The Uses of Inventories in Early Modern France, from the Bureau de la Ville de Paris to Antoine Furetière’s »Roman bourgeois«

Early modern inventories of papers, books, and other assorted artifacts have survived in great numbers and in many different forms. What was the wider cultural valence of making and checking them in domestic, public, and bureaucratic settings across early modern France? This essay addresses that question via a new interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the municipal registers of the Bureau de la Ville de Paris, a treatise by a distinguished librarian, Gabriel Naudé, and a comic novel by a renowned lexicographer, Antoine Furetière. The aim is to show how particular practices of record-keeping might inform our understanding of a broader constellation of inventorial practices in the seventeenth century. My analysis centres on the specific uses of inventories found in two interconnected spaces, the office and the library, together with the discursive space of the literary text which extends and problematises the practices of verifying and sharing information found in the other two spaces. Thus, it will be shown that to the early modern mind at least, administration had a worrying and perennial tendency to overflow its specific physical environs, what we might now call the »semiotope« office (in Bernard Siegert’s terms).⁽²⁾

Taken at face value, pre-modern inventories can tell us much about how artifacts were grouped together; yet historians are increasingly alert to the ways in which inventories exceeded their instrumental usage, testifying to deeper archival practices of storage and circulation that were subject to competing impulses. As Elizabeth Yale has reminded us,⁽³⁾ the more we understand the ecologies of writing, paperwork and print that surrounded early modern archives, the better placed we shall be to comprehend their records and inventorial procedures within the knowledge economies they served. Yale is one of several scholars to have recently appraised the history of the archive,⁽⁴⁾ and it is in this context of appraisal that I position my readings of my primary source material.

My entry point is recent work on the particularities of paperwork. The study of paperwork is now a recognizable offshoot of book history, as Ben Kafka has demonstrated in a 2009 survey article.⁽⁵⁾ Kafka dwells on the significance of contemporary office filing systems, as brought to light in major studies such as Bruno Latour’s 2002 ethnographic enquiry, »La Fabrique du droit«. Here, Latour demands that the ethnographer must »set aside vague propositions on rights, laws, and norms in exchange for a meticulous investigation into dossiers – grey, beige, or yellow; fat or thin; simple or complicated; old or new – to see where they lead us«.⁽⁶⁾ They lead us, as Kafka remarks, to places that are simultaneously dull and fascinating. Likewise, starting with a mundane assortment of red and green municipal registers, this essay will explore places where objects become repositories of useful information, affording different kinds of knowledge, whilst the materiality (as opposed to the abstraction) of that knowledge draws attention to its transience.⁽⁷⁾

A useful lens for focalising the transient nature of inventory-based knowledge is Thing Theory. Promulgated by the work of Bill Brown,⁽⁸⁾ and more recently reformulated as Stuff Theory by Maurizia Boscagli,⁽⁹⁾ this line of cultural-materialistic enquiry interrogates the »thingness« latently inherent in an object and manifested in what Brown calls »object events« that occur when a subject interacts with the object in question. Such interactions are often haphazard, and even when they happen in the context of a methodical process (the checking of an inventory, for instance) there is still considerable scope for unexpected discoveries. This is all the more acute when things did not go to plan, so to speak. Since the eighteenth century, jokes about faulty administrative procedure have, as Kafka notes, inescapably informed our cultural orientation towards bureaucracies. The humorous side of inventorying is, I shall argue, a latency of my sources, especially Furetière. To make full sense of this, however, requires serious scrutiny of the lengths to which administrators and librarians were prepared to go to make their resources purposely retrievable; it is here that inventories and their sister lists (catalogues, registers, accounts) come into their own.

