chasteaux de Madrid, La Muette et Pare du bois de Boullogne' for 50,000 livres. Fleuriau d'Armenon- ville 's accession to the charge was confirmed by lettres de provision on 28 October 1705, which were then registered by the Chambre des comptes on 24 November 1705 and again on 15 April 1710.

15. Among the outstanding debts listed in the document dividing the estate of d'Armenonville's wife Jeanne Gilbert (A.N. T/720, 25 April 1717, partage de succession) is the sum of 2,500 livres owed by the duchesse de Berry for rent of La Muette between 1 July 1716 and December 1716, the annual rent of the property having apparently been agreed at 5,000 livres. Presumably, the duchesse had been renting the place whilst the sale was being finalised. According to the marquis de Dangeau, negotiations had started in June 1716. On 2 June 1716 he noted in his journal: 'Madame la duchesse de Berry achete la maison de la Meute de M. d'Armenonville. II demeura toujours capitaine de Boulogne; en cette qualite il avoit un appartement dans le chateau de Madrid, qu'on lui fera accommoder mieux qu'il



PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHERNESS 1 93

subsequently died there amidst incense and scandal in the hot summer of 1719.16 Uncertainty over the dating of Watteau's designs has variously put both d'Armenon- ville and de Berry in the frame for the commission of the cabinet. Though we lack direct evidence, clues gleaned from the d'Armenonville family papers and from the studio drawings of Claude III Audran, with whom Watteau was working during the years c. 1708-12, serve, I think, to endorse the already strong case, made most recently by Martin Eidelberg and Seth A. Gopin, in favour of the intendant.17

D'Armenonville, who by family connections moved in court circles promoting trade and Christian mission to the East, had, according to the Mercure galant, transformed La Muette into 'one of the most agreeable houses in the environs of Paris'.18 So much so that in September 1707 the due and duchesse de Bourgogne felt compelled by curiosity to visit the place,19 and in 1716 the Regent, by probity, to order an inventory of all the acquisitions, augmentations and ameliorations made, in order to compensate d'Armenonville for his loss of the place.20 The inventory has not survived.21 However, in the same year d'Armenonville suffered a second loss: his wife, Jeanne Gilbert, died of smallpox. While her probate inventory cannot make good the lost account of La Muette's embellishments, it does provide valu- able circumstantial evidence about the contents of Watteau's cabinet and about the couple's taste for exotic, imported wares.22

n'est. Je ne sais point ce que madame la duchesse de Berry lui donne; je sais seulement que d'Armenon- ville dit qu'il est fort content du marche'. P. de Courcillon, marquis de Dangeau, Journal du marquis de Dangeau, ed. E. Soulie et al., 19 vols, Paris 1854- 60, xvi, p. 390. See also L. de Rouvroy, due de Saint-Simon, Memoires de M. le due de Saint-Simon, ed. A. de Boislisle et al., 43 vols, Paris 1879-1930, xxx, pp. 79-80. However, negotiations over the additional sums for improvements were still ongoing in August and the transfer not concluded until the very end of the year.

16. According to Duflos, she spent her last the last months shut up there in her apartments 'tout penetres de parfums, a se croire en Orient', a description which extends to the living space as a whole the specifically Chinese taste of Watteau's cabinet. He added that 'ceux qui le venaient voir en prenaient un mal de tete'. An orangerie, a laboratoire and an appartement des bains had been installed for her at the expense of the Batiments du roi; see BnF MS fonds francais 7801, Papiers de Cotte, fols 159- 60. For the faux Chinese lacquer furniture which was commissioned from the Gobelins for La Muette see T. Wolvesperges, 'The Royal Lacquer Workshop at the Gobelins 1713-1757', Studies in the Decorative Arts, 11. 2, 1995, pp. 55-76; esp. 61-62. Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3), p. 32, plausibly suggest that these pieces of furniture may have been acquired by the duchesse from d'Armenonville along with the chateau.

17. Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3). 18. Mercure galant, September 1707, p. 190: 'une

des plus agreables maisons des environs de Paris.'

19. Ibid., pp. 190-96; see also Dangeau, Journal (as in n. 15), xi, pp. 454-55; Saint-Simon (as in n. 15), xv, pp. 251-52.

20. Among the papers mentioned in Jeanne Gilbert's probate inventory are letters patent of 4 July 1716 ordering the drawing up of the inventory; see A.N. 6AP 12, 3 December 1716, fols 238V~39V (items 7-8).

2 1 . The inventory was deposited with the greffe at the Chambre des comptes on 7 August 1716. However, the archives of the greffe were destroyed by fire on 27 October 1737. See M. Mortier, Le sort des archives dispersees de la Chambre des comptes, Paris 1964.

22. See A.N. 6AP 12 IAD, Jeanne Gilbert, 3 December 1716, which tracks the passage of the items from La Muette to the chateau de Madrid, where they were haphazardly stored in assorted stables, saddlery and garde-meubles. Folios i52r-98r cover the furniture and effects 'au chasteau de Madrid ou ils ont este cy devant transports de celuy de La Muette ou ils estoient.' These included in the garde meuble, items (491) 'une toile indienne', 'une toile facon indienne'; (497) 'courte pointe de toille fagon indienne'; (509) 'un tapy de Turquie, pour une petite Table'; (551) 'cabaret a caffe a Tambour de la Chine sur son pied de bois dore'; (569) 'deux tours de lei de toille indienne'; (575) 'un grand tapy de Turquie fort use'; (589) 'une boeste a tabagies de bois peint de la Chine ovalle'; (592) 'un cabaret volant de la Chine', 'huit soucoupes de bois de la Chine', 'deux autres soucoupes aussy de la Chine garnys d'un cercle d'argent servant a mettre tasses . . . le tout de porcelaine fine.'



194 KATIE SCOTT

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First, it is significant that Jeanne Gilbert bought shares in the cargoes of several merchant ships, perhaps of the very kind responsible for bringing the Indian cottons, Turkish carpets, lacquer trays and boxes, and Chinese porcelain listed among the items evacuated from La Muette. This suggests an unusually active investment in the exotic, an investment she may possibly have initiated since only later did d'Armenonville buy shares in the Compagnie des Indes.23 Secondly, it is not unreason- able to suppose that the Eastern and Far Eastern wares recouped from the chateau issued specifically from Watteau's cabinet; certainly comparable items decorated cabinets at the hotel d'Armenonville in Paris.24 There, Chinese screens 'representant personnages', porcelain in blue and white and blanc de Chine, and Japanese urns mounted on stands of gilded wood decorated d'Armenonville 's cabinet on the ground floor;25 while on the first, Madame 's contained not only vases, silver mounted porcelain bowls, tea-cups adorned with gilt-bronze trimmings, but also a large, double-fronted lacquer cabinet on its stand of gilded wood.26 Indeed, it was her apartment rather than his that consistently struck an exotic note, her bed-chamber, salon and gallery all containing important items of lacquer, porcelain and oriental cloth.27

23. The papers listed in Jeanne Gilbert's inventory reveal that at an unknown date d'Armenonville and his wife invested 1,000 livres in each of six ships fitted out at La Rochelle, 'pour avoir part dans les pertes et proffits' (A.N. 6AP 12 IAD, 3 December 1716, fols 477v~78r); also among the papers is a receipt of 24 June 1712, signed by (Antoine) Crozat, acknowledging receipt from 'laditte deffunte dame d'Armenonville' of 1,500 livres 'pour laquelle il a interesse laditte dame dans le vaisseau armement et cargaison du Griffon (ibid., fols 476v~77r). D'Arme- nonville 's shares with their dividends are listed in his probate inventory drawn up on 22 December 1728 (A.N. 6AP 12, fol. 333V). For the outcome of these investments see below, n. 149.

24. D'Armenonville had bought the hotel in the rue Platriere from Esther Hernant, widow of Charles de la Cour, marquis de Gouvernet, for 220,000 livres at some date prior to 8 August 1 705 when the sale is mentioned in a constitution de rente. See A.N.M.C. CXIII/212, 8 August 1705; and further documents relating to the transaction in the same carton (titre nouvel, 17 August 1705; titre nouvel, 18 August 1705; quittance a titre nouvel, 18 August 1705; quittance, 22

August 1705). Before 1705, d'Armenonville 's address was rue neuve S. Honore.

25. AN. 6AP 12 IAD, Jeanne Gilbert, 3 December 1716, fols igv-24r (d'Armenonville 's cabinet)', items (55) 'un cabaret de la Chine garny d'argent avec trois tasses de porcelaine'; (57) 'deux flambeaux de bronze representant chacun un elephant, et deux pots de porcelaines en cornet rouge et blanc'; (58) 'deux tasses de porcelaine blanche sur leurs soucoupes de bois de la chine sur lesquelles est un cercle d'argent pour tenir les tasses'; (59) 'quatre porcelaines sur leur consolle de bois dore scavoir deux du japon en roulleaux et des autres en urne bleue. Une autre grande urne de porcelaine aussy

du Japon de deux pieds et deux pouces de haut ronde sur son pied de bois dore'; (67) 'quatre feuillets de petits paravents de la Chine representant personnages d'un cote, double de toille d'Indienne de l'autre cote, un ecran d'une feuille d'arbre aussi de la Chine monte sur son pied de bois de merisier'.

26. Ibid., fols 44V~49V (cabinet of Jeanne Gilbert): items (158) 'quatre grande jattes de porcelaine, un pot a sucre garny de cercle d'argent avec un rond aussy d'argent sur le couvercle, une soucouppe servant audit pot de porcelaine'; (159) 'un cabinet de bois de chine a deux volets sur son pied de bois dore..., douze porcelaines, dont une testiere garnye d'argent, et sept garnye de cuivre dore, le tout de porcelaine'.

27. Ibid., fols 4iv~43r (chambre of Jeanne Gilbert): items (137) 'un coffre de la Chine avec son pied de bois dore'; (138) 'un cabaret de bois dore a pieds de bieche dont le dessus est de la chine garny de six tasses avec leurs soucouppes, une boeste de sucre le tout de porcelaine bleue d'un coste a petittes fleurs d'or'; (139) 'un autre cabaret aussi de la Chine aussy a pied de bieche de bois noircy garny de douze tasses avec leurs soucouppes, une desquelles tasses est doublee d'argent'; (gallery) items (163) four canapes, 6 armchairs, 2 banquettes 'couverts de tapis de Perse'; (164) 'deux grands coffres de la chine dont un garny de nacre de Perle'; (170) 'vingt pieces de porcelaine'; (172) 'deux pagottes tenant chacune un enfant aussy de la chine de 2 pieds de haut'; (175) 'deux cabarets facon de la Chine; (salon) items: (183) 'un clavesin dans sa boete de bois peint fagon de la Chine a deux claviers.' Watteau is thought to have decorated just such a harpsichord: see Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), iv, p. 95, no. 206; G. Macchia and E. C. Montagni, L'opera completa di Watteau, Milan 1968, p. 94, no. 29.



196 KATIE SCOTT

If these documents reveal for the first time the full extent of the d'Armenonville

passion for things oriental,28 prints and drawings make possible a provisional reconstruction of the cabinet's fixed decoration. The Figures chinoises reproduce twenty-six upright compositions containing single, or occasionally coupled figures set against more-or-less abbreviated backgrounds; and four more complex, horizontal designs, most likely for the overdoors of the scheme. In the Receuil Julienne, Watteau's posthumously-engraved ceuvre, the same prints are grouped as follows: 14 uprights- 2 overdoors - 1 2 uprights - 2 overdoors, the order perhaps dictated by the wish to create a compulsive rhythm for the turning of pages.29 But the arrangement also hints at a space; a small but elegant rectangular room, generously punctuated by symmetrically placed paired doors, Watteau's small figures arranged in two tiers

(Fig. 2) - perhaps lines of four turning the corners into lines of two.30 The remaining uprights, Temme chinoise de Kouei Tcheon' and 'Viosseu ou Musicien Chinois', referred possibly to paintings inset above pier-glasses or overmantles.31 A painting of the Chinese musician came to light recently (Fig. 3) and, if original, the remains of the gold, trompe Voeil oval which frames the performer would seem to support the

arrangement proposed.32 The work's small-scale figures, loose and lively brushwork and light palette- pale green foreground, background of azure rocks and sky, pewter

28. Shortly after his appointment to the office of

garde des sceaux in 1722, d'Armenonville was given by his fellow secretaires du roi a set of the Beauvais tenture chinoise which at his death was stored in a

cupboard at the hotel d Armenonville. See A.N. 6AP 12 IAD, J.-J.-B. Fleuriau d Armenonville, 22 Decem- ber 1728, item 316, fol. 981". On the series see E. A. Standen, 'The Story of the Emperor of China: A Beauvais Tapestry Series', The Metropolitan Museum

of Art Journal, xi, 1976, pp. 103-17, esp. 114; C. Bremer-David, French Tapestries and Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 1997, pp. 80-97.

29. On the prints see Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), in, pp. 106-09, nos 232~59- The authors maintain that this is the most common arrangement in surviving bound sets. M. Roland Michel, 'Watteau et les Figures de differentes caracteres\ in Antoine Watteau ( 1 684-1 j '2i): Le peintre, son temps et sa legende, ed. F. Moureau and M. Morgan Grasselli, Paris 1987, pp. 117-27, notes the importance of the arrangement of the plates of the caracteres, to sustain the viewer's attention. For the Receuil Julienne see above, n. 1.

30. This follows the arrangement proposed by Jean Cailleaux for the panels at the hotel de Nointel. See his 'Decorations by Antoine Watteau for the hotel de Nointel', Burlington Magazine, cm, March 1961, supplement, pp. i-v. Cailleaux's reconstruction

assigned significance to the different angles of the

platforms supporting the central cartouches which, he argued, divided the panels equally into upper and lower tiers. No such structural features dominate Watteau's chinoiseries but the smaller scale and less defined backgrounds of Boucher's etchings suggest that they might have occupied the upper register, while the larger and fuller format of Jeurat's warrant

perhaps the lower. This at least has been the logic of

the distribution proposed in Fig. 2. (No attempt has been made to conjure up the style of the panelling; the intention is merely to explore possible patterns in the arrangement of the figural elements.) My warm thanks to David Lloyd-Jones for generating the

drawing. 31. These two prints, both by Aubert, are filled

out to the edges in a way that suggests a tighter framing analogous to that of at least two of the overdoors. Claude III Audran's later scheme with Nicolas Lancret for the cabinet dore at the hotel

Peyrenc de Moras (1724) included paintings inset above mirrors in the manner I am suggesting here. See Scott (as in n. 6), fig. 154.

32. The painting was auctioned at Sotheby s, New York on 1 1 January 1996, lot 151; it was first noticed and mentioned by Perrin Stein in 'Boucher's Chinoiseries: Some New Sources, Burlington Magazine, cxxxviii, September 1996, pp. 598-604 (599 n. 8). Marianne Roland Michel is convinced it is by Watteau but some uncertainty remains as to whether the canvas formed part of the La Muette cabinet or was a later repetition by the artist; see her 'Exoticism and Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century France', in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Master-

pieces of French Genre Painting, ed. C. B. Bailey, P. Conisbee and T. W. Gaehtgens, exhib. cat. (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Gallery, Wash-

ington DC; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemalde-

galerie, 2003-04), New Haven, CT and London

2003, pp. 106-19, esp. 115. The trompe Voeil frame

may have formed part of the decoration (less ex-

pensive than carving) or could have been added after the dismantling of the scheme to transform a decorative work into a cabinet picture. I have not been able to examine the work directly.




Figure 3. Attributed to Antoine Watteau, 'Chinese Musician', c. 1708-15, oil on canvas, 24-7 x 19-2 cm (Private collection, New York, © Sotheby's London)

and rose draperies, faded straw hat, blush pink feathers and foliage- are absolutely consistent with Watteau's decorative schemes, notably for the cabinet at the hotel de Nointel, executed from around 1708.33

As my reconstruction of the cabinet further suggests, I side with the view that the prints reproduce no more than the central motifs of an arabesque scheme,34 the ornamental components of which are partially indicated in the overdoor 'Idole de la

33. On the hotel de Nointel see Cailleaux (as in n. 30); and Rue de VUniversite, exhib. cat. (Institut Neerlandais), Paris 1987, pp. 186-88.

34. Here I follow A. Brookner, 'Chinoiserie in French Painting', Apollo, lxv, June 1957, p. 254; Macchia and Montagni (as in n. 27), pp. 92-93, no. 26; Posner (as in n. 3), p. 59; and the earlier interpretation of Marianne Roland Michel in Watteau (as in n. 3), p. 279. I am in disagreement with Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), 1, p. 26, Eidelberg

and Gopin (as in n. 3), pp. 29-32, and Roland Michel in 'Exoticism and Genre Painting' (as in n. 32), p. 1 15, who believe the figures not to have been situated at the centre of arabesques but rather floating on pools of black lacquer. This second thesis was advanced by Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold on the evidence of La Villageoise (current whereabouts unknown) , a lacquered work by Watteau, reproduced in the Receuil Julienne with a legend indicating that it was then in the collection of d'Armenonville's son,



198 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 4. Michel Aubert after Watteau, 'Idole de la Deesse Ki Mao Sao', 1731, etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

Deesse Ki Mao Sao' (Fig. 4). Adoration is being performed on platforms of strapwork stiffly overhung with aprons of a scalloped design and loosely joined by a finely stylised garland. Such ornament belongs to a genre of decoration known as grotesque or arabesque, in which the three-dimensional world of figurative representation is caught, delimited, even undone by the flat tactics of an incursive ornamental surround. Watteau's 'Empereur chinois' and 'Divinite chinoise' (Fig. 5),35 etched after drawings, possibly rejected ideas for the scheme, reveal more fully the com-

plexity and comic potential of a disjunctive interplay which remains largely implicit in the curtailed testimony of the La Muette overdoor. To the evidence of the

the comte de Morville, and which they proposed had served as an 'echantillon' or sample, to experiment with the lacquer process before work started on the cabinet. However, this painting appears in neither Jeanne Gilbert's nor d'Armenonville's inventories and therefore cannot have passed to de Morville by decent. This seems severely to compromise the hypothesis recently endorsed and elaborated by Eidelberg and Gopin (ibid., pp. 30-31), that Watteau's Chinese figures were also painted on lacquer. By the time of de Morville 's death in 1732, La Villageoise was no longer in his collection, a

circumstance which seems to belie the contention that the comte was sincerely attached to it. De Morville 's picture cabinet was dominated rather by 16th- and 17th-century masters of the Italian and Northern schools. Only a few French artists found a place (see A.N. 6AP 10 IAD, Charles-Jean-Bap tiste Fleuriau, comte de Morville, 3 March 1732, items 326 ['Mignard'] and 328 ['Robert']), though de Morville 's bed-chamber was densely hung with pastels, some by Rosalba Camera (items 329, 330).

35. Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), in, nos 134, 135.




Figure 5. Gabriel Huquier after Watteau, 'Divinite chinoise', c. 1731, etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

interrupted strapline at the right edge of 'Ki Mao Sao'- which first prompted the

argument in the literature that China was played out in the cabinet along its original extension, that is according to arabesque rules- we can add the low horizon lines, the partial silhouetting of figures against flat, empty sky and the cursory treatment of foregrounds in some of the upright prints: features which suggest fidelity to an

original vignette, and resistance on the part of the reproductive etchers, Francois Boucher notably, to fill out or complete the compositions in the topographical spirit of their assumed titles.36

The most plausible explanation for the excision of the arabesque ornament from the reproductions published by Chereau and Surugue is their likely attribution not to Watteau but to Claude III Audran, chief exponent of the genre at the turn of the

century. Watteau had joined Audran's workshop sometime around 1708 and had contributed figurative elements to Audran's designs, continuing to collaborate with him long after having set up independently.37 Among the hundreds of drawings from

36. Following Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), iv, p. 106, Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3), p. 38, suggest that the titles accompanying the prints were probably an original part of the decoration at La Muette, 'either within the painted scheme or perhaps in the framing elements'. However, no other scheme by Audran and/or Watteau incorporates text in this way. It seems much more likely that the titles

were added on the initiative of the publisher, specifically for the print market.

37. On Watteau 's career as a decorative painter during and beyond his apprenticeship with Claude III Audran see L. de Foucaud, 'Antoine Watteau, peintre d' arabesques', Revue de Vart ancien et moderne, xxiv, 1908, pp. 431-40; and xxv, 1909, pp. 49-59, 129-40.



2oo KATIE SCOTT

Figure 6. Claude III Audran, design for a ceiling, c. 1708-16, red chalk (Photo: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

Audran 's workshop38 are a group of sketches of a decidedly oriental flavour, one of the more finished of which is inscribed on the back, in an eighteenth-century hand, precisely but faintly, 'Chinois'.39 The reverse of another bears on the absolute right- hand edge the interrupted annotation 'cabinet de La Muette'.40 Thus, if Audran is known to have worked with Louis Cheron on the orangerie at La Muette during a later campaign for de Berry,41 these fragile and fragmentary inscriptions further

38. Audran's designs were bought after his death in 1734 by Daniel Cronstrom, the Swedish, ambassador. In 1949 the collection was given by his descendants to the Nationalmuseum at Stockholm and a year later an exhibition of a selection of the drawings was held at the BnF in Paris. The catalogue remains the principal study of the collection; see R.- A. Weigert et al., Claude III Audran (1658-1734), dessins du Nationalmuseum de Stockholm, Paris 1950.

39. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. CCII/195. The writing appeared to be by the same hand in all

the drawings that I looked at. From the position of the annotations on the sheets, these did not seem to be of a kind made by a collector. That is to say, the inscriptions do not present themselves as labels; they are too close to the design area. Moreover, they correspond to the script of invoices in the collection, drawn up on the backs of some drawings or on separate sheets (see e.g. CCIV/397 and CC/1084 verso). In all this, they strongly invoke their author, Claude III Audran.

40. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. CC V/177.



PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHERNESS 201

Figure 7 (left). Claude III Audran, design for a narrow wall panel, c. 1708-16, red chalk (Photo: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

Figure 8 (above). Edmejeurat after Watteau, 'Fille du Royaume dAva', 1731, etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British

Museum)

support the idea of a preceding collaboration with Watteau. Taking the Audran

drawings and the Watteau prints together we can, moreover, note their shared

vocabulary and compatible structure. For example, in the detail of one of Audran's projected ceilings (Fig. 6) we recognise the conically hatted acolyte of Watteau's overdoor (Fig. 4), prostrate still along a line - which leads once again to a female

41. See BnF MS fonds francais 7801, Papiers de Cotte, fols 159-60; ains the principal study of the

collection; see R.-A. Weigert et al., Claude III Audran ... dessins (as in n. 38), p. 64.



2O2 KATIE SCOTT

Figures 9 (left), 10 (right). Claude III Audran, design for a wall panel; and Edme Jeurat after Watteau, 'Chef des Samar de Tlevang Raptan', 1731, etchings and engravings (Photographs: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; and Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

deity, cross-legged, though with a parasol, not fan; she perches this time upon the back of an elephant. Two more drawings suggest the manner of the coming together of figure and ornament upon the walls: in one (Fig. 7), a China-girl, possibly 'du

Royaume d'Ava' (Fig. 8), stands between C-scrolls, one item in a cascade of sometimes exotic things, hinting that the horizontality, the strolling movement of her later, printed, self was perhaps of the printmaker Edme Jeurat's invention. In the other (Fig. 9), we recognise if not the 'Chef des Samar de Tlevang Raptan' (Fig. 10), his physical type, with a decidedly more luxurious and intentionally Imperial setting unfolding about him.

Exact correspondence between project and record, or preparatory drawings and printed reproductions, is too much to expect because Audran left the design of

figures to those whose expertise he called upon. His compositional drawings served rather to fix the theme and determine the spaces in which those figures were to perform. However, the recurring motifs in the prints and drawings, and the complementary interchange of vignettes and frames, strengthen the argument for the d'Armenonvilles having commissioned an arabesque decorative scheme. Moreover, together they enable a fuller imagining of the ensemble, on the basis of which the

following analysis of the cabinet's making and meaning may now more confidently proceed.



PLAYING GAMES WITH OTHERNESS 20s

2.1. Origami To explore the manner of its creation and the mood which accrued to the cabinet by virtue of that process, I want to propose a pictor ludens. Johan Huizinga, to be sure, denied the very possibility of such a person. The materiality of paint, the concrete limits of the support, the inertia of forms, the opacity of visual language combined, he felt, absolutely 'to forbid' the 'plastic artist' free play- that is, flights of imagination, improvisation and virtuoso performance.42 Reinforcement for such scepticism in the specific case of French culture at the turn of the eighteenth century is indeed readily to hand. We need look no further than the Academie, still under the mandate of Charles Le Brun, the rigidity of its institutionalised practices tending to sink academic form, weighing it down with convention, the concreteness of observed matter and the woe of epic truths.43 In Watteau, however, we broach an outsider, an artist for whom the painting of arabesques was construed as amounting to little more than a game, whose relationship with his master was described as competitive but not Oedipal and whose work seemingly defied gravity, his designs proceeding by lightness towards provisional and playful resolution.

The 'lives' or contemporary biographies of Watteau tell of a misspent youth, of talent abused as a commercial hack and of apprenticeship betrayed, his first master Claude Gillot's initiation amounting to little more than an introduction to the salty pleasures of the fair.44 From this perspective, the next step, across the threshold into Audran's workshop at the Luxembourg, that is, into the world of a privileged court artisan, represented a step up.45 Yet, with the wisdom of hindsight, Watteau's contemporary biographers noted that his education nevertheless continued to be at odds with his destiny; a detour. Drawing on the topos of the autodidact, they plotted Watteau's apprenticeship as a series of wrong turns and diversions which required negotiation and resistance before mastery was finally won.46 Thus, for Pierre-Jean Marie tte, Jean de Julienne and the comte de Caylus, the Luxembourg assumed the shape of a crossroads, the arabesque and Rubens's Medici cycle constituting competing attractions and sign-posting alternative roads.47 Officially, publicly, Watteau chose the arabesque, promptly and lightly matching his figures to Audran's ornament.48 Yet his commitment was never ultimate, his loyalty always short of total.49

42. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture, London 1970, pp. 182-96.

43. For a general survey of this fin-de-siecle gravitas in painting see e.g. A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500-ijoo, revised by R. Beresford, London !999'PP- 256-72.

44. See the collection compiled and edited by Pierre Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de Watteau, Paris 1984. On Watteau's apprenticeship with Gillot see M. Eidelberg, 'Watteau in the Atelier of Gillot', in Antoine Watteau (1684-1721): catalogue raisonne des dessins, ed. P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Paris and Milan 1996, pp. 45-47.

45. Edme Gersaint, in particular, contrasted Watteau's experience chez Gillot and chez Audran. See his 'Abrege de la vie d'Antoine Watteau' (1744), repr. in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 32. For Audran's studio at the time of Watteau's apprenticeship see Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), pp. 19-24.

46. On the autodidact and other topoi in the heroisation of the artist via tales of his youth and vocation, see E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, New Haven, CT and London 1979, pp. 13-60.

47. See J.-P. Mariette, 'Watteau', from his Abece- dario, vi, in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 3; J. de Julienne, 'Abrege de la vie d'Antoine Watteau', from his Figures de differents caracteres (1726), in Vies, p. 13; Caylus, 'La vie d'Antoine Watteau' (conference 3 February 1748), in Vies, pp. 60-62.

48. See Gersaint, 'Abrege', in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 32-

49. For a discussion of the relationship between rules and commitment in games that I have found suggestive here, see B. Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Edinburgh 1978, pp. 27-29.



2O4 KATIE SCOTT

Surreptitiously, he also studied the Old Masters (Rubens) and Nature (the Luxem-

bourg gardens).50 In the 'lives' it is this extra-curricular pastime which is represented as the central, sustained and creative experience- that is, the work- of the Audran

years; arabesques figure, by contrast, as little more than an occasional and marginal diversion.

The inferences of play function in these narratives to discredit a genre of painting which, though prized by court and nobility for its refinement and virtuosity, was

regarded by the Academie as too slight and ornamental to warrant the definition art. Edme Gersaint, writing, by contrast, from the vantage point of a merchant operating in the same 'economy of delight' as Audran,51 observed this fashionable creativity, and the dynamics in the workshop, in an altogether more positive light. He noted that 'Mr. Audran, who made his business from the facility and quickness of our

young friend's brush, (in turn) made his [Watteau's] life easy in proportion to the

profits occasioned by his works'.52 Hierarchy, and the exploitation it makes possible, is clearly articulated here, but so too is recognition- real, financial recognition- of

nearly-matched and complementary talents. Their relationship was shaped not by emulation, the reproduction of the master in the desiring pupil, but by collaboration, or the synergy of different specialisations. Watteau was, as it were, drawn into Audran's design as into a game; and fashioned his performance not according to Audran's example but according to his rules.53

Moving from words to works, we can note that a multiplicity of hands is often

discernibly at play in the workshop drawings, without exact identification of the

'players' always proving possible.54 Moreover, beneath the surface patterns of co-oper- ation we can further observe the complex ways in which the paper support was often folded, then opened out, occasionally refolded in another direction, and unfolded once again. Sometimes the fold segments the design into options (Fig. 6), sometimes it completes it (Fig. 1 1 ) by the reproduction of a ghostly mirror image, technically known as a counter-proof.55 Understanding this practice seems simple enough: folding achieves economies of paper, drawing and imagination. However, the fold is

50. See Caylus, 'La vie', in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 62. For a recent discussion of Watteau's drawings after Rubens during his apprenticeship chez Audran see A. Wintermute,

' Le Pelerinage a Watteau: an Introduction to the Drawings of Watteau and his Circle', in Watteau and his World: French Drawing from iyoo to 1750, New York 1999, p. 22.

51. The phrase 'economy of delight' is taken from Michael Sturmer, 'An Economy of Delight: Court Artisans of the Eighteenth Century', Business History Review, Lin.4, 1979, pp. 496-528. It seems to me that many of the characteristics Sturmer identifies with priviledged court furniture makers - the highest standards of craftsmanship, specialisation, flexibility, design innovation - are ones which readily apply to Audran.

52. '. . . M. Audran qui trouvait son compte dans la facilite et l'execution prompte du pinceau de notre

jeune Peintre, lui rendit la vie plus aisee a proportion du benefice que les ouvrages lui occasionnaient.' Gersaint, 'Abrege', in Vies (as in n. 44), pp. 32-33.

53. R. Rawdon Wilson makes this distinction in

games in order to draw attention to the intertextuality of play. See his In Palamedes ' Shadow: Explorations in

Play, Game, and Narrative Theory, Boston 1990, p. 5. 54. P. Bjurstrom, French Drawings: Eighteenth

Century, Stockholm 1982, nos 1252-66, reattributed some of the Audran corpus to Watteau, but without

raising the more challenging question of whether individual drawings combine the work of the two artists. Some of the drawings, it seems to me, merit such inquiry. In particular, two versions of the design for the Singerie at Marly have aroused conflicting views over authorship; see Bjurstrom no. 1252. Most

recently Wintermute (as in n. 50), p. 20, has cast doubt over whether any of the drawings at Stock- holm exhibit 'the fluency and freedom we expect from Watteau, even at this early point of his career'.

55. On the technique of counter-proofing (though not in relation to ornamental design) see M. Roland Michel, Les dessins francais au XVJIP siecle, Paris 1987, pp. 14-22.




Figure 11. Claude III Audran, design for a ceiling with a Chinese term, c. 1708-16, red chalk (Photo: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

productive in other, less obvious ways too. It forms a line or crease beneath the lines of the composition, an invisible, structuring and magical furrow which enfolds the

disparate, often contradictory elements of the design, resolving or dramatising rapid transitions between ornament and figure. As such, it is a discipline of composition attributable to the author, the master of the whole; an instrument for efficiently managing creativity - his own and especially that of his collaborators. In other words, it constitutes, at the pictorial level, a net or trap that prescribes interplay, comparable, at the social level, to the 'god-games' by which Audran sought to retain Watteau in his studio by belying his burgeoning talent as a painter of autonomous tableaux.^

56. The phrase 'god-games' is Robert Rawdon Wilson's (as in n. 53). For a contemporary account of

Audran 's detaining strategies cf. Gersaint, Abrege', in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 33.



2o6 KATIE SCOTT

It is, moreover, these unseen paper folds, echoed in the painted unfolds of the finished panels, that engender the arabesque's distinctive lightness, its visual wit.57 Their structuring hold is weightless, floating just below or just above the surface, and the potentially infinite extension of their reach beyond the paper or painted edge denies the material limit of the support. The whiteness of the ground appropriately qualifies these folds as 'Oriental' in Gilles Deleuze's terms, because they effect, in his words, a scission between fullness and emptiness rather than figure and background;58 which is another way of saying that the arabesque was constructed with holes. Weight was erased from the composition, leaving an airy but robust lattice- work to be partially in-filled with shimmering detail. The result is a dimensional lightness in which a line (strapwork) is always more than a line yet less than a plane, and a plane (vignette) always exceeds itself but falls short of full, coherent three- dimensionality. The liveliness created by the oscillation between spatial geometries finds parallels also in a procedural lightness, in the concision and agile inventiveness of Audran's conception and the quick-spiritedness of Watteau's brush (Fig. 3).59

Audran's method of composition might usefully be described as 'iterative', which would be to note that his designs were generated by a finite number of shapes and forms, repeated on larger and finer scales, variously orientated and variously combined- the 'C shape being a notable case in point. Such invention by repeated feedback of standard elements involved a minimum investment of effort and content; and the economy, the thriftiness in which the complex arabesque form was thus paradoxically rooted contributes still further to the overall effect of lightness. More- over, so stable yet so flexible an ornamental system facilitated the assimilation of novelties. To the classical repertoire of gods, goddesses and grotesque creatures might be added, as fashion demanded, popular characters from the theatre de lafoire and fabulous figures from the East.

That the arabesque could assimilate source material of infinite 'otherness' points to another sense in which it is iterative. 'Iteration' has been used to define a property of language as well as of geometry. Specifically, it refers to the process by which a word (or in this case, a motif, or mark) by virtue of repetition, that is in the fullness of use, becomes detached from its original referent, drifts away indeed, from any determinate meaning.60 Becoming ornamental may represent an extreme and explicit instance of linguistic slide, of the concreteness of origin giving way to

57. Minguet (as in n. 6), pp. 221-22, has drawn attention to the quality of lightness in Watteau; as has M. Vidal in Watteau's Painted Conversations, New Haven, CT and London 1992, esp. p. 156. For an inspiring discussion of 'lightness' as a literary value see I. Calvino, Six Memosfor the Next Millennium, transl. P. Creagh, London 1996, pp. 3-29.

58. See G. Deleuze, 'The Fold', Yale French Studies, lxxx, 1991, pp. 227-47; idem, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, transl. T. Conley, London 2001, pp. 27- 38, and for a related and very suggestive discussion of types of game in relation to these same qualities, ibid., pp. 66-68.

59. Mariette praised 'La touche de son pinceau', which 'de meme que son crayon est des plus spirtuelles, les tours de ses figures des plus agreables, ses

expressions assez communes mais gracieuses, sa couleur brillante, son travail leger.' See 'Watteau', in Vies (as in n. 44), p. 4 [my emphasis]; Caylus asserted that it was in fact specifically chez Audran that 'Watteau ... acquit une legerete de pinceau qu'exigent les fonds blancs ou les fonds dores sur lesquels Audran faisait execute r ses ouvrages.' 'La vie de Watteau', in Vies, p. 61 [my emphasis]. In 'Viosseu ou Musicien chinois' (Fig. 3), lightness is conspicuously a matter of brushwork - its freedom - but is also characteristic of the thinness of the layers of paint: the motifs seem almost to float on the background, sky visible, for instance, through branches and leaves.

