THE WRITER AND SOCIAL STRATEGY
169
So
much for the writer's outlook. I want to turn next
to
his
actual position in seventeenth-century society. In a short play called
La
Critique de /'ecole des femmes,
which Moliere wrote as a reply
to
his
critics, the character who represents the dramatist himself
uses these words:
The great test of all your comedies is the judgment of the Court. It is the
taste of the Court that you must study if you want to discover the
art
of
success. There is no place where opinions are so just; and without bring–
ing in all the learned people who are there, through natural, simple good
sense and mixing with the whole of the elegant world, there is created
there an attitude of mind which, without comparison, judges things
with more penetration than all the rusty learning of the pedants.
Now this was not idle flattery. There is no doubt that the Court
of Louis XIV did represent an intellectual elite and that it did provide
the writer with his audience. He lived by pleasing, and those whom
he needed to please were first and foremost the people whom the King
gathered round him.
How in fact did the writer live in the seventeen!9 century? The
answer
is
that he lived by patronage. There were two forms of pa–
tronage-the private patron and the King.
The aristocrats were well pleased to have a few men of letters
in their train and to pay for their services. When a dramatist published
one of his plays it was generally prefaced by a fulsome eulogy ad–
dressed to one of the great; and the author was suitably recompensed.
Some of the great were naturally more generous than others, and the
writers soon found out who paid best for their dedications. One in–
genious man made a practice of dedicating each edition of his books
to a fresh patron simply by changing the name at the beginning of
the dedication and drawing a further reward for his pains from the
new patron.
I think that this suggests already the sort of relations which
existed between what may be called the blood aristocracy and the
intellectual aristocracy. The nobility paid the writer for his services,
sometimes found a sinecure for him and for his literary friends in
their households, but they also kept him strictly in his place. A writer
who published a satire on a nobleman knew what to expect. A posse
of the noble lord's servants would seek him out and administer a sound
thrashing. Sometimes the victim would act himself. It is reported