At the centre of seventeenth-century Paris’s municipal governance was the Bureau de la Ville de Paris: an administrative body whose powers derived from a fifteenth-century ordinance that remained in force until 1789. The Bureau’s headquarters were housed in the impressive premises of the Hôtel de Ville (completed 1628), and its chief responsibilities included the upkeep of municipal infrastructure (buildings, bridges, quays, fountains) and the regulation of supplies (including wood, coal, munitions).⁽¹⁰⁾ It also oversaw a range of civic and religious festivities, in consultation with the king. Like other municipal authorities in France, the Bureau de la Ville de Paris archived its registers; and the responsibilities for curating this mammoth archive, stretching back to the early sixteenth century, fell to the chief clerks (greffiers) who typically held their office for a number of years (some died in post). Handovers of the office of chief clerk are significant milestones in the registers documenting the principal administrative acts of the Bureau. The appointment of a new chief clerk was a ceremonial event accompanied by a récolement: a periodic review of the inventory of all the municipal title deeds and treasures. This was a laborious task, all the more so given the infrequency with which it was performed, and the irregular fashion in which it was conducted—as we may readily appreciate by considering the records of one such récolement conducted at the turn of the eighteenth century.

It took place on 11 August 1698, and was duly recorded in the registers of the Bureau. The official record (procès-verbal) of this particular récolement offers an unusually clear insight into the processes and problems of municipal inventorying in early modern France. On this occasion, the retiring officer, Jean-Martin Mitantier, was succeed by Jean-Baptiste Taitbout, the new post-holder.⁽¹¹⁾ At 8 am, a small party of notables, consisting of Taitbout, Mitantier, the first alderman (premier échevin), and the royal procurator (procureur du roi), gathered to swear in Taitbout as the new Chief Clerk (greffier) of the Municipality of Paris. Henceforth, Taitbout would have responsibility of the registers and of the two municipal coffers containing title deeds, rent monies, and the city’s treasured artifacts. Taitbout was to maintain henceforth all the registers and the two coffers for use and consultation by other members of the Bureau de la Ville; but first, the task of verifying the inventories. On this occasion the Royal Procurator insisted upon a thorough overhaul of the register inventory, and not without reason. Mitantier’s predecessor, Jean-Baptiste Langlois (who had served as chief clerk from 1660 to 1681), had hardly been model of punctiliousness: period records reveal that Langlois had only kept a complete register for the first two years of his tenure, relying thereafter on transcriptions of minutes from Bureau council meetings.⁽¹²⁾ Mitantier had inherited »an endless heap of papers and files in such disarray that it was impossible to find what one was looking for«.⁽¹³⁾ This problem played out on a massive scale throughout the Ancien Régime. According to modern historians of France’s Archives Nationales, the early modern administrator constantly struggled to separate in physical space those documents deemed to be still in administrative use from those which had acquired the status of historic artifact.⁽¹⁴⁾ Indeed, Mitantier, we learn, had been sternly commissioned to work incessantly at rectifying the disorder, and to create sufficient space in locked cabinets and open shelves for all of the Bureau’s paperwork, past and present.

Did Mitantier manage to resolve the bureaucratic chaos he inherited? The short answer is no. The record states that when Taitbout was led into Mitantier’s office, he was immediately confronted with the same underlying problems of archival disorder that had by no means gone away. There were gaps in recent registers and the bulging cabinets could barely contain the archived volumes and single-leaf parchments dating back to 1300 (so some attempt had been made to keep historic documents away from those in current use). One wonders whether Mitantier had been so consumed in bringing some semblance of order to the affairs of his predecessor that he had neglected his own affairs; in any case he was forced to admit he had fallen a long way behind, and had not managed to complete the registers for a period of twelve years. With an ironic and mildly amusing sense of déjà vu we see history repeating itself: the new chief clerk, Taitbout, was ordered to transcribe »incessantly« until the backlog was cleared—only this time Mitantier was ordered to pay his successor for any extra expense incurred in completing the missing registers.⁽¹⁵⁾

