Madeleine de Scudery Quotes on Love

Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) — the seventeenth-century French novelist whose Saturday salon shaped the literary culture of mid-century Paris and whose long romances Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53) and Clélie (1654–60) made her the most widely read French author of her generation — gave précieux salon culture its most influential philosophical treatment of love. The famous Carte de Tendre embedded in Clélie maps the moral geography through which the affections of esteem, gratitude, and inclination develop into the legitimate forms of romantic friendship — and the broader theory developed across the conversations and the novels insists that love worthy of the name presupposes the reciprocal recognition of moral and intellectual equals. The framework, drawing on the neoplatonic tradition of Renaissance love treatises and the seventeenth-century French moralist culture, shaped subsequent French reflection on the relations of the sexes and the early intellectual self-understanding of educated women.