60. See J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris

!972,pp. 376"78-




instability, to play. For the ceiling at La Muette Audran imagined Chinese figures into herms or terms (Fig. 11), the process of transformation, of de-materialisation, accentuated by the abstract form of the term's composition. He is made not of flesh and blood but of triangles, from the tip of his pointed hat, via the inverted triangle of his upper torso, through the triangular flare of his wide robe below a pinched waist, to the sharp convergence of the shaft's lines in a point at his base. We recognise in these interlocked and geometric-like forms the fine meshed strength of the inter-

lacing strapwork patterns, but to the weightlessness of the visual language has been added a lightness, a brevity of meaning, the chain of association linking the Chinese man in his native context to the China-term afloat on a French ceiling having been

spun out virtually beyond sense, to non-sense. The arabesque served to reduce difference to a matter of bodiless, ethereal form. Moreover, Audran's and Watteau's scheme - with its 'parasol canopies suspended in mid-air', its 'temples open to the skies' (as Hugh Honour describes them),61 its floating deities- made an emblem of

lightness, a Chinese emblem to rival the flying carpets and the puffed, lamp-genii of the hugely popular Arabian Nights, published in 1 704 by Antoine Galland.62

To recapitulate briefly, we can suggest that in the creation of the La Muette cabinet Watteau and Audran each played a hand: both that they collaborated; and that they pursued keenly competitive interests- in Watteau's case the honing of skills and the making of court connections, and in Audran's the capturing of talent

necessary to his artistic projects. The agonistic nature of the social relations in the

Luxembourg workshop found a parallel in the ludic character of the arabesque invented there. I would suggest, moreover, that its lightness, liveliness and potential limitlessness, together with the virtuoso realisation of its forms by Watteau's 'spiritual' touch, articulated those very flights of fantasy which Huizinga (as noted at the beginning of this section) regarded as axiomatic of play.63

2.2. Charades

The words chinoiserie and arabesque imply performance: the donning of a Chinese manner, or Persian mask. The lightness of means and ends noted above has reinforced the impression of pretence, or charade. The historiography of the genres to which chinoiserie and the arabesque belong has thus, understandably, not been a

glorious one. Merely to play at difference, and in doing so to fall short of convincing illusion, smacks of frivolity. Chinoiserie is a joke; even its sins have appeared petty and trivial, unworthy of the effort to expose them. To put it another way, chinoiserie does not obviously anticipate the mendacious and predominantly realist colonial discourse which Edward Said and others have taught us to recognise and read.64 The exotic, on the rare occasions it has been found worthy of sustained theoretical reflection

by historians of eighteenth-century France, has assumed the form of the primitive

61. Honour (as in n. 3), p. go. 62. For a history of this publishing phenomenon

see R. Schwab, L'auteur des Milks et une nuits: vie d 'Antoine Galland, Paris 1964. The success of the book gave birth to imitations, notably in this case to Chinese ones. See Thomas-Simon Gueullette's Les 1 00 1 nuits et un quart d'heure. Contes tartares, Paris

1712 and Les Avantures merveilleuses du Mandarin Fum-Hoam, contes chinois, Paris 1716. My thanks to Rene Demoris for bringing these to my attention.

63. Cf. Huizinga (as in n. 42). 64. Classically, E. W. Said, Orientalism, London

1978; idem, Culture and Imperialism, London 1993.



2o8 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 12. Michel Aubert after Watteau, 'Habillements des habitants de la province de Hou Kouan', 1 73 1 , etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

in relation to which France appears as the incarnation of a culture at once more ancient and more advanced in sophistication.65 Watteau's and Audran's polished Chinese figures, however, have little visibly in common with, for example, baron Lahontan's noble Huron Indians, brought to the attention of the French public at around the same time.66 In the 'thickly' described particularity of their customs and dress, Watteau's and Audran's 'chinois' exhibit, if anything, an extreme refinement, an excess of culture, which implicitly positions French culture as a juste milieu between the primitive and the civilised. As such, I shall argue that the rhetoric of chinoiserie veered towards the comic. In so doing I take issue with those who, like Pierre Martino, maintained that the prestige of long distance travel and the absence of detailed

knowledge of the Far East in the late seventeenth century delayed the entry of the Oriental into French comedy.67 Martino was only concerned with instances in which

65. See notably T. Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought, transl. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA and London 1993, pp. 264-352.

66. Louis- Armand de Lorn d Arce de Lahontan, Nouveaux voyages de Mr. le baron Lahontan dans

VAmerique septentrionale, The Hague 1703 (modern edn ed. J. Collin, Montreal 1983).

67. P. Martino, UOrient dans la litterature francaise au XVIP et XVJIP siecles, Paris 1906, pp. 225-52. See also Ting Tchao-Ts'ing, Les descriptions de la Chine par lesfrancais 1650-1750, Paris 1928; J. Dehergne, S.J., 'Voyageurs venus a Paris au temps de la marine a voiles et l'influence de la Chine sur la litterature francaise du XVIIIe siecle', Monumenta Serica, xxm, 1964, pp. 372-96.




Figure 13. Michel Aubert after Watteau, 'Habillements de ceux du Soutchovene', 1731, etching and

engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

audiences were explicitly engaged to laugh at the Chinese; he overlooked, I think, those subtler instances in which laughing with and through the figure of the China- man gave rise to less pointed satire. By the 1690s Chinese characters had, in fact, emerged as a reasonably familiar type at the Commedia delVarte and the Paris fairs. The comparisons between theatre and painting which I offer below are intended

primarily to establish a context for the reception of d'Armenonville's cabinet.^ I am

certainly not suggesting direct influence between plays and arabesques; though Watteau 's interest in the Commedia delVarte is of course well documented from the time of his apprenticeship in Gillot's studio.69 What follows is, rather, an attempt to understand the comedy played out in the cabinet at La Muette.70

68. The plays by Jean-Francois Regnard and Charles Dufresny which have been my focus were written and performed before the notorious expul- sion of the Comedie italienne in 1697. It is therefore

unlikely that as performed plays they had any impact on either the production or the reception of the cabinet. However, the plays were published by Evariste Gherardi in 1694 and then again in 1700, 1717 and 1734, and pirate editions appeared in 1695, 1701, 1707 and 1721. The number of these official and unofficial publications indicates the widespread

and sustained appeal of the commedia delVarte and it therefore seems reasonable to propose that the characterisation of China and the Chinese established there informed the interpretation of Audran's and Watteau's decorative scheme. On the editions of the plays see A. Calame, Regnard: sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris i960, pp. 141-42, 379-82.

69. Crow (as in n. 6), pp. 57-60, is the most

suggestive and developed discussion of the relation-

ship between Watteau, Gillot and the theatre. It is

perhaps worth adding that one of the playwrights



2io KATIE SCOTT

The early, comic form of Orientalism that I have in mind does not take the form of caricature. Indeed, from the outset, the nature of the arabesque experience would seem to preclude it: surrounded on all sides by Chinese figures, ensnared from above by arabesque patterns, the viewer of the cabinet finds it impossible to distance him or herself, to get the measure of this other, to secure a vantage point from which to descry, desire, or pity the unfolding scene. The 'real' world may have suffered a comic degradation to the status of a game, but it was one whose form impelled participation.71 Such decoration incorporates the viewer physically and psychically, blurring the line between the subject and the object of fun in a manner wholly consistent with early-modern honnete ideals of mockery which invoked its integrative function- a rire d'acceuil- requiring of the elite that it was able to take as well as to make a joke.72 Questions of distance, movement and orientation, of position, are, I shall contend, subtly raised by Watteau's scheme, the more so since the status and function of a cabinet, or closet, add a social dimension to the ambiguity of the spatial and psychic relations of self and other: it constituted a place that is at once peripheral - a room set apart - and focal: the innermost of interior spaces.73 The crudely binary relations of self and other, centre and margin, indigenous and exotic in colonialism thus fail to account adequately for their correlation in chinoiserie. Using 'charade' in its literal rather than pejorative sense, I want to suggest rather that what most characterises the latter's articulation of difference is the absolute uncertainty with which it deals with these issues. D'Armenonville's cabinet put equivocation or guesswork into play: the 'Chi - na' of chinoiserie articulated syllabically, so to speak, in an essentially non-narrative or ornamental performance in parts.

Taking the overdoors as representative of the larger ensemble, for a moment, we note immediately that the compositions break up into pairs: those ostensibly concerned with the quotidian dress and customs of the Hou Kouan and Soutcho- vene provinces (Figs 12, 13); and those dedicated to the worship of the idols Ki Mao Sao and Thvo Chvu (Fig. 4 and below, Fig. 2 1 ). Juxtapositions of sacred and profane were also present, though less dramatically staged, in the paintings upon the walls:

discussed below, Charles Dufresny, was very possibly known to Watteau since the two shared a fascination with Persia and China and, at a later date, a common acquaintance in Antoine de La Roque. Charles Dufresny invited La Roque to join him as editor of the Mercure de France in 1721. On Dufresny 's taste for the exotic as expressed in the oriental tales published in the Mercure (under his editorship if not his pen) see F. Moureau, Le Mercure galant du Dufresny (1710-1714) ou le journalisme a la mode, Oxford 1982, pp. 63-68.

70. On play as a conceptual model for the comic see M. Gutwirth, Laughing Matter: an Essay on the Comic, Ithaca and London 1993, pp. 79-82.

7 1 . On the significance of distance to the humorous attitude see Sigmund Freud, Humour (1927), in the Penguin Freud Library, xiv, London 1985, pp. 427-33. The distinction Freud makes between the joke and the comic on the one hand, and humour on the other, involves distance: while jokes remain in the thick of pleasure, humour asserts distance - from which it derives a 'grandeur', 'dignity', 'elevation',

that is denied to jokes (pp. 428-29). In this sense, the cabinet belongs, as we shall see, to the category of the joke. On disinterestedness or detachment and the humorous attitude, see J. Guillaumin, 'Freud entre deux topiques: le comique apres L'Humour (1927), une analyse inachevee', in Revue francaise de psych- analyse, xxxvii, 1973, pp. 633-35, 640-41.

72. The phrase 'rire d'acceuil' is Ernest Dupreel's ('Le probleme sociologique du rire', Revue philosophique de la France et de Vetranger, cvi, 1928, pp. 213-60) and has been by used to describe the conventions of late 17th-century laughter by A. Richardot, 'Rire et hospitalite dans les salons de l'age classique', Espaces domestiques et prives de

Vhospitalite, ed. A. Montandon, Clermont-Ferrand 2000, pp. 53-63. For a further elaboration of this positive construction of raillerie see also eadem, Le rire des lumieres, Paris 2002, pp. 83-96.

73. See A. Merot, 'Le cabinet, decor et espace d'illusion', XVIP siecle, clxii, 1989, pp. 37-52; idem, Retraites mondaines: aspects de la decoration interieure a Paris, au XVFP siecle, Paris 1990.




Figures 14 (left), 15 (right). Boucher after Watteau, 'Tao Kou ou Religieuse de Tau' and 'Femme du Royaume de Necpal', 1731, etchings and engravings (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

the mounting of the prints in Julienne's Receuil, two to a page, suggests that Koui Nou, a young Chinese beauty, found her place opposite the 'religieuse' Nikou,74 and that the cloistered Chinese Tao Kou (Fig. 14) confronted an elegant and worldly Nepalese (Fig. 15). In the case of the overdoors, difference is teased into comic contrast by the clash in formal languages deployed - a circumstance arising in part from the cabinet 's place in an enfilade of rooms whose decoration included conven-

tionally painted tableaux above adjoining doors.75 The tangible world of place, dress and customary pursuits and pleasures is rendered with a three-dimensional projection and mimetic precision designed to persuade us of the strange veracity of all we see. The etherial world of idols, on the other hand, is incommensurate with our own. Its ornamental discourse, far from imitating or representing reality, produces it. In the alternative world so created, life thrives in two dimensions, the scale of figure and ornament is reversed (the latter providing support for the former), idols become

lively and defy gravity, and elements commingle, earth behaving like water or air. Moreover, in the absence of depth (actual and psychic), identities are conflated, crushed: figures and ground simultaneously follow the lie of a pastoral land and invoke the empire of Kan Xsi.

74. For this pair see the prints reproduced by Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), iv, pp. 242, 243-

75. On this hypothesis the Hou Kouan and Soutchovene tableaux (Figs 12, 13) would have been situated above the doors communicating with these adjacent rooms, thereby maintaining continuity,

while the arabesque Ki Mao Sao and Thvo Chvu (Figs 4, 2 1 ) would have crowned other, or even false doors in the depth and the difference of the arabesque room. On the planning of 18th-century domestic architecture see Scott (as in n. 6), pp. 103-09.



212 KATIE SCOTT

We may note here, in a general way, that the physiognomy, poses and occu- pations of Watteau's figures in their natural settings correspond suggestively with those of the fete champetre, while remaining different in dress and accompanying paraphernalia. Specifically, 'Tao Kou' (Fig. 14), the Chinese acolyte, is vignetted into a landscape more persuasively European than Asian, in the background of which a hybrid fabrique combines a classical, arcaded infrastructure with the distinctive roof- line of a Chinese temple. Moreover, the evidently Chinese fan she holds finds a contrast in the tambourine in the foreground (the ornamental link, surely, to the absent arabesque frame), an instrument which the French musical tradition also claimed as indigenous.76

The Frenchness of Watteau's chinoises beneath their exotic attire has usually been explained in terms of cultural blindness, a failure of sight. However, within living memory Paris had directly experienced the visit of the Chinese Jesuit Michael Shen Fuzong (1684) and the sensational arrival of the ambassadors of Siam (1686), reliable printed visual and verbal records of which were still in circulation in the early eighteenth century.77 Moreover, the images and accounts of China published by French Jesuit missionaries from the late 1690s and the influx of Chinese artefacts added further to the rich stock of knowledge available to artists.78 Indeed, two of Audran's projects for ceilings79 suggest that the designer once toyed with the idea, very possibly in connection with La Muette, of explicitly contrasting chinois and chinoiserie (see Fig. 16): a monkey, capped and legs crossed Eastern style on a gigantic acanthus-like scroll, and a cartouche within which Chinese figures and a pagoda are drawn in a manner that invokes the figurative reserves on authentic blue and white Kan Xsi porcelain.80 It is unlikely, therefore, that Watteau was guilty of oversight. Rather, he chose to substitute for a credible likeness an ambiguous image, a condensation of self and other, comparable to the witty double entendres accomplished by masquerade,81 most especially at the Commedia delVarte and the spectacles de lafoire.

76. The tambourine made its appearance in Europe in the 15th century and by the 18th at least two distinctive French regional types had evolved: the 'tambourin de Provence' and the 'tambourin Basque'. At the turn of the 18th century the tambourine was introduced into both high and low urban culture when the vogue for pastoral brought champetre instruments similarly into fashion. See The New Grove Dictionary of Music, ed. S. Sadie, London 2001, xxv, p. 55; Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVTP et XVIIP siecles, ed. M. Benoit, Paris 1992, p. 660. For the tambourine as an instrument at the fairs see C. Barnes, 'Instruments and Instrumental Music at the "Theatres de la foire", Recherches sur la musique francaise classique, v, 1965, pp. 142-68.

77. For a discussion of almanacs and illustrated travel literature see H. Belevitch-Stankevitch, Le gout chinois en France: au temps de Louis XTV, Paris 1 9 1 o, pp. 210-55; for portrait engravings of Shen Fuzong see T. N. Foss, 'The European Sojourn of Philippe Couplet and Michael Shen Fuzong (1683-1692)' in Philippe Couplet SJ. (1623-1693). The Man Who Brought China to Europe, ed. J. Heyndrickx (Monu- menta Niponica Monographs, xxn), Louvain 1990,

pp. 121-40. For further prints of China and the Chinese at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th see those in the series Oe 48 in the Cabinet des estampes at the BnF, Paris.

78. Of particular note are Joachim Bouvet, S.J., L'estat present de la Chine en figures, Paris 1697; and Louis Le Comte, SJ., Nouveaux memoires sur Vetat present de la Chine, 2 vols, Amsterdam 1696. Though not illustrated the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses ecrites des Missions etrangeres par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jesus (1702-1776) were significant in the shaping of opinion.

79. Stockholm, National Gallery, CCIII/102; CCIII/109 (illustrated).

80. Cf. Stockholm, National Gallery, CCII/32, a drawing of a quarter-section of a ceiling which alludes to Chinese wares more abstractly, by working in colours associated with Chinese porcelain and silk, notably blue and yellow.

8 1 . Jean I Berain's 'Chinese' designs were similarly compromised. Daniel Cronstrom, writing to Nico- demus Tessin the Younger in 1699, commented on the six 'desseins Chinois' which he was sending: 'Us ne sont pas dans la purete du goust chinois, mais ils




Figure 16. Claude III Audran, design for a ceiling, c. 1708-16, red chalk (Photo: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

In Jean-Frangois Regnard and Charles Dufresny's plays for the Comediens Italiens du Roy, performed both at the hotel de Bourgogne in Paris and at Versailles,82 the

figure of the Chinese is invariably travestied by the 'insolent, mocking, obsequious, droll, and ... infinitely scatological' character Arlequin.83 Such role-playing produced instant comedy because, as the engraved frontispiece to Les Chinois partially suggests (see Fig. 17), with his distinctive black mask, triangular patched costume and out- landish manners,84 Arlequin always showed through the part he was playing, thereby undermining the seriousness of the theatrical illusion.85 Moreover, the visual

sont comme toutes ces productions agreablement alteres et appropries a la taille et a la danse.' Quoted from Les relations artistiques entre la France et la Suede, 1693- 1 J18: Nicodeme Tessin lejeune et Daniel Cronstrom.

Correspondance, ed. R.-A. Weigert and C. Hernmarck, Stockholm 1 964 (hereafter L 'art en France et en Suede) , p. 254, letter no. 46.

82. On the performance of the plays at the court see F. Moureau, 'Les comediens-italiens et la cour de France (1664-1697)', XVJP siecle, cxxx/cxxxi, 1981, pp. 63-81. Among these was a play entitled Disgraces d 'Arlequin mi de la Chine, performed at Versailles on 10 February 1695 but for which no text appears to have survived.

83. The characterisation is Luigi Riccoboni's in Histoire du theatre italien, 2 vols, 2nd edn, Paris 1731,

11, p. 315: 'insolent, railleur, plat, bouffon, et surtout infiniment ordurier.' In Le Divorce (1688), Arlequin plays a Chinese ambassador, in L'Homme a bonne fortune (1690) a 'prince Tonquin des Curieux' and in Les Chinois (1692) a Chinese doctor, false suitor of the fair Isabelle.

84. Evariste Gherardi, Le Theatre italien, 6 vols, Amsterdam 1721, iv, frontispiece to Les Chinois (facing p. 155). Arlequin is the figure to the left; the close hatching of his face crudely denotes the mask, the diamond square on his Chinese robe his habitual dress. For a description of Arlequin 's costume see Riccoboni (as in n. 83), 1, pp. 4-5.

