the honnête femme, he found women to be especially promising pupils precisely because they were, by academic standards, ignorant; they had not been corrupted by the “blind prejudice” of “the schools.”26 But he did not see the delicacy of their imaginations as a source of intellectual clarity; unusually “strong, constant women” were distinguished by the fact that their imaginations were relatively lacking in delicacy and hence more easily disempowered.
The Bel Esprit
To extend our reach deeper into the meanings Malebranche attached to “effeminacy,” we have to follow the social line of his thought, particularly as it focuses on language as the instrument of human intersubjectivity. Malebranche “ordinarily got bored in conversations,” his friends recalled, but “he said an infinity of times that he never got bored when he was alone.”27 If he could not live a cloistered life, he could at least avoid unwanted contacts with the world outside the Oratorian residence, and with some of his neighbors within it, by withdrawing into himself. Explaining this inclination simply as a matter of temperament would leave us with an all-too-obvious half-truth. Malebranche’s preference for solitude was grounded in the sharp dichotomy he drew between the silence of meditation and the noise of social communication, and that in turn marked a cultural tension in the worlds he inhabited and observed.
The upper reaches of seventeenth-century French society harbored a felt need for the state of silence in solitude. It stood in counterpoint to the aesthetic ideal of conversation, promising to some an occasional respite, and to others a permanent refuge, from the hyper-relational self that polite sociability required. We would seriously underestimate the tension between speech and silence if we conceived it simply as a line dividing worldly honnêtes gens, devoted to the art of conversation, from people with more devout sensibilities. The line also runs through the milieus of polite sociability, registering a strain internal to it. The life of Mme Madeleine de Sablé literally straddled the line. A habitué of the Blue Room, she experienced a conversion under Jansenist influence in 1652, at fifty-four, and built an apartment abutting the convent at Port Royal. Her new residence positioned her to alternate between participating in the nuns’ monastic life and presiding over an elegant salon peopled by cultivated aristocrats of both sexes and Jesuit men of letters as well as Jansenist luminaries.28 In the case of Mme Marguerite Hessein Rambouillet de la Sablière, a grande dame of le monde who had had strong interests in worldly literature, philosophy, and science (she had been a convinced Cartesian) and had been the patroness of Jean de la Fontaine, renunciation took the form of a far more radical break, in reaction to a humiliating marriage and a broken love affair. Following her conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism in the late 1670s, she entered a life of penitence. “I am in complete solitude … with God,” she wrote joyfully in 1692 to her spiritual guide the abbé de Rancé. “Having talked too much,” she informed the spiritual director Rancé had chosen for her, “I must remain silent.”29
Malebranche saw this need for solitude in the women who sought his spiritual guidance. In his own order, the same need had found expression in the founders’ strong attraction to the mysticism of, among others, Bernard de Clairvaux and Saint Theresa of Avila. Though he was wary of the theological implications of the mystical tradition, Malebranche advocated and practiced a form of spirituality that had strong affinities with it. The theologian who seems to have served as his director of conscience for the last forty years of his life was the abbé Pierre Berrand, a student of mysticism with a strong ascetic bent. Berrand taught “hatred” of the natural “self” (le moi) and the practice of solitary “prayer” in a systematic ascent through stages of meditation.30
Another figure looms large in this world of pious women and priests seeking to extract themselves from worldliness: Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, the founder of the Trappist order. The sole heir of a wealthy family that had ascended to the pinnacle of the Parisian robe nobility, Rancé came of age with the titles and incomes of no less than five ecclesiastical benefices. His extensive classical education had equipped him to be a fashionable man of letters and a dazzling habitué of the salons. His ecclesiastical dignities did not prevent him from leading the life of a dandyish libertine in Parisian high society. “I am going this morning to preach like an angel,” he wrote a friend, “and tonight to hunt like a devil.”31 In 1657, when he was twenty-nine, the sudden death of his mistress Marie de Montbazon, herself a notorious libertine, set him on the path to radical renunciation of the world. In 1686, in a letter to Mme de Lafayette, he would recall of this conversion that “agreeable conversation, worldly pleasures, plans for a career and a fortune, seemed to be such vain and hollow things that I began to look on them with disgust.”32 In 1664 his renunciation took a radical turn; he left Paris to take up his duties as abbot at Notre-Dame-de-La-Trappe, a monastery in the Perche valley that had fallen into ruin and had been reduced to six monks of dubious religious commitment. He replaced these remaining residents with a group of Cistercian monks of the strict observance. Taking the Anachronites, the hermit saints of the early Eastern church, as his models, he set about subjecting himself and his fellow monks to a life devoted entirely to penitence and expiation.33 The major exception to Rancé’s embrace of silence was his correspondence with several society women who sought his spiritual guidance, of whom Mme de la Sablière was one.
Some churchmen protested that Rancé’s excessively severe rule created a climate of sadism and encouraged suicide. But notoriety only increased the fascination with La Trappe at the royal court and in Parisan high society, as well as in the clergy; the monastery became a kind of pilgrimage site for people in these circles. For some, visits to La Trappe probably offered little more than an opportunity for spiritual tourism. Others were drawn to Rancé’s community precisely because it was so uncompromising in excluding the relentless demands of polite sociability. They felt a need for expiatory solitude, and wanted to experience it even though they could not devote their lives to it.
Malebranche was one of the latter. We have known from Lelong’s biography that he was on close terms with Rancé, and that he made periodic “retreats” at the monastery. But one of the two surviving letters from Rancé to Malebranche, largely ignored to date, tells us much more. Dated April 9, 1672, the letter is in response to Malebranche’s announcement of his “resolution” to become a member of the community at La Trappe. Not wanting to seem to have recruited Malebranche, the abbé urged him to keep secret their earlier conversations about his “plan.” Though he approved of the decision in principle, he remained concerned that a man with Malebranche’s frail health would not be able to withstand the harsh physical conditions (he notes “the horrors of the long winters”) and “the deprivation of all human contact and consolation” at La Trappe. But if Malebranche remains unphased by “all the possible consequences of so great a renunciation,” Rancé writes, he should “follow the stirrings of grace”; “a person taking so great a step must have complete trust in God and expect nothing from human help.” He advised him, though, to visit La Trappe before making a decision.34
Malebranche obviously changed his mind, probably because in the end he had to acknowledge to himself that his poor health was an insuperable obstacle. But the very fact of his resolution in the spring of 1672 points us to the complexity of his vocation. That was the year in which Rance introduced a new regimen at La Trappe, still harsher than the Cistercian strict observance. Henceforth the monks could no longer use their cells as private retreats; they could retire to them only for sleep, in complete darkness. Their entire waking lives would be spent in a collectivity of silence, without conversation of any kind. By 1672 Malebranche almost certainly had begun writing The Search After Truth, whose first volume would appear two years later. He knew from conversations with Rancé, and perhaps from visits to La Trappe, that, in sharp contrast to his own and other orders, the monastery was organized on the principle that the life of a monk was one of penitence in silent retreat, not study. Learning led to speech, and speech would transform the monk into a public spectacle.35
Malebranche was apparently willing to abandon his philosophical project, and indeed the entire world of learning, for a life in which reading would be limited to devotional material. Having turned back from a commitment to harsh asceticism, he would henceforth retire periodically to La Trappe, where he could