La promenade architecturale de Mélite: initiation au libertinage ou démonstration de savoir-vivre dans la Petite Maison de Jean-François de Bastide
Dix Huitieme Siecle Revue Annuelle De La Societe Francaise D Etude Du Dix Huitieme Siecle, 2004
An analysis of Jean-Francois de Bastide' s La Petite Maison, this article investigates the wa... more An analysis of Jean-Francois de Bastide' s La Petite Maison, this article investigates the way in which the correlation existing between architecture and decorum at the time of Louis XIV is both maintained and transformed in eighteenth-century libertine texts into a relationship between space and conve¬ nience, while the tension resulting from this opposition of continuity and change comes to characterize libertinage itself. Referring to the work that sociologist Norbert Elias wrote on Court Society in which, using Versailles as an example, he drew a parallel between architecture and etiquette as emanations of social order, Bastide' s text can be read as documenting a shift from courtly values toward bourgeois standards, although this shift remains paradoxically set in that most aristocratic of spaces — a petite maison. The pleasure pavilion, in this respect, is symbolic of a phase when a number of societal mandates still coincided — social mores and personal convenience, ostentation and consumption, corres¬ pondence between image and status, on the one hand, and transparency of form and function on the other.
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Papers by Carole Martin