85. See W. E. Rex, The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment, Cambridge 1987, pp. 59-60.



214 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 17. Frontispiece to Les Chinois, from Evariste Gherardi, Le Theatre italien, 1721: Arlequin introduces Roquillard to a Chinese pagode, etching and engraving (© The British Library)

doubling was matched in speech by Arlequin 's puns and witty neologisms, a salty word-play defended in the prologue to Les Chinois by Apollo (himself travestied by Columbine), who insists that 'all the most beautiful ideas in the world are two- faced'.86 Comedy arises out of the forced marriage of opposites: Arlequin the servant, the ignorant, the vulgar, in the part of the master, the savant, the exotic. In Audran's and Watteau's scheme the composites are less dramatically conflicted and less

86. Gherardi (as in n. 84), p. 159 (prologue, scene II): 'Pour moy, je n'y vois que des mots tout pleins de sel, qui a la verite sont quelquefois a double entente: mais toutes les plus belles pensees du monde ont deux faces, tant pis pour ceux qui ne les prennent que du mauvais cote'. Later in the play Arlequin, now in the role of a Chinese doctor,

ostensible suitor of Isabelle, notes of his beloved: 'J' ignore pas que la fille ne soit une fieffee Coquette; mais ... je la sais mettre aux Magdelonettes.' Ibid., p. 176 (act II, scene IV). On the word-play see Calame (as in n. 68), pp. 207-24; F. Moureau, Dufresny, auteur dramatique (165J-1724), Paris 1979, pp. 220-34.




stridently comic because chinoiserie and the pastoral belong to the culture of the high. The union of sacred and profane in two of d'Armenonville's overdoors (Figs 4, 21) is witty: a French coquette surfaces through divine Chinese folds and gestures, to become farcical, absurd, in the context of the exaggerated devotion of her 'suitors'.

In the cabinet, as in the plays, China represents culture- but culture that has bolted into an excess of refinement and fashion. The doubling of the sign is thus deployed to expose the status of chinoiserie as mere surface: style or title rather than content. Introducing Les Chinois to his audience, Apollo seems to acknowledge the superficial attraction of the Orient, implying that the play may fail to live up to its authors' promise: the Italians, he remarks, call it La Comedie des Comediens chinois - but 'Cette Troupe-la est toujours magnifique en titres'.87 The plot sets a Chinese doctor, played by Arlequin, within a constellation of rivals for Isabelle's hand; he personifies 'colifichet' or contrived sophistication, in comic contrast notably to the huntsman's coarse rusticity and in fact to his would-be father-in-law, Roquillard's petty archaism.88 Making a display of his dower chest, a 'Cabinet de la Chine', ArXequin- chinois extracts from it his fellow-valet Mezzetin, disguised as 'une pagode' (a pagod or Chinese idol)89 whom he presents to Roquillard- the scene of Gherardi's frontispiece. In the exchange which follows the superfluity, the emptiness of this eighteenth-century emblem of China, its status as mere form, is humorously acknowledged:

Roquillard A pagod! What is a pagod? Arlequin A pagod is .... a pagod. What the devil do you want me to say? Roquillard But what is it for? Does it do something? Arlequin It also sings.90

To reiterate differently, chinoiserie construed not only as useless91 but as meaningless the accoutrements of Eastern custom; these existed merely to entertain the Western eye. It slyly invited publics and markets to laugh at themselves as devotees of an absurd taste.

Mezzetin had been conjured up from a cabinet de la Chine 'full of grotesque Chinese figures';92 and such cabinets remained a characteristic feature of the staging

87. Ibid., p. 156 (prologue, scene I). Quanti- tatively speaking, we can agree that no Chinois in fact appear in the play, and though invoked in the plural a singular Chinese personage has a significant part in the plot.

88. In act I, scene IV Isabelle talks to her maid, Columbine, of the qualities she seeks in a husband. First among them he is to be 'joly' but not 'colifichet' (ibid., pp. 167-68); and Arlequin's parade of Chinese extravagance is aimed precisely at casting his master Octave as joly. Isabelle's travestied suitors divide, in fact, into pairs, the Chinese doctor and the huntsman finding their opposites in one another, and the mud- lark soldier and the pompous tragedian acting in parallel as twinned instances of ridiculous heroism.

89. According to Antoine Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel, The Hague 1701, 'Pagode' was originally the Portuguese word for a Chinese temple but 'il se prend aussi pour l'idole qu'on adore dans le temple,

8c dans ce sens il est plus ordinairement feminine. Pagode d'or, Vilaine Pagode. Petite Pagode... De la vient que les curieux donnent aussi le nom de Pagode aux petites idoles de porcelains qui viennent de la Chine'.

90. Gherardi (as in n. 84), iv, p. 179 (act II, scene IV). R.: 'Une Pagode? Qu'est-ce que c'est qu'une Pagode?' A: 'Une Pagode est .... une Pagode. Que diable voulez-vous que je vous dise?' R: 'Mais a quoy est-elle propre? Scait-elle faire quelque chose?' A: 'Elle chante aussi.'

91. In Le Divorce (1688), act II, scene VI, the alienation of form and function in chinoiserie is elaborated as a joke when Arlequin, the Chinese ambassador, reveals at his leave-taking that his hat is 'un Cabaret garni de tasses a Caffe pleines'. Gherardi (as in n. 84), 11, p. 120.

92. Gherardi (as in n. 84), iv, p. 178 (Le Chinois, act II, scene IV): 'Le Cabinet de la Chine ou il etoit



216 KATIE SCOTT

of 'Chinese' plays.93 Alain-Rene Le Sage's later Arlequin invisible (1713) opens in the cabinet du Roy de la Chine to which Arlequin had been conducted by the devil: 'There were to be seen there a thousand precious things, among them three cross-legged Pagods seated on a long table'.94 It is perhaps difficult to get the comedy of excess in the mere number of Chinese things invoked by stage directions, but likely that such ornamental exaggeration constituted a visual analogue to the extravagant speech, stuffed with material metaphors, which was regularly put into the mouths of Chinese characters. 'I am', boasts the doctor in Les Chinois, 'the pot-pourri of Doctrine, the

potted Meat of Letters, the salmagundi of all the Sciences';95 in Uhomme a bonne

fortune (1690), Arlequin informs his audience that the prince Tonquin des Curieux has described Isabelle as 'a resplendent star of perfection', adding that 'if the tail of her gown were any longer, he would mistake her for a comet';96 in Le Divorce (1688), the ambassador of the Emperor of China (again played by Arlequin) complements Columbine by proxy: 'I have no doubt that the sparks of your eyes ... falling ... on the frizzen pan ... of his heart ... the powder of his love ... Madame, ... I bid you good day'.97 In the last instance, the parody of figurative language (here a firing gun) is inter-cut with awkward silences and mockery targets not only excess but

ineptitude.98 To return to Audran's and Watteau's cabinet, the illusion of China is conjured

up there too by a multiplicity of exotic things: by long-handled ceremonial fans and 'feather dusters',99 by shoe-string moustaches and conical hats, by elegant parasols and pointed shoes, by strangely shaped garden urns and curious musical instruments, by the exotic animals and birds in Audran's proposals for ceilings, and in one case

by hatched rim patterns, imagined as an option for a border or cornice (Fig. 18).100 In the latter's arabesques mere profusion of repeated standard motifs alone

s'ouvre, 8c on le voit remply de figures Chinoises grotesques'.

93. It seems likely that one of the principal attractions of exotic plays was the elaborate stage sets they necessitated. Arlequin Mahomet, performed at Saint Laurent in 1714, seems, for instance, to have demanded quite complex stage machinery. See E. Campardon, Les Spectacles de lafoire, 2 vols, Paris 1977, 1, p. 93.

94. Alain-Rene Le Sage and d'Orneval, Le theatre de lafoire ou V opera comique, 3 vols, Paris 1721, 1, p. 68: 'On voit mille choses precieuses, 8c entr'autres raretez, trois Pagodes qui sont sur une longue table assises les jambes croisees.'

95. Gherardi (as in n. 84), iv, pp. 176-77 (act II, scene IV): 'Moy, le pot pourry de la Doctrine, le Pate en pot des belles Lettres, & le Salmigondis de toutes les Sciences'.

96. Ibid., 11, p. 366 ('scene des curiositez'): 'C'est un compliment Tonquinois. II dit qu'elle est une Etoile resplendissante de perfection; et que si la queue de son manteau etoit plus longue il la prendroit pour une Comette.'

97. Ibid., 11, p. 1 19 (act II, scene VI): 'Madame, je vois dans vos yeux que vous brulez d'envie d'etre Reine de la Chine, j 'en avertiray le Roy mon Maitre, & je ne doute pas que les etincelles de vos yeux ...

venant a tomber . . . sur le bassinet . . . de son coeur . . . le poudre de son amour ... Madame, je vous donne le bon jour.'

98. On the dramatic techniques of mixing mis- chief and ineptitude see Calame (as in n. 68), pp. 223-24.

99. Honour (as in n. 3) has noted the uncanny likeness to 'feather dusters', a simile I have borrowed because it captures something of the lightness of form and function. For a factual discussion of Chinese fans cf. J. Hutt, 'Chinese Fans', The Connois- seur, cc, April 1979, pp. 236-41 (esp. 240). He notes that although fans were important for Chinese society, the fan motif rarely featured in Chinese art of this period. Thus in addition to some of the fans in Watteau's scenes being identifiable as export-ware, falsely stereotypical of China (feathered fans were made for a western market only), the very act of depicting fans in such profusion marked Watteau's enterprise as chinoiserie and not chinois.

100. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. CCII/133. Also of note in the drawing is Audran's use of scattered dots or flower-heads as decorative in-fill between the filigree lines of the arabesques, perhaps imitating patterned grounds found in oriental ceramics.




Figure 18. Claude III Audran, design for a ceiling with rim border, c. 1708-16, graphite overworked with pen and ink (Photo: Hans Thorwid, © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

impresses; in Watteau's vignettes that excess assumes further the form of an

exaggerated refinement. The 'Medecin chinois, I Geng' (Fig. 19), for example, sits in a landscape, his legs scrolled under him in smoothly-drawn coupled curves, his arms arranged more or less akimbo, the right hand elegantly articulated to follow the arch of the knee, the oval silhouette of his top-knotted head perched orb-like on

slimly tapered shoulders, an echo of the stepped obelisk in the left distance, while in the foreground a pine advances on the right to shed its shade over him in the

graceful style of the ubiquitous Chinese parasol.101 Lacking action or attribute to

101. A similar exaggerated elegance may be noted in Watteau's 'Lao Gine ou Vieillard chinois', 'Officer Tartare du pays des Kuskasi', and 'Talegrepat ou

Religieuse du Pegor'; see Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), iv, nos 241, 253, 254.



218 KATIE SCOTT

Figures 19 (left), 20 (right). Francois Boucher after Watteau, 'I Geng ou Medecin chinois' and 'Chao Niene ou jeune chinois', 1731, etchings and engravings (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

define him, Watteau's doctor is (like Regnard's and Dufresny's before him) an ornament, a trinket (colifichet), an elegant instance of a comic archetype defined by Henri Bergson as 'du mecanique plaque sur le vivant'.102 Occasionally figures stumble from the status of witty toys into outright farce: in 'La Deesse Thvo Chvu' (Fig. 21), for instance, the pose of the left-hand figure, head down, arms outstretched over an abyss, suggests that this worshipper has been accidentally tripped into a kotow by the close wrap of his gown while his companion is saved the knock (ko) on the (+ tow) head by the gravitational necessity of holding onto his hat. For the most part, however, figures and ornament appeared comic merely by dint of repetition and the tendency to ornamentalise. The structuring pattern of the arabesque empties motifs of their semantic and emotional charge103 and reconfigures them as cliches in playful exhibitions across and between intersecting surfaces- in this case, those of a cabinet- like so many circumflexes on French vowels.

Taking the decoration of the cabinet as a whole, its figures and ornament can, on the basis of the discussion so far, be said to exhibit two kinds of comic strategy. On the one hand, the composite structure and doubled origin of the idol Ki Mao Sao or the coquette Tao Kou results in doublethink, in an excess of meaning, an absurd incongruity of Chinese and French signifieds: hybrid physiognomies, fete champetre landscapes, Franco-Chinese architecture, mixed attributes. On the other, the obsession with form and accessories, or trivial and displaced indices of identity,

102. Henri Bergson, Le rire (1899), in his Oeuvres, ed. A. Robinet and H. Gouthier, Paris 1963, p. 405.

103. See E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, London 1979, pp. 278-81.




Figure 19. Michel Aubert after Watteau, 'La Deesse Thvo Chvu dans l'isle de Hainane', 1731, etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

results - in the case of the doctor, for instance - in a proliferation of cliches, or signi- fiers stripped of seriousness and consequence by over-refinement and ubiquity.104 Thus, semantically as well as formally the arabesque conveys a distinctly uneven texture, scissions between areas of layered density and others of worn-through trans-

parency. Turning again to a theatrical simile, we can note, moreover, that just as Francois Couperin's piece La Saillie or The Joke (written for the ballet of acrobats in Les Chinois)105 enjoins laughter by the spring between complex contrapuntal chorus

104. I am particularly indebted here to the discussion of paradox in J. A. Flieger, The Purloined Punchline. Freud's Comic Theory and the Post-Modern Text, Baltimore and London 1991, pp. 59-63. A point worth developing may be the fact that the male figures feature more often as cliches and female ones as double entendres.

105. This is the conclusion of Jane Clark in eadem and Derek Connon, 'The Mirror of Human Life': Reflections on Francois Couperin's Pieces de Clavecin, Huntington 2002, p. 109. The piece was published in 1730 in the 27th order of the fourth book of Francois Couperin's Pieces de clavecin; it follows another piece entitled Les Chinois, thought to have been the overture for the play, an accompaniment to

the prologue. Couperin owned a copy of Regnard's works and almost certainly knew both Regnard and Dufresny well (ibid., p. 23). Dufresny's interest in China extended also to music, specifically to song, and in October 1713 he published in the Mercure galant an essay entitled 'Enigmes chinoises ou paroles de quelques chansons chinoises'. These were, apparently, some of the first examples of Chinese music brought before a French audience. See Ysia Tchen, La Musique chinoise en France au xviiie siecle, Paris 1974, pp. 10-11. Meanwhile, the Jesuit father, Joseph-Marie Amiot was making attempts to introduce Couperin's music into China. See P. Beausant, Francois Couperin, Paris 1980, p. 499.



2 2O KATIE SCOTT

and simple melodic line, and by the surprise of a B-minor key yoked to a 'lively' 2:4 romp, so in the cabinet comedy arose not only within the orders of the figurative and the ornamental but also in the shift and contrast between registers.106

Such folded language contrasts sharply with the smooth surface of conventionally descriptive pictorial observation, the analogue of the travel relation, of which one of the pairs of overdoors (Figs 12, 13) has been noted above as representative. Earlier, I described the conjunction of these modes- the descriptive and the ornamental- as a clash; here we might think of the ornament in the cabinet as un-working the mimetic- the arabesque serving to throw into question the presumed economy and sufficiency of the relation of signifier and signified, in order to suggest rather, that mimesis in fact no more than approximates what it means to say.

The cabinet's mood of comic ambiguity and the techniques of condensation and displacement alive in its decoration are, of course, those which Sigmund Freud attributed to jokes.107 Although Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) does not conspicuously concern itself with the social dimension of laughter, precisely the terrain of the historian, Freud's theory nevertheless hangs on an assumption, first articulated by Thomas Hobbes, that joking involves a relation- a form of communi- cation- with others: that it is a deeply cultural affair.108 Since the shared meanings of laughter (rather than its inner motivation) are our principal concern, it is without serious risk of anachronism that we can ask, in the light of Freud: what was the joke of Watteau's cabinet} Was it (to use his terms) innocent, or tendentious? That is to ask: was its aim essentially aesthetic, an end in itself? Or did it have a purpose: did it, rather, satisfy by substitution an aggressive impulse towards the joke's object? Partial answers suggest themselves in the traces of self-mockery discernable in chinoiserie; but to understand fully what made eighteenth-century viewers smile, we must look more closely both to the historical context which gave the joke topical value, and to the social conventions which governed the exercise and experience of mockery at the turn of the eighteenth century.

106. The score is marked with the instruction 'vivement'. Clark (as in n. 105), p. 109, notes that 'saillie' had many meanings in the early 18th century including joke, jump and reproach. As a 'mot d'esprit' it conveyed the idea of brilliance and surprise, added to which Furetiere in his Diction- naire (as in n. 89), vol. 111, also says of saillie that it describes a movement 'vif & subit; emportement, fougue, transport', which captures precisely the joke of this Chinese dance, one '[qui] se prend ordinairement en mauvaise part'. In the CD notes that accompany Claude Rousset's 1993 recording of the pieces for Harmonia Mundi, Bruce Gustafson writes respectively of Les Chinois and La Saillie: 'L'aspect exotique des Chinois est rendu par la duree inegale de sections et juxtapositions d'idees musicales radicalement antagonistes. La toute derniere piece de Couperin est une Saillie non pas sophistiquee, mais parfaitement equilibree, pleine d'allegresse malgre le mode mineur; le discours est simple, la polyphonie, recherchee. Mais pour finir, le titre reste enigmatique - un saut? Un mot d'esprit? Une

reproche?' On the music at the fairs see C. Barnes, 'The "Theatre de la foire" (Paris, 1697-1762): Its Music and Composers', PhD, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 1965, a part of which was published as 'Vocal Music at "Theatres de la foire" 1697-1762: Vaudeville', in Recherches sur la musique frangaise classique, viii, 1968, pp. 141-60.

107. Freud, Jokes (as in n. 5), pp. 47-131. 108. Prior to Hobbes the Cartesian model of the

passions framed the discussion and understanding of laughter: one which focused on identifying an inner wellspring of joy rather than observing its social function. The paradigm shift was, according to Richardot, LeRire (as in n. 72), pp. 9-13, profoundly significant and marks the later 17th century as belonging decisively to the modern. See also P.-L. Assoun, 'Freud et le rire' in Freud et le rire, ed. A. W. Szafran and A. Nysenholc, Paris 1994. Calame (as in n. 68), p. 225, in his analysis of the comic in Regnard, makes reference to Hobbes 's definition of laughter as a 'chant de triomphe' (De la nature humaine, 1652).