If this récolement speaks to a wider narrative of work backlogs and clerical shame, it is also an object-oriented story about the materiality of the Bureau’s diverse artifacts: the insistent objects that command the solemn attention of those at Taitbout’s investiture. These objects largely shape what we know of the event and its protagonist, whose inventorial aptitudes come under immediate scrutiny from Mitantier, the first alderman, and the royal procurator. Taitbout’s identity is the outworking of his inspection of each and every object put before him. Out comes the inventory of the municipal treasures, followed by registers of various shapes and sizes: small red registers, larger ones bound in tanned green leather, others still enclosed with the parchment of old rent constitutions. An incipient filing system can be seen in this colour-coding: another small step in the direction of purposefully retrievable documentation.⁽¹⁶⁾ All these registers are inspected and then put away in the cabinet, whilst Taitbout shows eager willingness to look after them, promising to make them available on demand as per the requirements of his office.⁽¹⁷⁾ Nevertheless as the investiture tour moves on, one can imagine his face falling again, after what happens in the next two rooms.

Next Taitbout is led into the Hôtel treasury, to verify the inventory of its valuable relics kept under lock and key. Here the object-immediacy is at its most intense in the listing of these items. Thirty-one treasures are inspected:

Two large ingots, a large round bowl, two medium-sized oval bowls, two baskets, two large flagons and four medium-sized flagons, an ornamental receptacle in two pieces, six salt cellars, six candlesticks, four cups, all of the aforementioned made of silver, coated in gold-vermilion gilt, and embossed with the city’s coat of arms.⁽¹⁸⁾

As ceremonial investitures go, Taitbout’s is rather pathetically mundane. Nevertheless, the very act of his inventorying, for all its mundanity, sites municipal administrative procedure in a potentially richer frame of cultural reference. With every coffer Taitbout unlocks, the importance of the vestigial is strikingly showcased: relics that have lingered in obscurity suddenly come to light again, perhaps for the first time in decades. Each one has acquired a further degree of decrepitude since the previous récolement; and, paradoxically, this very decrepitude invites us to acknowledge (as Taitbout would have done) the historic importance of la Ville de Paris as an enduring hub of commerce and artisanal creativity, notwithstanding the poor condition of the city’s residual treasures. We might thus consider Taitbout as a record-keeper in archaeological mode; operating as such, he can be situated in a retrospective movement of historical reflection carrying seventeenth-century municipal administration upstream to an earlier point in French culture, where records and ceremonial artifacts join literary works in a converging heritage.

One thinks back to François Rabelais’s sixteenth-century fictional accounts of Paris that inventory the city’s treasures. A lengthy book catalogue of one of the city’s leading libraries (to which we shall later return) is given as the seventh chapter of »Pantagruel«. Earlier, the unearthing of an ancient tomb reveals the source-text of the chronicles of »Gargantua« together with several flagons and a genealogy scribed in a spidery chancery hand.⁽²⁴⁾ Rabelais »translates« and indeed interpolates this obscure text into his rendering of the adventures of his famous giant. So, if Rabelais’s sixteenth-century masterpieces self-consciously blur the boundaries between present text and historic documentation, might we look again, perhaps more generously, at the heap of registers confronting Taitbout over a hundred and fifty years later? Could it be said that during his administrative career, Taitbout would seek not so much to prevent the merging of historic and present documents, as to preserve, as far as functionally possible, a continuous series of registers from the recent to the arcane? One might even venture that the new chief clerk, like his predecessors and his successors, had to weigh up the symbolic cost of removing the most ancient parchment records of Paris to an off-site location. Perhaps he decided against such a removal, lest he and other municipal officers be deprived of the silent presence of the past, the witness of the city’s administrative longevity, within physical proximity if not touching distance.

What we can say with some historical certainty, is that Taitbout, for all his professed eagerness, did not institute an archival system to the satisfaction of his eighteenth-century successors. Following the death of Taitbout in 1711, we find the Hôtel de Ville commissioning its agents to go out into public and private libraries, to buy back copies of the Hotel’s missing registers.⁽²⁵⁾ But even this did not go far enough. A later procurator, Antoine Moriau, would in 1735 voice familiar complaints about incomplete records and a number of missed récolements in the Hôtel de la Ville’s administration.⁽²⁶⁾ Moriau provided the first attempt at producing a continuous historical record of municipal inventorying up to 1735. In a longer historical perspective, then, Moriau represents a pivot towards decisive rationalisation in the administration of the city’s archives. Indeed, his refusal to tolerate any further inconsistency in record-and relic-keeping by the chief clerks points to a need for a new cultural space for the Hôtel de Ville, one where it could better manage its treasures and eventually house its own collection of books. Sure enough, the 1760s would see the inauguration of the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville (1763), the library that would curate the Hôtel’s artifacts for a wider audience.⁽²⁷⁾ Rationalized inventorying—on a much more regular basis than the seventeenth-century chief clerks, Langlois, Mitantier, and Taitbout, had managed—would remain at the heart of the administrative operation of this new library, according to its statute of 20 July 1770:

The Librarian of the City will be charged with updating the General Inventory, according to its diverse artifacts (books, dossier boxes, registers, manuscripts, ephemera, medals, tokens, and other collections) as often as new items are acquired by the Library. The Librarian will also be held responsible for drafting an account of all new items three months after said items are approved by the Bureau, and the account shall be submitted to the Office of the Chief Clerk of the City.⁽²⁸⁾

Studying the evolution of inventorying in the Hôtel de Ville de Paris has offered us a route into a larger archival problem that was articulated with increasing directness from the seventeenth century. This was the phenomenon of what we might call the office-cum-library: or to put it another way, the coexistence of administrative and intellectual labour in the same physical space or in interconnected physical spaces. In early modern France, writers often dictated their writings to servants and secretaries working alongside them in their libraries and studies.⁽²⁹⁾ As well as dictation, these servants carried on with routine administration: managing the master’s accounts, keeping his family records, answering correspondence, and acting as librarian for his collection of books. Library-office settings were furnished with cabinets, shelves, and desks, replete with sprawls of books, registers, and related artifacts—not all of which were readily retrievable for the task at hand, be it daily paperwork, or literary and academic pursuits. Managing one’s resources required practical administrative solutions, particularly where large numbers of books were involved. Few perceived this more clearly than Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653), whose treatise on libraries clearly sets out his thinking.

The son of a minor Parisian bureaucrat, Naudé was an erudite man. He had a doctorate in medicine but is best known for his service as librarian to great men and women of state, notably Cardinal Mazarin in France (1642–1652) and Queen Christine of Sweden (1652–3). Naudé wrote his »Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque« (1627) for his earliest patron, the magistrate Henri de Mesmes who had a large private library; and although it described ideals for bibliothéconomie (library management), it was rooted in Naudé’s extensive experience as a librarian and book collector. As Estelle Boeuf has shown, the »Advis« bears a close resemblance to the inventories Naudé made of his own private book collection, allowing him to expand his vision of bringing together an encyclopaedic range of knowledge from Antiquity to the present.⁽³⁰⁾

Indeed, as Warren Boutcher argues, Naudé’s work can be read as a lens for understanding two key trends in the development of early modern libraries.⁽³¹⁾ Firstly, the »Advis« attests to the coexistence of documentary archives (such as those of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris) with older and predominantly manuscript collections, and with newer and predominantly printed collections open regularly to the public. Secondly, the »Advis« signals the development of distinct but overlapping cultures and economies of collection, one centred on luxury or customized artefacts, whether manuscript or print, the other a burgeoning information culture dependent on the diffusion of cheaper print and scribal copies. Naudé’s ideal library would be one that drew together, under one roof, various kinds of print, manuscript, and documentary resources, to maximise the production of knowledge and the reputation of the library owner. Such a library would be open to all, but especially to scholars, statesmen, and other notables, putting at their disposition its extensive holdings, both rare and ordinary, as opposed to the small, restricted collections of rare and expensive books found in private cabinets of curiosity.⁽³²⁾

