ABSTRACT
With the publication of L’honneste-homme ou L’art de plaire à la court (The proper gentleman, or, The art of pleasing at court; 1630) by nicolas Faret (1596?– 1646), a new social etiquette took root in seventeenth-century France, one that prescribed a vigilant self-monitoring of the courtly subject through the use of his judgment, understanding, virtue, and reason. In particular, Faret’s precepts insisted on the regulation of the body: the courtier must never passively submit to the intemperance of his humors or the disorder of his passions: “One of the most important and most universal maxims that must be followed in this company is to moderate the passions… . And certainly, when a mind is thus tainted with these lethal seeds, what likelihood is there that it can produce anything but bitter fruit, and that those who have recognized it do not attempt to flee at its approach, as from a person taken unexpectedly by some contagious illness? Let us therefore be masters of ourselves, let us know how to command our own affections if we wish to win those of others.”1 Faret erected the need to be “master of oneself” and of one’s body, to control one’s humors and affects, into the guiding concept for the individual seeking to be integrated into the royal court. That important precept governed the social model of the age known by the term honnêteté.2