Two securely established discursive identities were accorded to China by that date. Firstly, she was the object of national commercial ambition- a vast emporium of spices, drugs and luxury goods to improve the quality of life in France and to swell royal coffers with revenue.109 Secondly, she was a land of pagan souls whose conversion was keenly desired and energetically pursued by a universal church, notably by the Society of Jesus.110 In 1685, Louis XIV had been persuaded to despatch the so-called Jesuit mathematicians to Peking.111 Less than a decade later one of their number, Joachim Bouvet, returned to France as 'Imperial legate' (k'in-tch'ai) , to recruit further missionaries and, more importantly perhaps, to encourage the swift expediting of a trade mission- the Jesuits firmly believing that their apostolic ends would be substantially furthered by demonstrations of Western scientific and cultural prowess in the tangible form of scientific instruments and luxury goods for sale.112 During his sojourn in the capital Bouvet met the wealthy industrialist Jean Jourdan de Grouce who, seduced by the reverend father's rich descriptions of the Far East, was prompted to form a company of investors whose capital of over half a million livres fitted out the 400-ton Amphitrite.113 She set sail from La Rochelle in 1698, returning from Canton two years later with her first cargo of screens, chests, fans, lacquer boxes, snuff-boxes, porcelain and silk cloth114- which are the very kinds of merchandise listed in the d'Armenonville inventories.

If d'Armenonville was linked by taste to the burgeoning traffic in China-wares, family connection lent a further dimension, a further complexity, to his sinophilia. Marriage and court factionalism had him moving in the orbit of the minister Louis- Jerome Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain, who both brokered the necessary trade monopolies for Jourdan & Co. and invested significantly in the firm.115 Relations of

109. On trade with China see R. Picard, J. P. Kerneis and Y. Bruneau, Les compagnies des Indes: route de porcelaines, Paris 1966, pp. 114-32, 247-66, 288- 95; P. Haudriere, La compagnie francaise des Indes au XVIIIe siecle (1J19-1J95), 4 vols, Paris 1989, 1, pp. 19-29, 31-36; and especially L. Dermigny, La Chine et V Occident: le commerce a Canton au XVIII e siecle (iyig- 1833), 4 vols, Paris 1964, 1.

110. See A. H. Rowbotham, Missionary and Manda- rin: the Jesuits at the Court of China, Berkeley and Los

Angeles 1942, pp. 37-175; and G. H. Dunne, S.J., Generation of Giants: the Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty, London 1 962 .

111. The decision to send the French mission consisting of Joachim Bouvet, Jean de Fontaney, Jean-Francois Gerbillon, Louis Le Comte, Claude Visdelou and Guy Tachard was apparently taken in the wake of Philippe Couplet's and Shen Fuzong's successful interview with Louis XIV at Versailles ( 1 5 September 1684). See J. W. Witek, S.J., Controversial Ideas in China and in Europe: a Biography of Jean-Francois Foucquet (1665-1741) (Bibliotheca Instituti Historici S.I., xliii), Rome 1982, pp. 13-39 on tne prepar- ations for the French mission and pp. 70-72 on its purpose. For a contemporary account of the voyage out, see J. B. Du Halde, Description geographique, historique, chronologique de V empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, 3 vols, Paris 1735, 1, pp. 61-81. More

generally on French missions to China and their cultural impact see La mission francaise de Pekin aux XVIP et XVIIP siecles (actes du colloque de sinologie, CIRIC, 1974), Paris 1976.

112. Dermigny (as in n. 109), 1, p. 149. For Bouvet's account of his return mission to France see Du Halde (as in n. 111), 1, pp. 95-104.

113. See Claude Mandrolle, Les premiers voyages francais a la Chine. La compagnie de la Chine 1698- 1J19, Paris 1901, pp. xxxi-xxxvii.

114. See the account given in Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel du commerce, 3 vols, Paris 1723, 1, col. 1361. He noted that while on this first voyage the compagnie had been allowed to import silk and cloth of silver and of gold to the value of 150,000 livres, thereafter the Amphitrite returned (in 1703) with only 'quelques lits brodez, des robes de chambre pour hommes et pour femmes, & des toilettes en petit qualite', the more lavish textiles having been judged 'prejudiciable aux Manufactures de France'.

115. For d'Armenonville 's connection with Pont- chartrain see L.-N. Tellier, Face aux Colbert: les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot ... et Vavenement du liberalisme, Quebec 1987, pp. 129-30 and the biographical entry pp. 715-16. For Pontchartrain 's position and his involvement in the Compagnie de la Chine see Dermigny (as in n. 109), 1, p. 149.



222 KATIE SCOTT

blood, meanwhile, attached d'Armenonville to the Jesuit mission: a brother, the Jesuit father Thomas-Charles, was from 1701 responsible for the Society's missions to the Levant.116 It was to this connection that, according to the due de Saint-Simon, d'Armenonville chiefly owed his credit with the king and at court.117 At the time of the cabinet 's realisation, however, the Jesuit mission to China was in full crisis over the so-called Rites and Terms Controversy.118 This issue saw the Jesuits pitted bitterly against members of the mendicant orders and the secular clergy over the question of whether the conversion of a culture entailed radical transformation- the internal revolution demanded of the individual soul but on a national scale- or whether, less dramatically, indigenous terms and local customs might safely be adapted to serve the interests of Christ.

From the time of the defining apostolate of Matteo Ricci to China at the end of the sixteenth century, we can describe Jesuit policy there as a kind of 'wooing', not simply because wooing advances love (of God) as the motivation for mission, but because it further acknowledges the seductive form assumed by Jesuit evangelism in China and recognises the spirit of humility in which the beloved object (China) was approached. The Jesuits had adapted themselves to a Chinese cultural mould, assuming Mandarin dress and translating the Gospel and liturgy within the limits of the Chinese language, seeking out approximations, correspondences between Christian ideas and Confucian concepts and figures of speech. Coincidentally, then, the Jesuits, working between West and East, were testing the adequacy of arbitrary signs at just the time when in France, painters of the arabesque were playing with sufficiency of natural ones.119 In the engraved portrait of Jacques Le Faure published

116. Tellier (as in n. 115), pp. 129-30, 715. D'Armenonville was attached to this brother and made provisions for him in his will: a rente viagere of 400 livres 'pour l'aider a entretenir la voiture et T equipage qui sont a son usage', and a further 600 livres to add to the 400 which he was already receiving in rentes 'pour luy procurer le service d'un

compagnon.' A.N.M.C. CXV/460, 8 November 1728. By a codicil dated 19 November 1728 d'Armenon- ville also left 2000 livres to the Jesuits in Paris, to be distributed by his brother. Thomas-Charles Fleuriau's concerns were with the Middle rather than the Far East but he was nevertheless deeply engaged with the wider issues of mission, as is revealed by his

publications, Etat present de VArmenie, tant pour le

temporel que pour le spirituel (Paris 1694), Etat des missions de Grece (Paris 1695), Nouveaux Memoires des missions de la Compagnie de Jesus dans le Levant, 7 of 8 vols, Paris 1717-45. That Joseph-Jean-Baptiste took an interest in his brother's concerns is suggested by the presence in his extensive library of copies of Tavernier's Voyage en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes

(1676), another, unspecified, Voyage aux Indes (De La Haye and Caron's?), and an Histoire de V empire ottomane. China features in the inventory of his library rather less specifically, in a miscellany of 1 o volumes about 'la Chinne' and TAngleterre'. See A.N. 6AP IAD, 22 December 1728, fols 225-71, specifically items 99, 921, 1003, 965.

117. Saint-Simon (as in n. 15), ix, pp. 17-18, cited in Tellier (as in n. 115), p. 130.

118. The literature on this issue is enormous. David E. Mungello provides a brief and useful critical introduction to it in 'An Introduction to the Chinese Rites

Controversy', in The Chinese Rites Controversy: its History and Meaning, ed. idem, Nettetal 1994 (Monumenta Serica Monographs, xxxiii), pp. 3-14. In addition to Dunne (as in n. 110), and Rowbotham (as in n. 110), I have found the following particularly useful: R. Etiemble, Les Jesuites en Chine: la querelle des rites

(1552-1JJ3), Paris 1966; D. W. Treadgold, The West in Russia and China: Religious and Secular Thought in Modern Times, 2 vols, Cambridge 1973; J. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: a Conflict of Cultures, transl. J. Lloyd, Cambridge 1985; G. Minamki, The Chinese Rites Controversy: from its Beginning to Modern Times, Chicago 1985; and L. M.Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilis- ation, Durham and London 1997, pp. 77-133-

119. Athanasius Kircher in La Chine illustree, transl. F. S. Dalquie, Amsterdam 1670, pp. 155-60, ex-

plained that the Chinese forbade entry to foreigners and that missionaries had had enormous difficulty in

penetrating the Chinese mainland. The Chinese

judged those seeking either to visit or to stay in China

by their command of Mandarin and their dress. The

Jesuits apparently resolved not to send missionaries

except those able to satisfy the Chinese on these two




Figure 2 2 . Jean-Baptiste Nolin, Portrait of Jacques Le Faure, S.J., c. 1698, engraving (© Bibliotheque nationale de France, Cabinet des arts graphiques)



224 KATIE SCOTT

by Jean-Baptiste Nolin in the late 1680s- one of a set of prints of missionaries, mandarins and converts - we see a man visibly sunk into his Chinese context (Fig. 2 2). 120 The movement between self and other seemingly runs in the opposite direction to that discerned in Watteau's images, where the Frenchness of some of the figures welled up from below, trivialising signs of difference on the surface. Here, by contrast, Le Faure's pose, dress and beard, his assumed identity thoroughly enclose him, his Parisian origin (proclaimed in the text below) buried for good, save for his faith condensed to a fine point of distinction in the minuscule but still devastating mystery of the cross displayed on his breast. To Jesuits such as Le Faure, China constituted a different but by no means inferior world, one they aspired to inhabit fully, that is physically, psychologically and culturally, and to redeem from within.

Instinctively, we anticipate contrasting the ideologies of missionary and merchant. Their avowed objectives were officially opposed: the Jesuits sought to give a final, Salvationist touch to this most ancient of empires; Jourdan & Co. to take a hand- some profit at her expense. That said, the cargo exported by the Amphitrite suggests that French merchants at first anticipated a symmetry in commercial relations analogous to the 'loving' dialogue that had long structured theological and philosophical exchange. Unlike the British, by whom China was imagined as a potential mass market for cheap woollens, Jourdan & Co. envisaged China as a future niche market to be wooed into existence by the finest French wares. Specifically, Jourdan de Grouce, also a director of the Manufacture royale des glaces at Saint-Gobain, was looking to find in China a new outlet for the company's mirrors.121 The Far East and the glitter of glass had become intimately associated in French minds, from the time of the Siamese ambassadors' dazzling reception in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1686; and by a process of reading back, this French connection was projected onto the Chinese in such a manner that a taste for mirrors, like the yearning for Christ, was identified as latent, even prefigured in Chinese culture, only awaiting the providential arrival of the West to be fully realised. Metaphorically speaking, the mirror may thus serve to characterise both Jesuitical and commercial discourses on China, in that each was premised on reflection, recognition, on patterns of sameness in difference.

points. Melchisedech Thevenot in Relations de divers voyages curieux qui n'ont pas este publies, Paris 1696, p. 1, opens his 'relation' as follows: 'Me voicy vestu a la Chinoise & de la mesme facon que nos Peres paroissent en public dans l'un des plus vastes & des plus mieux policez Royaumes de la terre.' To his readers desirous of knowing the history of the church in China he responded by expressing inadequacies born of too long and too thorough an integration into another culture: 'un eloignement si estrange, & une si longue absence de l'Europe m'a fait oublier la purete du language Italien.' On the manner in which the Gospel was taught and church services conducted see Louis Le Comte (as in n. 78), 11, pp. 191-266. For a 20th-century assessment of the policy of accommodation as it related to custom and language see Dunne (as in n. 110), p. 28; and Treadgold (as in n. 118), p. 9.

120. On Nolin see M. Preaud et al., Dictionnaire des editeurs d'estampes a Paris sous Vancien regime, Paris 1987, pp. 250-51; on his 'Chinese' prints Belevitch- Stankevitch (as in n. 77), p. 221. The portrait of Le Faure was one of a series sold by Nolin from his shop in the rue Saint Jacques, including Adam Schall, Kan Xsi, Paul Siu, Loa Kiun, Confucius, Xe Kiam, Shen Fuzong and Chin Fo Cum.

121. According to Dermigny (as in n. 109), 1, p. 150, in 1685 mirrors and the artisans needed to install them had been sent to Siam (A.N. F12/1486); in 1698 or 1701 the Amphitrite similarly took on 'huit ouvriers pour la miroiterie' as well as the cargo of glass itself in order properly to establish the taste for mirrors in Chinese homes.




We need now to return to the question of jokes, and the kind or kinds of joke which the cabinet told to its eighteenth-century admirers. We can note without further ado that the familiarity, freshness and vigour of the context to which the decoration alludes must itself have afforded them a bonus pleasure, a supplement of joy in addition to the sources of comedy inherent in chinoiserie.122 But can we go further? Can we tease out parallels, a relation even, between the high purposes of mission and trade and the cabinet's comic turns? Certainly Audran's and Watteau's programme aimed spatially and visually to effect a conjunction, an analogous interpenetration of East and West. China surrounded the cabinet' s amused occupants on all sides, caught them up in an encircling narrative, diverted them from the processional course of the enfilade, detaining them in endless play. Moreover, the pier-glasses and mirror- faced overmantel must have functioned to project their reflected selves among the painted China-men and -women on the walls,123 so that, like so many Gullivers, they came momentarily to inhabit an alternative, exotic world. The resulting encounter was prompted, however, not so much by need- to establish the compatibilities necessary for exchange - as by desire: for incommensurability and the pleasures of the absurd.

To follow Mihai Spariosu, incommensurability achieves conjunction without connection;124 it describes a relation of incomprehensibility or bafflement, of entities held together which remain nevertheless apart, different - Lilliputians and Gullivers, representation and reflection, fiction and reality, pagan and (in this case) Christian. Given that incommensurate worlds are mutually unfathomable, ultimately unread- able in each others' terms, the 'other' necessarily assumes the status of a fiction for the self. Difference is aestheticised, becomes a matter of ontology and form: of triangular shapes of race and custom (Fig. 11), rising profiles of superstition, dipping lines of obeisance (Figs 4, 21), of the celestial colour blue;125 theirs a slender, floating world of slight figures, slipping between the panel and the paint, ornament and ground, the thread of the strapwork all the thickness needed for an existence a la chinoise. Thus, not only the techniques (condensation, displacement) but the aesthetic effect (incommensurability) of the arabesque suggest kinship with Freud's innocent jokes, those whose pleasure is an aim in itself. The innocent arabesque, likewise, has no other purpose; is apparently motiveless beyond the pleasure principle. In 'Chao Niene' (above, Fig. 20), identities amiably cohere, the boy's androgyny voicing the vertiginous instability of boundaries, the hedonistic oscillation between self and other, here and there, via a deftly handled interplay of signs of gender.

122. Cf. Freud, Jokes (as in n. 5), pp. 171-73. 123. A scene in Les Chinois provides another

instance in which, again in a comic context, a room set for play, the decoration is intended as inter- active. In act I, scene III, Pasquariel, seeking to escape the clutches of Pierrot, who has caught him with Marinette, hides unsuccessfully in the frame of the picture over the door of the room and is shot out of jealousy. See Gherardi (as in n. 84), iv, p. 166: 'Pierrot les surprend ensemble, veut battre Pasquariel, qui s'enfuit & se cache dans la bordure d'une Tableau, au dessus de la porte de la Salle. Pierrot prend un pistolet & tire; Pasquariel tombe'.

124. On incommensurability and the theory of alternative worlds see M. I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of Literature, Albany 1997, pp. 54-71.

125. The blue and white exterior of the Chinese Trianon de Porcelaine (1670) at Versailles had reinforced an already habitual identification of blue with China in the late 17th century. When colour was specified in relation to the Oriental porcelain listed in the d'Armenonville inventories blue is the one colour mentioned (nn. 25, 27); it seems not unlikely that blue may have struck an appropriate, dominant note in Audran's and Watteau's cabinet.



226 KATIE SCOTT

Though Freud has little more to say about the particular character of innocent

quips, his general account of the psychogenesis of jokes positions them in a way which is additionally suggestive. He outlines a four-stage development which brings the joke into existence and leads it by steps to its full perfection. Jokes, he says, begin in child's play, in the free and arbitrary association of words and thoughts; they are transformed from senselessness to nonsense in jest; thereafter they assume their

proper status as jokes, innocent as yet of purpose but yielding pleasure in defiance of critical reasoning; and finally, they triumph as tendentious jokes or explicitly motivated, unreservedly transgressive hilarity.126 Imagined as an historical genesis,127 the first stage, child's play, equates to the age of the primitive, the tendentious joke to the modern one; while jests and innocent jokes stand in the gap, and correspond to the liminal phase of the post-primitive or pre-modern, the pre-colonial, to

European society in the last vestiges of its innocency. Licence for such free elaboration of Freud can be found in recent studies on ancien regime laughter. Anne Richardot, in her work on the ancien regime, has shown that the turn of the eighteenth century constituted a particularly pivotal moment in laughter's history:128 a late, brief, full-flowering of what she calls the 'pacifist'- but we might call the innocent- savoir rire of the aristocratic honnete homme, which functioned avowedly to strengthen social bonds. She quotes, among others, Shaftesbury and his definition of raillerie, from his essay on its usage, published in French in 1710: Vest par une douce raillerie que nous nous polissons l'un l'autre' (a 'gentle collision by which we polish one another');129 and extrapolates two fundamental rules of honnete joking- that it remains within the parameters of the benevolent and that it is universally compre- hensible. Together these rules expressed the confidence of the court aristocracy, and furnished the means by which it was pleasantly to reproduce itself. Innocence, thus expanded, signifies a warmly motivated if, in the case of France and China, uncomprehending mutuality, a non-violent, non-coercive interaction, as such, it

seemingly occurred at several different levels in the early 1700s: at the level of elite social practice, at the level of commercial, theological and cultural discourse, and in the realm of pure, hedonistic aesthetic pleasure.