Order by means of the catalogue is Naudé’s sine qua non for the establishment of a well-run library. Naudé understands the use of catalogues in two distinct but complementary ways: the first is to exploit lists of books in pre-existing catalogues to inform one’s own selection and acquisition of books; and the second is to draw up an accurate, methodical inventory of one’s own stock. The first usage turns the catalogue into a heuristic tool of discovery. Here, Naudé encourages his librarian to use his commercial contacts who have access to sales catalogues of books commercially available on domestic and overseas markets.⁽³³⁾ He also tacitly appeals to a crucial element embedded in the European knowledge economy since the mid sixteenth century: published volumes—known in their own right as librairies— that inventoried the range and scope of printed books currently available in a particular location, or on a given topic, thus providing models that could inform the holdings of aspiring librarians.⁽³⁴⁾ In France, largescale inventories of works published in French had been in circulation since the publication of the »Bibliothèques« of François Grudé La Croix du Maine (1584) and Antoine du Verdier (1585).⁽³⁵⁾ Naudé’s »Advis« suggests he is conversant with these works, but he is at pains to stress that the best librarian will want to go further still:

One must not neglect to procure and transcribe copies of all available catalogues, not only those of the great and renowned libraries, both ancient and modern… but also those of particular studies and cabinets which are little known, unfrequented, and thus sealed in a perpetual silence.⁽³⁶⁾

Naudé’s ideal library is a front for a new kind of erudite civility that seeks to put knowledge in the hands of an expanding community of gens de lettres. But this lofty ideal is never severed from practical, administrative tips to make it a reality onsite, within a purposefully constructed library building. Much of the »Advis« is devoted to discussion of the quantity of books a librarian should acquire and the material conditions in which books should be stored. Naudé’s proposed solutions are underpinned by his second major usage of cataloguing. Use of library space will correspond closely to »a catalogue accurately drawn up according to each and every class and faculty divided into precise subunits as far as is practicable«.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Naudé sees the value in simple yet rigorous classification systems based on key subject areas (theology, medicine, jurisprudence, history, philosophy, mathematics, humanities) so that one can easily ascertain the state of one’s stock. He recognises, moreover, the importance of having the right furnishings if books are to be easily retrievable. Here we find him wresting with not dissimilar problems of storage as those facing the chief clerks of the Bureau de la Ville de Paris.⁽⁴¹⁾

One of the difficulties surrounding record accessibility in the Hôtel de la Ville was that everything was locked away, requiring the personal intervention of the chief clerk whenever a member of municipal personnel wished to consult a register. Naudé, by contrast, wants his library users themselves to locate their desired books as quickly as possible: this is to be achieved by visibility of book stock on flat shelves (tablettes),⁽⁴²⁾ and concealment only for the most valuable manuscripts in the collection. The savvy librarian, furthermore, will factor in excess shelf space at the ends of subject sections, so that over time new stock can be comfortably accommodated without having to cram too many books per shelf. Indeed, a large library will require an entire section devoted to recent acquisitions: new stock should remain there for six months, after which it can be absorbed into the main body of the library. All of these administrative operations depend, once again, on the precise inventory of library stock—an inventory that is kept legible, dynamic, and regularly updated.

Through this rigorous ideal of inventorying, Naudé thus envisages a physical space where the intellectual labour of readers is silently harmonised with the administrative tasks of the librarian and his staff. Although the »Advis« does not directly mention the latter, their background presence is implied in several places.⁽⁴³⁾ Assistants are required to maintain good levels of lighting and aeration throughout the library, and to carry out basic maintenance of library book stock, mending damaged volumes, and dusting down surfaces.⁽⁴⁴⁾ A competent secretary, one may surmise, might assist the librarian in maintaining the book lending register which forms a key administrative counterpart to the library catalogue.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Again, Naudé is remarkably clear on the practical details, although his proposed system falls short of double-entry precision; nonetheless, if implemented, it would entail the crossing out of complete entries, thus making it not dissimilar to early modern merchant account ledgers. In the main column, the register must alphabetise the names of all borrowers along with the following details: date of loan, the size of the volume, its place and date of printing, and finally, the borrower’s signature. All of these details are to be crossed out upon return of the book, with the date of return noted in the margin and brief remarks on the condition of the book upon return—only careful borrowers are worthy of further loans.