Innocence is, of course, never absolute. There is a danger that in confusing the

perspective of the court elite with the missionary and merchant position we become

party to the joke. Looking for difference, however, we can note that whereas for the Jesuit missionary the policy of accommodation was proof of the lengths to which he would go to save a soul, of his willingness to defer the triumph of mission in order better to be assured of ultimate victory, for the honnete homme at La Muette, Watteau's French figures in Chinese costume constituted by contrast a short cut, a means to economise on the psychic expenditure needed to transport him from West to East, a means, that is, of immediate gratification through recognition.130 It is to

126. Freud, Jokes (as in n. 5), pp. 177-79. 127. Gutwirth (as in n. 70), p. 77, also notes the

mirroring of ontologenic and implicitly phylogenic accounts in Freud's analysis of the comic.

128. For what follows see Richardot (as in n. 72), 'Rire et hospitalite'; and Le Rire, pp. 83-96.

129. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftes- bury, Essai sur Vusage de la raillery et de Venjouement,

dans les conversations qui roulent sur Us matures les plus importantes, translated from the English by Justus van Effen, The Hague 1710, p. 11. The English title was Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour.

130. On the economy of pleasure in jokes see Freud, Jokes (as in n. 5), pp. 167-70.




the difference of the long and the short circuit and to the switches in the direction of the current of interaction- or, to put it another way, between introjection and projection- that we respectively owe the natural strangeness of Le Faure (Fig. 22) and the strange familiarity of Ki Mao Sao (Fig. 4) . The distinction is not specious, for fiction came with subtlety, veiling a difference between itself and fact, and lightly stole away the blessings that accrued to the latter by virtue of the labours of faith.

Shifting attention now decisively from the irenic world conjured up by the arabesque's joke-work to Watteau's vignettes and his choice of figure-types, we note first that the scholar mandarin, the pivotal mediating figure in the fortunes of Jesuits and merchants in the Far East, is conspicuous by his absence.131 Seemingly in absolute contradiction to European interests on the ground, the painter's Chinese assembly stars Buddhist and Taoist monks and palace eunuchs- those notoriously obstructive to Western commerce and the progress of Christianity.132 It seems to me, though I recognise that I am being more speculative here, that by comparison with many of the chinoises, whose Frenchness has been noted, Watteau's Thau Kiene, Eunuque du palais a la Chine' (Fig. 23) and his depiction of a Buddhist monk, 'Bonze des Tartares Mongous' (Fig. 24), are embodiments of an irreducible otherness.133 The eunuch's features are cast into perturbing obscurity by the uncompro- mising sharpness of his hat. His body sits obdurately on terrain staked out by his torch. Meanwhile, the curved sweep of the bonze's profile accentuates a similar, simple-shaped solidity. The refined line of his corpulence echoes the grotesque, spirit-defying corporeality discernable both in Western portraits of particular bonzes - Jean-Baptiste Nolin's Xe Kiam (Fig. 25) is a virtual caricature134- and the pagods parodied for the popular stage. Consciously or otherwise, such perceptions reflected an early-modern Christian missionary prejudice. In theological discourse of the period, the confusion of idols and idolaters and of both with matter served to express the seeming contradiction of Buddhist holy men whose perceived Epicureanism appeared necessarily to stand in the way of their pastoral function. Bonzes blocked rather than opened the way of the faithful to God.135 In this respect the pose of Watteau's bonze is more explicit than that of the eunuch, who merely stakes the ground as if to mark a boundary: rather, he stands literally in the way, impeding the viewer's path into Cathay, his lantern or staff flung across his shoulder in the manner a guard carries a gun.

131. One of the prints represents a 'Mandarin d'Armes du Leaotung', seated on the ground with a dagger conspicuously thrust into his sash, a figure to correspond with the 'Officier Tartare', perhaps, as both are paired with women holding parasols. See Dacier, Vuaflart and Herold (as in n. 1), iv, nos 251, 254. This is a different kind of mandarin to the scholars celebrated not only in Jesuit writing but in the important Beauvais tapestry series The Story of the Emperor of China (c. 1697-1705). See Standen (as in n. 28); and Bremer-David (as in n. 28), pp. 80-97.

132. On the early use of Buddhism by the Jesuits as a bridge to Christianity, before its utter rejection by them in favour of the order of mandarins, and on the increasing hostility towards Buddhists and Taoists thereafter, see Jensen (as in n. 118), pp. 42-54.

133. On Jesuit understanding of Buddhism in China in the early 18th century see Dunne (as in n. 1 10), p. 27; Gernet (as in n. 1 18), p. 23. There was by this date, apparently, no discourse presenting Buddhism in a positive light.

134. In Nolin's series of Chinese portraits there is in fact a marked contrast made between the refined representation of the Mandarin converts such as Paul Hsu and Buddhists such as Xe Kiam.

135. See Charles Le Gobien, S.J., Histoire de VEdit de VEmpereur de la Chine enfaveur de la religion chrestienne, avec un eclaircissement sur les honneurs que les Chinois rendent a Confucius et aux morts, Paris 1698, preface; also J. Dehergne, 'Les historiens jesuites du Taoisme', in La mission francaise de Pekin (as in n. 111), pp. 59-68.



228 KATIE SCOTT

Figures 23 (left), 24 (right). Francois Boucher after Watteau, 'Thau Kiene, Eunuque du palais a la Chine', and Edme Jeurat after Watteau, 'Bonze des Tartares Mongous ou Mogols', 1731, etchings and engravings

(Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)

According to Freudian psychoanalysis the 'tendentious joke' arises from obstructed desire. In Freud's scenario, the interruption of 'wooing' by the arrival of a third party results in 'smut' or the exchange of dirty talk between men about and at the expense of a desired woman, affording them a deflected libidinal satisfaction in place of the sexual act.136 In Watteau's scenario of the bonze in his Chinese

landscape, the situation is somewhat different in that the desired object (the comic

victim) and the third party are conflated. That is to say that the personification of China in the bonze extends via his dress and mien the promise of exotic pleasure, while his pose effects the simultaneous denial thereof. A viewer's laughter at this can be termed a rire d 'exclusion', it is in every sense contrary to the honnete and the innocent rire d 'acceuil discussed above. Savage in its mockery, the eighteenth-century form of the tendentious joke, soon termed persiflage, served to strengthen social bonds, doing so not by rallying others, including its victims, but by erecting barriers and creating outcasts, such as, in this case, oriental ones.137 Examination of the

putative causes of this evolution within the historical genesis imagined earlier must await the next game; but to anticipate a little we can surmise that such change concurred with a metamorphosis in the elite, and was most likely connected with the trade and taste in luxury whose child the cabinet appears to be.

136. Freud, Jokes (as in n. 5), pp. 140-44. 137. See Richardot, Le Rire (as in n. 72), pp. 96-

126; also E. Bourguinat, 'Rire et pouvoir: la lecon

du persiflage libertin', XVIIP siecle, xxxn, 2000, pp. 279-90. The term persiflage was first coined in !734-




Figure 25-Jean-Baptiste Nolin, 'Xe Kiam, Chef des Bonzes', c. 1698, engraving (© Bibliotheque nationale de France, Cabinet des arts graphiques)



230 KATIE SCOTT

To entertain the idea of China as comedic obstructed desire presupposes a quarrel of incompatible worlds, in place of the ludic swerve of incommensurable ones. Incompatible worlds may be defined as those which share a frame of reference sufficiently to beg to differ, or to learn to hate.138 In visual terms incompatibility involves more that a choice of stance or posture;139 it is a matter of the very language of representation. In the overdoors that depict provincial genre scenes (Figs 12 and 13), China is projected according to the same laws of physics and rules of geometry that govern the depiction of the 'real' world, but in such a way as to locate it securely at a distance. The persuasive conventions of linear perspective and illusion, which anchor possible worlds into place, oblige the viewer to believe in China's existence; and yet, paradoxically, against this inter-adjustable ground the contrast of here and there stands out more readily, more disturbingly. Though the figures perform familiar rituals- the dance, the concert- there is a pervasive, unsettling wrongness about the clothing, gestures, landscape. The women's dresses wrap instead of hang- ing like sacks, men hide their hands in sleeves not waistcoats, the urns are top-heavy and vegetation is contrary, flowers more prolific than leaves, trees on the scale of plants. The demonic otherness of these details sets East and West on a collision course - from which the anticipated outcome, actually and discursively, was no longer accommodation but conquest.

In the second decade of the eighteenth century such expressions of hostility towards China and the Chinese in French art and discourse were exceptionally rare. And although Savary des Bruslons and Montesquieu wrote memorably of the rapacity and brigandage of Chinese merchants in the '20s and '30s, it was not until the end of the century that a thoroughly secular, primarily mercantile, sinophobic literature emerged to contest the sinophilic view of the early Jesuit missionaries.140 Around 1710 the obstacle to French satisfaction was not China - in 1684 ^an Xsi had liberalised trade with the West and in 1692 he issued an edict of Christian toleration- but other European powers. The Amphitrite and other early merchant ships had to compete for trade with the superior fleets of the Dutch and the British.141 Meanwhile, in the controversy over rites and terms, the position of the mendicant orders- who stubbornly maintained that indigenous Chinese terminology for God and the rites to ancestors and Confucius violated Christian dogma- was gradually gaining ground.142 A protracted investigation by the Holy Office resulted in a decree of Pope Clement XI in 1 704, ruling against the use by missionaries of Chinese rites,

138. See Spariosu (as in n. 124), pp. 59-60. 139. I have used the word 'posture' because,

according to Le Gobien (as in n. 135, preface), one of the most distinctive characteristics of the bonzes and which marked their difference was the practice of kung fu: the practice of assuming 'certaines postures en donnant aux pieds, au bras a la teste, une situation bizarre ...'. No such bizarreness is to be found in Watteau's figure but his stance, nevertheless, establishes otherness.

140. Savary des Bruslons (as in n. 114), 1, col. 1 175: 'En un mot, les Chinois sont en Asie, comme les Juifs dans l'Europe, repandus par tout ou il y a quelque chose a gagner; trompeurs, usuriers, sans parole, pleins de souplesse & de subtilite pour

menager une bonne occasion; 8c tout cela sous une apparence de simplicite & de bonne foy . . .

'

Montesquieu, L'esprit des lots, vm, ch. XXI (ed. G. True, Paris 1956, p. 118), argues that one should not depend on the false reports of virtue made by missionaries but rather ask them about 'les brigandage des mandarins'. Cited in the context of a fuller discussion of later examples in Dermigny (as in n. 109), 1, pp. 28-29.

141. Dermigny, ibid., pp. 90-200. 142. For the Dominican view see P. Villaroel, O.P.,

'The Chinese Rites Controversy: Dominican View- point', Philippiniana Sacra, xxvin, 1993, pp. 5-61.

143. See Dunne (as in n. 110), pp. 282-302; Etiemble (as in n. 118), pp. 46-51.




especially Confucian ones, which in turn led to his decree of 1715 (Ex ilia die) and Benedict XIV's of 1742 (Ex quo singulari), banning Chinese rites and silencing further discussion.143

To return to Watteau's eunuch and bonze (Figs 23, 24) in light of this discussion, we may interpret the former's solid occupation of territory, and the latter's obstructive stance, his inhibiting gesture, as actually no more than postures which deflected hostility from respected secular and sacred European authorities, attracting their quarrels instead to themselves, that is to a blinding Chinese surface. European wounds were thus salved; Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustinians, Dutch, French and British merchants, all became allies in the joke as 'China' playfully assumed the burden of European dissent. Some viewers may have penetrated the disguise, guessed at the antagonisms hidden in the arabesque tracery; many more must have been seduced and amused by the cabinet's disjunctions, by the superficial travesty, the comic stereotyping of Chinese identity. Thus, the cabinet at La Muette travelled forwards- even, perhaps, unwittingly anticipating an imperialist future, helping indeed to secure the figural idea of China as a subject nation, a land of grotesque coolies - and simultaneously fell backwards in an innocent display of the absurd, an aesthetic performance of ornamental strangeness particular to the early modern court.144 Insofar as chinoiserie, as figure and ornament, successfully enfolded the contradictions, a power-oriented ideology was held temporarily secure in an irenic embrace.

2.3. Roulette

It remains for us now to ask: what value was attributed to the cabinet? What social function was performed or fulfilled by that exotic, ornamentalist ensemble? These questions are raised under the sign 'roulette' because fortune (in more than one sense) is implicated in the answers.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, chinoiserie was a gamble. Watteau's and Audran's highly original scheme was the first of its kind.145 The ducal families of Orleans, d'Antin and du Maine variously enjoyed China- cabinets at their country houses or in Paris; but these were created as an application of curiosite to the fabric of the house, with panels of lacquer from oriental screens fitted into the panelling on walls, rather than as invented arabesque decoration.146 Moreover, as Thomas

144. For a particularly illuminating discussion of 'strangeness' and its value at the court of Henri II see S. Mullaney, 'Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance', Representations, in, 1983, pp. 40-65.

145. Historians of chinoiserie insist on the originality of the scheme; see Impey (as in n. 3), p. 8o;Jarry (as inn. 3), p. 13.

146. Monsieur, the king's brother, had a lacquered cabinet at Saint-Cloud described with no little awe by Martin Lister in his Journey to Paris in the year 1698, 2nd edn, London 1699, pp. 205-06. Much later, Giles-Marie Oppenord created a cabinet for the duchesse d' Orleans at Bagnolet, a drawing for which in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin shows lacquer fragments captured and disciplined in rectilinear

frameworks of oak panelling. Kimball (as in n. 1 ) , p. 140, relates the drawing to a 'cabinet de la Chine rouge' at the Palais royal, but I have been unable to identify such a room in the Orleans inventories. However, there were at least two Chinese cabinets at Bagnolet: the 'cabinet de la Chine', primarily a porcelain cabinet, and the 'cabinet de bois de la Chine' or lacquer cabinet. It is probably to the latter that the Oppenord drawing relates. Since there is no trace of the room in the Regent's inventory (A.N. Xia 9162, 16 March 1724) it must have been realised post 1724. The room, combining lacquer and mirror-glass and articulated by pilasters, is described in some detail in Louis d'Orleans's inventory (A.N. Xia 9170, 17 February 1752). The duchesse du Maine's cabinet at the hotel du Maine,



232 KATIE SCOTT

Crow first fully recognised, the arabesque was a practical joke, a breaker of classical codes and conventions.147 Watteau's and Audran's scheme likewise risked novelty in a context where convention largely prevailed.148 Its success, moreover, rested on taste for actual Chinese things which, in turn, were themselves hazardously secured

by long-distance maritime trade. It was not simply by good fortune that Chinese

porcelain and lacquer, and tric-trac and card tables, cohabited in intimate, scarlet

splendour at the hotel d'Armenonville in Paris; nor indeed that d'Armenonville and his wife invested speculatively in merchant ships.149 Chinese things invoked chance, encouraged risk- and by their playful indeterminacy in one instance, helped to re-arrange the consumer market as a game: in 1689 the due d'Orleans held a sensational lottery at the Palais Royal and the public gambled for Chinese trinkets.150

I should like here not to argue the matter through in intricate detail but rather to address the crossed destinies of fortune and chinoiserie in more general terms. The

closely determined, densely meshed social order of the ancien regime ensured that those who sought a chink in its hard-ribbed grid, a back-ladder to social advance- ment, often did so successfully only with fortune as an ally. In such games of social credit, a Chinese cabinet might become a trump, an ace of diamonds, a card high enough to best the spade-full hands of those of nobler birth. Historically the four suits represented the orders of feudal society, with diamonds standing for the merchants;151 and 'roulette' is really the fulfilment of the merchants' tale. Secured and exploited by absolutist policy, the exotic as a significant part of the luxury economy was an important means by which the cultural system of the court was

gradually reorganised by the forces of capitalism. However, pursuing such grand theories in the local terms of the cabinet will involve attending to the infinitely small,

rue de Bourbon (now rue de Lille), realised under the direction of Robert de Cotte and Armand-Claude Mollet in the second decade of the 18th century, consisted in narrow panels of lacquer exotically held into place in the panelling by frameworks of carved chimeras and Chinese figures (see F. de Catheu, 'La decoration des hotels du Maine au faubourg Saint- Germain', Bulletin de la societe de Vhistoire de Vart

francais, 1945, pp. 46-100; for colour illustrations of some of the wall panels see B. Pons, French Period Rooms (1650-1800), Dijon 1995, pp. 35-37) • Finally, in 1714 Antoine Vasse realised a Chinese cabinet for the duchesse d'Antin which also combined lacquer, carving and mirrors; it was described in the Mercure de France as producing a seductive coup d'ceil. See F. Souchal, French Sculptors of the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Centuries, 4 vols, London 1977-93, in, pp. 418-19.

147. Crow (as in n. 6), esp. 59-61. See also Scott (as in n. 6), pp. 123-45.

148. See Scott (as in n. 6), pp. 109-17. 149. For the couple's investments in merchant

shipping see above, n. 23. While these records do not give the vessels' itineraries, some, very likely, were prow-bound for the East. At the time of Jeanne Gilbert's death in 1716, she had in her cabinet (A.N. 6AP 12 IAD, 3 December 1716) 'deux tables ... couvertes de drap vert, l'une a cinq pents et

l'autre a trois, prisees ensemble avec un tric-trac a pied couvert de maroquin noir auquel couvercle est un damier garny de ses dames et cornets' (item 161); and in her gallery was another wooden card table similarly covered in green cloth (item 165). In the division of Jeanne Gilbert's estate (A.N. T/720, 25 April 1717) it emerges that in the case of her investment of 1 ,500 livres in the Griffon, she received a return of only 975 livres, 'qui est tout ce qu'on estime pouvoir recouvrir de cette affaire.' Regarding their joint 6,000 livre investment in ships at La Rochelle, a note in the margin of the inventory reads: 'actions sur des vaisseaux douteux'; yet despite the risks d'Armenonville continued to invest in long- distance overseas trade. At the time of his death his investments included 'deux actions interessees de la Compagnie des Indes . . . avec leurs dividendes des six premiers mois de l'annee 1728 et suivant' (A.N. 6AP i2,fol. 333V).