Strict rules around book handling and lending, moreover, are necessary to prevent the public library from descending into disorder. Naudé warns in a later work that without such restrictions, members of the public would spend all day leafing through as many books as they could get their hands on—or even using the free paper, ink, and desk space for an array of writing tasks.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Clearly Naudé wished to avoid what we might now call »hotdesking«, since the proliferation of office paperwork within the library environs would frustrate the intellectual labours of reading of his high-minded readers. Naudé’s ideal library, then, is more than the sum-total of its books. It is, in fact, a self-sustaining knowledge economy in which intellectual curiosity in the widest sense is shaped by administrative prudence, from the macro-level of the library layout to the micro-detail of the catalogue and of the loan register.

There is, furthermore, a visual dimension of this knowledge economy that further enhances the cognitive benefits of a well-administered library: its ornamentation. The ornaments of a library, says Naudé, must continually impress the readers who study there. When it comes to library ornaments, Naudé is nonetheless still a pragmatist.⁽⁴⁷⁾ He advocates the use of tapestries as an anti-humidity precaution more than for display.⁽⁴⁸⁾ He acknowledges that some wealthy patrons want to spend large sums on luxury book covers,⁽⁴⁹⁾ though he would prefer to invest in bigger and better editions of key texts rather than in sumptuous book binding. As for other visual artifacts, antiqueness plays second fiddle to visuality. For Naudé, what counts is that the visual artifact, statue or painting, should be a striking corporeal or physiognomic likeness of a famous writer or philosopher—and this physical likeness should complement what a reader learns from studying biographies of the author in question. Naudé savours how the reader’s eye moves from ornament to text, whereby the textual-aesthetic conformity produces a stimulating cognitive experience: what he calls the »powerful goad that will excite a generous and noble spirit to follow in the footsteps of great minds«.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Thus, the very thingness of books and ornaments in Naudé’s ideal library is constituted at the convergence of aesthetic and textual detail, silently playing out in countless felicitous object-events as readers acquaint themselves with the prestigious materials that the library has to offer.

How does Naudé’s ideal library compare with other imaginative projections of book-collecting and record-keeping in seventeenth-century France? The thingness of books and papers looks very different in our final text, the »Roman bourgeois« (1666), by Antoine Furetière. A mid-seventeenth-century writer and a controversial member of the Académie française, Furetière is nowadays best known for his lexicographic masterpiece: his »Dictionnaire universel« (1690). His »Roman bourgeois«, a quirky novel by any standards, proposes an altogether different set of object-events from that which we have previously seen, centring on the inventory of a defunct poet. Here, at last, we come to fiction proper. Furetière’s inventive inventorying offers a snapshot of a satirical penchant for cataloguing imaginary books that can be traced back to the fictitious library of Saint-Victor of Rabelais, as Claudine Nédelec has recently shown.⁽⁵¹⁾ For all its overtly burlesque and satirical elements, Furetière’s comic novel is, nonetheless, deeply invested in the material existence of the bourgeoisie in 1660s Paris.⁽⁵²⁾ As such, the »Roman bourgeois« affords an oblique counterpoint, both to Naudé’s »Advis« and to the Bureau de la Ville’s records of récolement. Furetière gives an anarchic twist to the ideal of object collections smoothly conforming to the records made of them—perhaps the greatest illusion of so many inventaires généraux that populate early modern French archives.

The »Roman bourgeois« is an anti-novel in two books; each book narrates a mock love triangle between three middling persons of Paris, and there is (deliberately) no meaningful narrative progression from the first to the second book.⁽⁵³⁾ We shall focus on the second book, at the point where the three adversarial protagonists—an impecunious writer, (Charrosselles), a pompous magistrate (Belastre), and a litigious woman (Collantine)—are forced to break off their querulous conversation in Collantine’s salon, when the magistrate’s clerk (Volaterran) hurriedly arrives from the lawcourts with an inventory that urgently requires his master’s signature. The inventory in question is that of a well-known and recently deceased poet, Mythophilacte (a Greek-sounding name meaning »guardian of the tale«), whose goods, papers and books are to become the driving force of the rest of the novel.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Suddenly, the text acutely focuses on the object-events that ensue from the legal paperwork of the inventory, thereby affording, to my knowledge, the most subtle portrait of the administrator in action in pre-Balzacian French fiction.