150. An account of the lottery appeared in Mercure galant, July 1689, pp. 178-86. See also Belevitch- Stankevitch (as in n. 77), p. 95.

151. The four estates represented are: the nobility (Spades); the clergy (Hearts); the merchants (Diamonds); the peasantry (Clubs). See C. Olmsted, 'Analyzing a Pack of Cards', in Gambling, ed. R. D. Herman, London 1967, pp. 136-47.




and the seemingly trivial: to the details of Watteau's sources in costume and fine Chinese wares; and to duchesse Elizabeth-Charlotte d'Orleans's querulous complaint that lansquenet, or games of chance, had by the 1690s all but replaced dance.152

Modern scholarship argues that the social practice which grounded the visual conjury of China at La Muette was the fete or court masque. In contrast to the performances of the Commedia deWarte which provided a context for seeing the joke of the cabinet, the performance of the masque offers both model and material for understanding its social use, its function. Notwithstanding the economies introduced at Versailles in the New Year of 1700, for instance, the masques in the run-up to Lent were astonishingly exotic.153 Monsieur, the prince de Bourbon-Conde (the king's brother), and the chanceliere, Madame de Pontchartrain, organised respectively a collation a la chinoise at the chateau of Saint-Cloud and a fete chinoise in Paris, while the beginning of carnival was celebrated by a select court at Marly with an entertain- ment entitled Le Roy de la Chine in which Louis played the starring role.154 For one of these, if not for a mascarade organised by Monsieur le Prince in his rooms at Versailles that same January, Jean I Berain designed his 'Habit de Mandarin Chinois' (Fig. 26) which was worn by the due de Bourgogne and is believed to have served as the source for some of Watteau's Figures chinoises (cf. Fig. 23).155 However, whereas, in the latter, comedy arose from doubling of reference, from identities playing through and against one another (the French coquette arising from below, as it were, to disrupt the occidental fantasy of China), in Berain's costume design, Arlequin's distinctive multi-chequered coat is superimposed onto the Chinese habit, so that Arlequin and China jostle for position on the surface, drawing attention to the plurality and the ubiquity of performance.

What did it mean to put on Chinese costume, to become one of Watteau's figures, so to speak? To understand court masques and their implications here it seems important to distinguish costume and disguise. Disguise implies anonymity; costume connotes consensus, a shared responsibility for appearance. Court masques seem largely to belong to the latter. They were tightly controlled events, the themes often assigned (by the king or one of his heirs), the participants hand-picked, and the costumes and sets designed by the office of the Menus plaisirs, whose brief it was to attend to the unity and coherence of the ensemble.156 Even in the absence of

152. 'La danse est done hors de mode partout? Chez nous en France, des qu'il y a une assemblee, on ne fait que jouer au lansquenet; e'est le jeu qui est ici le plus en vogue; les jeunes gens ne veulent plus danser.' Letter to La Raugrave Louise, from Paris 14 May 1695, in Lettres de Madame, duchesse d 'Orleans, nee Princesse Palatine, ed. O. Amiel, preface P. Gascar, Paris 1981, p. 118; cited by Kavanagh (as in n. 7), p. 32.

153. Saint-Simon in his Memoires (as in n. 15), vn, p. 1 , records that the year began with the announce- ment of the king's refusal to pay for alterations and redecoration of courtiers' apartments. Within days he was discussing the magnificence of the balls and entertainments which followed rapidly one upon another between Candlemas and Lent.

1 54. On these various fetes see L 'art en France et en Suede (as in n. 81), p. 262; Belevitch-Stankevitch (as

in n. 77), pp. 171-72; R.-A. Weigert, Jean I Berain, dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet du mi (1640- iyn): sa vie, safamille, son style, 2 vols, Paris 1937, 1, pp. 77-78, 91; and M. Eidelberg, 'Fantastic Costumes and Factual Prints', On Paper, 1, March-April 1997, pp. 19-21.

155. On the print see Weigert,/mn I Berain (as in n. 154), 11, no. 250; for a contemporary description of the costume as worn by the due de Bourgogne see below, n. 160. I thank the editors for drawing my attention to a silk brocade (c. 1700 incorporating some of Berain's designs for Chinese costumes. See A. Gruber, Chinoiserie: der Einfluss Chinas aufdie euro- pdische Kunst iy.-ig. Jahrhundert, exhib. cat., Bern 1984, pp. 38-42, ill. pp. 40-41.

156. For a different reading of masquerade see S. Cohen, 'Masquerade as Mode in the French Fashion Print', in The Clothes that we Wear: Essays on Dressing



234 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 26. After Jean I. Berain, 'Habit de Mandarin Chinois', c. 1700, etching and engraving (Department of Prints and Drawings, © The British Museum)




a designated theme, as in the case of the prince de Bourbon-Conde's mascarade at Versailles, a constituent order was created by the guests' coordinated dressing of themselves and their retinues: the duchesse de Bourgogne and her ladies came as village brides, the princesse de Conti and her entourage 'en Espagnolettes'.157 As further limits to licence, entrees or arrivals tended smoothly to follow laws of pre- cedence.158 Such carefully choreographed flights into royally sanctioned alterity thus seemingly left little scope for carnavalesque disorder, for rough fantasy, turbulent ambition or acts of transgression;159 on the contrary, they provided opportunities for the serious business of enacting, of bringing to life and light, the buried structures of status and clientage. Thus, insofar as Watteau'sjfrgw^s not only drew on but evoked the world of court masques, they represented a culture which played at otherness in order to be more essentially, more perfectly itself.

Costume, however, was not the sole experience of Versailles. At de Bourbon- Conde's ball, guests departed only to return in disguise. It was at this point that de Bourgogne donned his Chinese habit (Fig. 26), the beard affording him anonymity and first acquaintance with doing without those social distinctions which before the interval had been the abiding object of mimicry and play.160 In this new arena status was increasingly a matter of assertion, of appearance: an individual, not a collective responsibility. For Madame de Pontchartrain's ball in 1699, the duchesse de Bourgogne had apparently sought a design for her costume from her father confessor pere Louis Le Comte, formerly a Jesuit missionary to China, exploiting, in the interests of eclat, her superior access to the authentic.161 In disguise, authenticity, status, was less a property of persons than of things, and operated according to slyly different rules. Masquerade set the scene for a game of family fortunes and courtiers dressed competitively to express or dissemble haute noblesse and fealty, in high hope of royal sanction and favour.

In the unofficial and unpredictable race for distinction, visual signs and luxury goods assumed an increasingly significant role. Reports tell, for instance, of the porcelain and silks used like theatrical props for the exotic divertissements organised by courtiers;162 I have found no visual records, but the capacity of porcelain vases temporarily to circumscribe an isle of delight is attested in an illustration of a fete at Versailles in 1678 (Fig. 27)163- even if, at this earlier date, the theme is classical

and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. J. Munns and P. Richards, Newark and London 1999, pp. 174-207.

157. See L'art en France et en Suede (as in n. 81), p. 260.

158. Ibid. 159. The French court masques were thus in

important respects quite different from the urban masquerades of 18th-century England, analysed by T. Castle in Masquerade and Civilization: the Carnival-

esque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, London 1986, esp. pp. 52-109.

160. The event was described by Daniel Cronstrom in January 1700 as follows: 'Le Due de Bourgogne estoit en Druide chinois. II avoit une jaquette grise, qui luy venoit a my-jambe; par dessus cela un petit manteau venant a la Cinture, bigarree de differentes

couleurs en losange, comme un habit de harlequin, lequel couvroit une bosse artificielle. Sa coeffure estoit un parasoll tenant a sa teste duquel s'ostoit une aigrette de 2 pieds de haut; son masque estoit un vieillard a barbe grise' [my emphasis]. L'art en France et en Suede (as in n. 8 1 ) , p. 260.

161. '"Le confesseur, continue Mme Dunoyer [Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer], avoua ingen- nieusement qu'il avait plus de commerce avec les Chinois qu'avec les Chinoises. ...' An amusing account of this unorthodox way of treating a father confessor as a fashion guru appears in a letter quoted in Belevitch-Stankevitch (as in n. 77), p. 171. For Le Comte 's Nouveaux memoires see above, n. 78.

162. See ibid., 162-70. 163. See Andre Felibien, Relation de la feste de

Versailles du 18 juillet mil six cens soixante-huit, Paris



236 KATIE SCOTT

Figure 27. Jean Lepautre, 'Illuminations du Palais et des Jardins de Versailles', from Andre Felibien, Relation de lafeste de Versailles du 18 juillet 1668, Paris 1679, engraving (By permission of The British Library)

rather than Chinese. Twenty years later, in a fictional/^ related by Madeleine de

Scudery in her Conversations nouvelles, beautiful and rare merchandise constituted the very focal point, the distinguishing object, of the occasion. At a salon at Marly guests discovered for their amusement four magnificent shops complete with shop- keepers, counters, dice and dice-cups and a prodigious diversity of 'marchandises

galantes' from the East and Europe, including Chinese coffers, tables, large and small cabinets, boxes and fans.164 The company was urged to gamble freely, extravagantly for what it wanted, the exotic wares thus seeming to function as strange attractors, instituting about themselves potentially turbulent fields of players competing for chance possession.

The conjunction of imported luxuries and gambling is suggestive in a number of ways. With respect to the objects themselves, gambling as a means of acquisition reinforces the idea that such goods fall outside routine circuits of production and

exchange; it implies that they were neither laboured over nor laboured for. Rather

1679. I am grateful to Juliet Carey for drawing my attention to this text. The occasion illustrated here, an illumination devised by Gissey, took place at one of the ' 1001 'fetes celebrating the declaration of peace in Europe after the end of the Dutch War in 1678. According to Felibien 's account, the interior of the temporary structure which housed the feast given in the petit Pare before the firework display was crowned

with an elaborate cornice along which were arranged, backlit, 64 'vases de porcelain', while outside, Gissey stationed 200 similar vases, 'de quatre pieds de haut de plusieurs facons, et ornez de differentes manieres', presided over by statues of the Four Parts of the World.

164. Madeleine de Scudery, Conversations nouvelles sur divers sujets, 2 vols, Paris 1698, 11, pp. 489-91.




they were discovered, became objects of speculation and of accumulation without prior possession. With regard to the players, gambling confirms that we are among gens de qualite: risk affords opportunities for quality to show itself by its honnete insouciance.165 Gambling functioned, according to Thomas Kavanagh, as the defining quality of nobility, affirming its legal, moral and spiritual superiority through its equanimity to swings in fortune which concerned no more that the in- and out-rush of louts to and from its purses.166 However, in Mile de Scudery's tale the king and host finally spoils honour's splendid resistance to the incursions of the money because, unbeknownst to the players, he has guaranteed all losses in advance and in making everyone a winner has thereby deprived them of the clearest victory of all, the victory in defeat. In this circumstance, where Louis XIV explicitly assumes the role of Destiny, the scene changes focus; exotic goods come to signify the drawing force of Bourbon monarchy, its power to dazzle and infantilise. Players were brought to exchange their noble autonomy for the mere role of high-placed and dependant subject caught in struggles with an absolute ruler upon whose capricious favour all seemingly rely for their prosperity.167 Goods, gamblers and government are related in Mile de Scudery's tale and in the society it portrays not accidentally but meaning- fully.

Applying the insights prompted by this 'conversation' to d'Armenonville and his cabinet at La Muette suggests that nobles manipulated luxuries, curiosities, exotica of all kinds (even if on a lesser scale than in the story) to attract their own measure of approbation and to better the displays of others. To live nobly was to exhibit taste on a potentially ruinous scale and to avow an indifference to constraints of cost

165. In Madeleine de Scudery's story, the character Clorelise recommends in addition to reading, needle- work, painting, music and walking, 'le jeu sans passion, & pour peu de temps' for women of the court (ibid., p. 471). The (real) chevalier Mere, who eschewed the strange behaviour and odd super- stitions of some gamblers, insisted that 'II fautjouer le plus qu'on peut en honnete homme, et se rendre a perdre comme a gagner, sans que l'un ni l'autre se connoisse au visage ni a la facon de proceder.' (Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Mere, Oeuvres completes du chevalier Mere, ed. C. H. Boudhors, 3 vols, Paris 1930, in, p. 165). And as related by Ortigue de Vaumoriere, Uart de plaire dans la conversation, Paris

1711, p. 429, in a dialogue between Eraste and Dorante it is readily acknowledged that an honnete homme may gamble 'quand on joue plutot par amusement, que par interest.' For historians' views of aristocratic gambling seej. Dunkley, 'Gambling: a Social and Moral Problem in France 1685-1792', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ccxxxv, 1985, passim (but for a succinct statement p. 17); and Kavanagh (as in n. 7), pp. 29-66.

166. Kavanagh (as in n. 7), pp. 38-44. D. M. Downes, Gambling, Work and Leisure: A Story across Three Areas, London 1976, p. 16, makes the more essentialist argument that 'Those whose status is based on the aleatory principle of heredity will cultivate it at play'.

167. That is, the scenario can be related to the classic Oedipal one. For psychoanalytic readings of gambling see The Psychology of Gambling, ed. J. Halliday and P. Fuller, London 1974, in which are reprinted, among others, Sigmund Freud, 'Dostoy- evsky and Parricide' (pp. 157-74) anc* Edmund Bergler, 'The Psychology of Gambling' (pp. 175- 201). Freud's discussion of the bisexual component which drove Dostoyevsky's Oedipal fantasies and gambling sprees suggests that the courtier's relationship with his absolute monarch may be understood psychoanalytically as similarly characterised by a dual impulse: to want to be in the father's place and to want to be a woman for the father. It was into the latter position that the courtiers at Marly were forced (by royal will as well as by fantasy) . Edmund Bergler developed out of Freud the theme of 'psychic maso- chism', according to which the gambler searches for unjust treatment and desires to lose, in order to vindicate his belief that his father despises him. Considered at the level of social rather than individual practice, Bergler's theory raises the possibility of understanding court gambling as behaviour prompted by the nobility's sense of itself as out of favour, as unjustly diminished and overlooked. It is beyond the scope of this study to develop either of these threads here. They are mentioned in order to lay stress on the pain as well as the pleasure inherent in 18th-century play.



238 KATIE SCOTT

Figures 28 (left), 29 (right). Chinese porcelain: Kan Xsi vases, 1662-1722; Arita vase, 1700-22 (© The Board of Trustess of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

analogous to the gambler's masochistic disregard for reality and the certainty of eventual loss at the tables.168 However, for members of the new financial and office-

holding elites, like d'Armenonville, it further required throwing aside the prudent management of wealth by which fortunes sufficient to the purchase of office had been carefully accumulated in order to risk, via conspicuous display, accession to a higher legitimacy.169 According to President Henault, d'Armenonville embodied

precisely this contradiction: inwardly calculating in his talent for finance, outwardly liberal in his style of life, he ultimately owed the grudging consideration of the court to the convincing performance of his three graceful houses, Rambouillet, La Muette and Madrid.170 We might say that, in playing to win, the members of this new elite accelerated the process of reification already at work at the fetes, by which nobility was implicitly transposed from persons and behaviours onto things.

The eighteenth-century word cabinet simultaneously denotes a physical space, the social practices accomplished therein and a piece of furniture.171 We might, then, conceive that in the game 'Distinction' Watteau's cabinet was turned inside-out: inverted from a void, a space of fetes and charade (accomplished within and upon the walls) into a material object, a generically exotic counter.172 Observing the cabinet in this second manifestation is no longer to see in Watteau's and Audran's designs the

168. See Elias (as in n. 8), pp. 37-38, 53; Scott (as in n. 6), pp. 81-97.

169. Kavanagh (as in n. 7), pp. 50-51. 170. Henault is cited by Franqueville (as in n. 13),

pp. 49-50.

171. See Antoine Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel, 3 vols, The Hague 1690, 1, 'cabinet'; Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire frangais, Geneva 1693, p. 170.

172. Or, to put it differently again, we compare its metaphorical passage to that from the ludic space




Figure 30. Lacquer cabinet, Japanese (Kyoto?) and French (Paris), c. 1680, hiba-wood lacquered in black and gold (© By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection)

simulacra of chinoiserie but to recognise instead their likeness to actual Chinese things. It is mentally to match the scheme of elaborately framed, isolated 'chinois' (Fig. 2) to, for example, scenes in blue and white on transitional and Kan Xsi porcelain (Fig. 28); to trace across female beauties, parasoled or with fans full spread (Figs 4, 7, 8) to Kakiemon and Imari wares (Fig. 29); to travel the floating world of the arabesque (Figs 4, 11, 16, 18) according to that marelle rhythm perfected to navigate the archi-

pelagos of golden islands unfolding across black, lacquered space (Fig. 30). 173 The materialism of the taste for the exotic was, as we have seen, a comic sub-theme in both Regnard's and Dufresny's plays and Watteau and Audran's cabinet.114 However,

of the studio on the ground floor of the Palais du Luxembourg to the casino in the basement where up to 400 players nightly placed their bets at the invitation of the duke of Modena. For the latter see Kavanagh (as in n. 7), p. 255 n. 1.

173. Belevitch-Stankevitch (as in n. 77), p. 250, also proposed that Watteau was drawing on actual Chinese things. Eidelberg and Gopin (as in n. 3), pp. 36-40 and n. 51, have argued, on the contrary, that the range of specific motifs makes travel literature a more likely source. My point is rather different, insofar as it concerns the address to the viewer, or

to the consumer, rather than the working methods of the painter. On the trade in oriental ceramics in the late 17th and 18th centuries see J. Ayers, O. Impey andj. Mallet, Porcelain for Palaces: The Fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750, London 1990; T. Wolvesperges, 'Les vicissitudes du marche des lacques a Paris au XVIIIe siecle', Histoire de VArt, xl/xli, 1998, pp. 59-73; and esp. C. Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: the Marchands-merciers of Eighteenth- Century Paris, London 1996, pp. 62-96.

1 74. Additionally we can note that when, in Le Sage's Arlequin invisible (1713), Arlequin greedily



240 KATIE SCOTT

the lightness and comic wit expressed at La Muette was soon undone by the weight of that which it sought subtly to mock: for within twenty-odd years, competition for status and favour forced the scheme to make way for newer, presumably more winsome, decoration.175

The conflict of meanings in the word cabinet additionally raises long-standing questions about the nature of the relationship between courtly culture and capitalist enterprise and, by extension, about the role of the early modern state in promoting both the substance and semblance of exchange between them.176 According to Werner Sombart the relationship was intimate, causal. In Luxus und Kapitalismus (1913) he argued that capitalist forms of trade and manufacture germinated in the ambitious consumer patterns of the court; and that the nobility, old and new, had, for the traditional reasons of status, readily entered the new world of capitalism by the mid-seventeenth century.177 Mile de Scudery's 'conversation' supports this view. Court and market are synchronised such that the interests of the merchants appear to fold snugly and continuously into the boundless desires of the court, her characterisation of traders and nobles serving additionally to disavow all that actually separated ease and privilege from the sweat and aggression of trade. The court merchant or 'oiselier', we are told, owed his name to his likeness to birds;178 his trade might be likened to an arabesque flight of acquisitive discovery. The fleet effortless- ness of the oiselier stands in contrast to the deathly ennui of the court (personified by Aminte, or elite, aristocratic woman), the dissipation of which is the effortful theme and enterprise of Mile de Scudery's tale. The capacity of each to reflect the denning characteristics of the other in close patterns of ease and effort imposes a smooth, mirror-mould of aesthetic order on the disruptive, turbulent forces at play; it creates a dialogue unknown to the participants. Furthermore, inasmuch as Louis XIV functions in the tale as the deus ex machina, as the one who sets desires and ambitions in motion, the mercantile policies of the early modern state appear doubly occluded: first by the aestheticisation of commerce just noted; and secondly by court appetite, the satisfaction of which in the interest of peace and prosperity becomes the alibi for the mercantilist project. Aminte (and not her bourgeois sister) is thus advanced as the principal desiring subject, the inspiration for the traffic in commodities.179

Though in Mile de Scudery's story a generic exoticism, indiscriminately combining Near and Far Eastern goods, is secured to meet courtly demand, chinoiserie

stuffs his pockets with jewels and trinkets from the king of China's cabinet, the joke encompassed not only the things taken but also the illegitimate satisfaction of appetite. See Le Sage and d'Orneval (as in n. 94), 1, p. 69. Such comedy surely involved the insight that the exotic was in complex ways related to the social change effected by commerce, acknowledging the ill-gotten nature of the acquisition of the 'other'.

175. Rarely, such rooms survived by inheritance. See e.g. M. Jallut, 'Marie Leczinska et la peinture', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, lxxiii, 1969, pp. 309-11, on Leczinska's Chinese cabinet (1761) which was left to the duchesse de Noailles in the queen's will.

176. For a stimulating discussion of some of these issues see J. Dewald, 'The Ruling Class in the Market-

place: Nobles and Money in Early Modern France', in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. T. L. Haskell and R. F. Teichgraeber III, Cambridge 1993, PP- 43~65-

177. W. Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, transl. W. R. Dittmar, introd. P. Siegelman, Ann Arbor 1967, pp. 58-112. For an analysis of Sombart' s position in relation to Fernand Braudel's dismissal of his arguments see C. Mukerji, 'Reading and Writing with Nature: Social Claims and the French Formal Garden', Theory and Society, xix, 1990, pp. 651-58.

178. Scudery, Conversations (as in n. 164), p. 488. 179. Here I am responding to the arguments put

forward by L. Brown in Ends of Empire: Women and

Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature, Ithaca

i993,esp.pp. 103-34.




seems in fact to have enjoyed a privileged role in promoting the elision of consumption and aristocratic femininity. Missionaries like Le Comte spoke eloquently of the beauty of Chinese women and praised the refined elaboration of their dress, while at the same time admitting a deficiency of direct evidence since these women lived out a cloistered and thus suitably modest existence, tucked away in the deepest interiors of their houses.180 In so far as chinoiserie invoked these informed prejudices about China it appeared able to reconcile the irreconcilable: luxury and feminine virtue.181 That many of the chinoiserie cabinets in Paris182 and the ile de France, including d'Armenonville's at La Muette, were apparently realised for women suggests a mapping of fantasies about the first onto the second, playing out the possibility of a cloistered, chaste but luxurious femininity. D'Armenonville, indeed, seems to have associated his wife with Cathay, as is suggested by the removal after her death of a gold-footed Chinese chest from her chambre to his, presumably as a memento mori183

To summarise: the East was initially performed as a spectacle by court society. Gradually this fictive play, facilitated by both the arabesque's and the masque's hospitality to otherness, was destabilised by the introduction of imported goods. Intended to support and extend performance, they became (with the state's con- nivance) the very object of play; something ultimately to hold against privilege. In one last move, I want to consider the implications of the transition from play to game, or from an order of mimicry to an order of competition and chance- the triumph of lansquenet over dance.184 One of the authors of Les Chinois, Charles Dufresny, observed that at lansquenet 'the last among men, with money in his hands, takes whatever rank his card gives him, and finds himself above a due et pair.'185

180. On Chinese display, including sartorial display, see Le Comte (as in n. 78), 1, pp. 311-66 and n, pp. 282-83, in connection with the consequent difficulty of giving women religious instruction. Bouvet, in L'estat present de la Chine (as in n. 78), used the abstract nouns 'commodite', 'modestie', 'agrement' and 'gravite' to characterise the dress of Chinese women; and hoped that the French 'ne seroit peut- etre pas fachee de prendre quelque chose des Chinois dans la forme de ses habits: et apres en quelque maniere use toutes les modes, qu'un caprice bizarre a pu inventer, peut-estre a leur example, pensera-t-elle [la Nation] a se fixer a quelqu'une, au choix de laquelle la raison seule aura part.' As a final and rather extreme example see E. M. De La Barbi- nais Le Gentil, Nouveau voyage autour du monde, 3 vols, Paris 1728, 11, pp. 156, 158. In this account of his circumnavigation of 1716, dedicated to the comte de Morville, he announced that 'La jalousie est le premier Architecte des Chinois. II me semble qu'ils ne batissent que pour derober leurs femmes a la vue du Public' He went on to specify: 'L'appartement des femmes est dans l'endroit le plus recule. C'est un prison desagreable et obscure que l'habitude, l'idee d'un honneur chimerique, et la triste necessite a obeir a leurs maris leur fait trouver suportable.' On the grounds of their modesty, Chinese women who had converted to Christianity were held up as examples worthy of emulation; see P. Couplet, S.J.,

Histoire d'une Dame chretienne de la Chine (Madame Candide Hiu petittefille du Grand Chancellier de la Chine), Paris 1688.

181. In this chinoiserie was notably different to turquerie where the dominant idea of the harem worked to sexualise the representation of women. See P. Stein, 'Madame de Pompadour and the Harem Imagery at Bellevue', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, cxxiii, 1994, pp. 29-44, on turquerie in the 18th century.

182. For the cabinets at the hotels du Maine and d'Antin see above, n. 146; for the cabinet at the hotel Dodun see B. Pons, Waddesdon Manor, Architecture and

Panelling, London 1996, pp. 557-93, esp. 563-71; and for the cabinet by Louis Herpin and Jean-Martin Pelletier at the hotel de La Vrilliere see La rue Saint-Dominique: hotels et amateurs, exhib. cat. (Musee Rodin), Paris 1984, p. 191.

183. A.N.6AP 12 IAD, 3 December 1716, item 137, 'un coffre de la Chine avec son pied de bois dore', 'dans la chambre de Jeanne Gilbert', would seem very likely to be item 400 in d'Armenonville's inventory (A.N. 6AP 12 IAD, 22 December 1728), 'un coffre de la Chine d'environ trois pieds et demi de long sur son pied de bois dore', notwithstanding the depreciation in value from 1 50 to 30 livres.

184. See above, n. 152. 185. 'le dernier de tous les homes, l'argent a la

main, vient prendre audessus d'un due et pair, le rang que sa carte lui donne'. C. Dufresny, Amusements



242 KATIE SCOTT

Chance equalised; it enabled outsiders to break down traditional barriers of social distinction and allowed, more generally, the odds, hunches and markets played by merchants to appear alongside the parts, hands and dice played at court.186 The same forces appear to have shaped, for example, the rise and fall of Fleuriau d'Armenon- ville's credit at court; and the fluctuating returns on the cargoes of the Amphitrite.181 In the second edition of his Essay d 'analyse sur lesjeux de hasard (1713), Pierre Remond de Montmort promoted the idea that aleatory arithmetic- Blaise Pascal's 'Geometrie du Hasard'- could become part of a general 'art of conjecturing', or probability theory, which might help resolve moral, social and political decisions made under

analogous conditions of uncertainty.188 Abstract patterns of numbers, the delicate

filigree of the arithmetical triangle, appeared to hold the key to destiny; in games of all kinds courtiers and merchants, women and men, seemingly relinquished their conditioned selves to be moulded into shapes determined by principles of probability alone. Thus while these games of fortune and trade could be played to reinforce the status quo, they also afforded opportunities to pull back from the oppressive rigidities of the society of orders and experience the heady novelty of anonymity and rivalry in social relations.189 In an argument which shadows Freud's account of the psychogenesis of jokes, Roger Caillois contended that 'modern' individualising games of chance replaced the 'archaic', collective play of court entertainments once the universe was apprehended as rationally ordered and quantifiable.190 It is one of the

arguments of the present essay that, paradoxically, Watteau's fantastic and comic cabinet participated in this process of rationalisation. Thus, we find at the level of social practice, in the strategic function of the cabinet, a co-existence of ancient and modern structures, those of feudal estate and those of modern subjectivity, analogous to the bifurcated meanings, the innocence and tendentiousness, identified in its

imagery. The risk taken by d'Armenonville in his patronage of a novel decorative

genre, executed by an elite workshop- an embellishment of his property which made it more desirable, thus prompting, most likely, its compulsory purchase soon afterwards191 - in the long run returned unanticipated dividends to those of his rising

serieux et comiques, ed. J. Dunckley, Exeter 1976, p. 31, cited in Dewald (as in n. 176), p. 60.

186. For discussion of the theory and practice of risk see L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlighten- ment, Princeton 1988, pp. 1 12-87.

187. According to Franqueville (as in n. 13), pp. 47-48, Fleuriau d'Armenonville was disgraced towards the end of Louis XIV's reign. See also Saint- Simon (as in n. 15), xv, pp. 382-85 on d'Armenon- ville's loss to Nicolas Desmarets in 1708 of the post of intendant des finances, for which the capitainerie of the Bois de Boulogne was seemingly a form of com-

pensation. In 1716 d'Armenonville was appointed secretaire d'etat but objections were raised to his hold-

ing this office and that of conseiller d'etat (see BnF MS fonds francais 16219; n.a.f. 9735). Though the affair was ultimately resolved in his favour and heralded his promotion in 1722 to garde des sceaux, both d'Armenonville and his son, de Morville, were

finally dismissed from office in 1727 to make way for Germain-Louis Chauvelin, the rising star in Cardinal

Fleury's administration and coincidentally another

patron of Watteau. Amphitrite 's first voyage was highly successful andjourdan et Cie paid dividends of 50% to investors, but the second voyage, of 1701-03, brought in a loss of 100,000 ecus. See Dermigny (as in n. 109), 1, pp. 150-51; also above, n. 114.

188. Pierre Remond de Montmort, Essay d 'analyse sur les jeux de hasard (1708), 2nd edn, Paris 1713, commenting on Jacob Bernouilli's Ars conjectandi, the fourth part of which was to have extended probability theory into the realm of politics and ethics. See also B. Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire du renouvellement de VAcademie royale des sciences en 1699, Paris 1708, pp. 174-75; I- Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: a Philo-

sophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference, Cambridge 1975, esp. 63-153.

189. See for an expression of similar views Dewald (as in n. 176), p. 62.

190. R. Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, Paris 1967, pp. 161-94.

191. See above, n. 15.




Figure 31. Secretary, Italian (Venice) c. 1730-35, carved, painted and varnished linden-wood, decorated with decoupage prints (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1925-/25. 134. lab)



244 KATIE SCOTT

social class: it helped demystify privilege, reducing it to no more that the possession of surplus (exotic) things.

3. Conclusion/Postscript: Decoupage A return to the beginning, to the Figures chinoises published in 1731, the printed after-life of the cabinet, affords at one level the prospect of drawing together the various 'games' and of seeing, perhaps more clearly via the exaggerated effects of reproduction, the significance of the original. Decoupage refers, however, not just to the survival of the designs as prints but also to a potential use of them; to the way in which they too were open to play. In concluding with prints, I will therefore, necessarily be making a brief beginning- a postscript- of the end.

Decoupage follows in many ways compulsively in the wake of 'roulette', because in breaking up the space of the cabinet and reproducing in flattened, edited form only the tangible, figural elements of the scheme, the prints accomplished the process of commodification merely latent in the original. Aiming, most probably, to project the scheme into a wider, middle-market of urban, 'populuxe' consumers,192 the print-sellers Chereau and Surugue omitted the arabesques- and the sphere of playful, aristocratic sociability they evoked- and substituted simple, rectilinear frames and ostensibly informative captions ('Habillements des habitants ...', 'Idole de la Deesse ...'), thereby deflecting the Figures into a broader culture of travel and curiosite. By stripping chinoiserie of ornament, the prints stripped it too of its innocent, comic effects: the puns, double entendres and cliches. China, an incommensurate world of mirrored refinement and luxury, personified by fantastic idols or goddesses, was traded for incompatibility, for a secular, low world of eunuchs, bonzes and servants: for mere difference. Charades, one could say, decisively made way for the conquests of 'Go'.

If the livret format and informative legends officially addressed the Figures to curieux, 2l look at the advertisements in the Mercure de France reveals that exotic prints, often sold for fabrication into fans, were in the 1730s more usually directed at fashionable, elite or would-be elite, women.193 The proliferation of such printed chinoiserie testifies further to the commercial success of appealing to women as desiring subjects, as the desiring Destiny towards which trade in exotic goods naturally tended. Though gender has not figured conspicuously as an issue in this essay, the figure of woman is a recurring motif: Jeanne Gilbert, the probable recipient of the cabinet; her sex as ostensible inspiration to trade; and La Chine represented in all her exotic allure by a retinue of witty coquettes and goddesses. In all these instances femininity served the interests of change- and of capital, not land. That service was not, however, always passively given.

Decoupage was the rage in the 1720s and '30s, and in 1727 Gersaint advertised prints after Watteau for the purpose.194 Though of Venetian origin and somewhat

192. For the term 'populuxe' and an analysis of consumerism in the 18th century see C. Fairchilds, 'The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. J. Brewer and R. Porter, London !993-

193. See, for example, those advertised by Thomas Mondon in the Mercure de France in 1736 and those advertised by Huquier in 1737.

194. Mercure de France, November 1727, p. 2492. For this and other examples of decoupage advertised in the Mercure de France, including those intended




Detail of Figure 31. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1 925-/25. 1 34. lab)



246 KATIE SCOTT

later in date than Watteau's cabinet, a secretaire in the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals the ambitious ends to which the art could put; and exhibits in its interior a miscellany of complexly-patterned arabesques- of a kind to compare with the interior at La Muette- cut-out from prints and varnished into place (Fig. 3 1 ) .195 The novelty value of the figures and the silhouette-like manner in which many of them detach themselves from their backgrounds makes it likely that on occasion these too prompted something beyond complacent reception. Decoupage involved women in reproducing the creative act that had brought the original into being: their cutting, sorting and arranging analogous to Audran's and Watteau's folding, inventing and composing. It was classed as an amusement or pastime, a kind of parlour game, not for its lack of art but because worked by amateurs. However, if we take this classifi- cation as game literally for a moment, it opens the way to a fuller understanding of the particular pleasure afforded by decoupage: in creating from originals, it discovers the beginning in the end.

The pleasure we take in games derives from their action as both rule-binding and liberating; they free us from our 'normal' selves, our usual lives, but within specifically determined, consciously contrived parameters. The pleasure of this legaliberte, as Colas Duflo terms it, arises on the one hand from a willing submission to law, however arbitrary or absurd, joined on the other hand to a powerful sense of self- determination, of being the cause of destiny.196 To put it succinctly, we might say that ludic pleasure consists in an experience of equivocation, of enslavement and mastery in equal measures. The social rules of decoupage first limited play to women, subjecting them to their own company; that is, setting them aside not only in but by the game.197 The conventions of the genre restricted creativity to bricolage-a type of play using borrowed signs and assigned identities. Within these limits, however, decoupage armed its devotees with scissors, invited a playful sabotage, a bladed decom- missioning of exotic commodities (or rather representations thereof) by those they purported to define. Watteau's cabinet in the hands of women, cut-up, rearranged, in-mixed with other designs and patterns, was, I suggest, freed of some of its old, patriarchal power to enthral, amuse, and define; freed, potentially at least, to instate a new disorder of feminine design.

The Courtauld Institute of Art

for making 'Chinese' fans, see Scott (as in n. 6), pp. 249-50.

195. On this secretaire see the magnificent article by D. O. Kisluk-Grosheide, '"Cutting Up Berchems, Watteaus, and Audrans": A Lacca povera Secretary at The Metropolitan Museum of Art', The Metropolitan Museum Journal, xxxi, 1996, pp. 81-97.

196. C. T>ui\o,Jouer et philosopher, Paris 1997, passim. 197. For an address about decoupage made specifi-

cally to women see 'Lettre ecrite par M. Constantin a la marquise de *** sur la nouvelle mode des meubles en decoupure', Mercure de France, December 1727, quoted in full in Kisluk-Grosheide (as in n. 195), pp. 94-95. For actual spaces filled using decoupage see

e.g. Bruno Pons's fascinating reconstruction of the duchesse de Bourbon's cabinet interieur which contained, at her death, portfolios 'remplis de differentes decoupures', a pastime of which she was notably fond, and was decorated with panelling a la capucine by Francois Roumier, inset with fancy portraits of members of her family in the guise of saints and nuns -persons in retreat from the world. The location and decoration of the room reinforced its privacy and its function as a space for decoupage. Pons (as in n. 182), pp. 497-521. For a discussion of secluded-ness as one of the defining characteristics of play see Huizinga (as in n. 42), pp. 28-29.




Detail of Figure 31. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1 925-/25. 1 34. lab)



248 JOURNAL OF THE WARBURG AND COURTAULD INSTITUTES



watteau's chinese cabinet

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