The arrival of Volaterran jolts the narrative out of a parodic judicial register (the protagonists’ airing of mock-legal arguments ending with neither sentencing nor a transaction) and into a new idiom that derives its substance from an informal reading of the freshly drafted inventory.⁽⁵⁵⁾ What we find is an altogether complex performance of inventorying that generates comic friction as bibliographic and bureaucratic impulses rub against each other. Both are portrayed as vanity; both are nonetheless indulged at some length, in an alternating pattern, the one keeping the other in check. The narrative becomes discontinuous, torn between the voice of the clerk, reading proudly and then irritably from his inventory, and the voices of his three hearers, who constantly interject, ever insistent on expressing their views on Mythophilacte’s papers and books listed in the inventory. Eventually, an exasperated Volaterran, resenting what has amounted to a good hour of unpaid overtime, exclaims, »›Truly, I cannot earn my living here!‹«, and storms out of the room, presumably to return to his lawcourt office where he can get back to the »real« business of administration.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Thus, Furetière calls time on an odd experiment with grafting bureaucratic styles into a novelistic narrative about book lists.

What readers are left with, nevertheless, is not principally a gratuitous satire of library catalogues à la Rabelais, and of the socio-economic challenges facing writers in mid-seventeenth-century France (pace Nédelec). Furetière is doing something more fundamental: he is showing how readers, unused to encountering administrative forms in literary narrative, might go about reading an inventory. It is a deliberately selective process of uneven pace, accelerating in certain places and slowing down at other points. Furetière assumes that in the first place, we will identify with Charrosselles in wanting to skip the »notarial preamble« covering the deceased Mythophilacte’s moveable goods:

First, a bed on which the aforementioned deceased was discovered, consisting of three planks on two trestles, a mattress, with an old suitcase serving as a headrest, and a cover made from a section of Rouen tapestry. The lot priced: 25 sous.

One should ponder the significance of this change of pace. Malcolm Walsby notes that in the early modern world, probate inventories were the most commonplace type of list to feature books, and such books would often be among the most valued possessions of the deceased.⁽⁵⁸⁾ So in fast-forwarding to the books, Furetière is, in a sense, going along with the probate norms of his day—but he does so in a slippery fashion. It is not so much the intellectual or monetary value of the deceased’s books as the listing of titles (of works, and of subsections of those works) that is under scrutiny. Collantine, furthermore, regrets the absence of »›title deeds, house-sale contracts, rent constitutions‹«, saying that »›these are the principal articles of an inventory‹« rather than books.⁽⁵⁹⁾ In the narrative economy of book two of the »Roman bourgeois«, an important choice has been made: contractual paperwork and writs for debts are to be a narrative dead-end, whereas testamentary paperwork and catalogues will provide the way forward. A timely reminder, then, that whatever else the »Roman bourgeois« is, an unmediated, fetishist inventorying of all kinds of bureaucratic document it most certainly is not.

Each interruption, or re-direction of Volaterran’s reading of the inventory diminishes the administrator’s power, but it would be mistaken to conclude that this is purely to facilitate literary satire. Furetière’s route to the latter always starts with the administrator’s selection of material, which is consciously signalled to us; and it is, moreover, the administrator who betokens the »voice« of the defunct poet, as he reads aloud from the latter’s writings.⁽⁶⁰⁾ This is most clearly visible as Volaterran is directed to read from the last will and testament of Mythophilacte. Readers acquainted with the genre of the literary testament would instantly recognise some of the bequests formulae (Item, je donne et lègue) that now frame the text with respect to a well-established French tradition. Some of its salient generic features are duly emphasized: the post-mortem divvying up of property among selected individuals (in this case jotters and books, both printed and in unpublished draft) along with snide jibes at »›false patrons‹« whose largesse never materialized and »›nasty printers and booksellers‹« who profited unfairly from the deceased’s works.⁽⁶¹⁾ As the satire heats up we start to forget that it comes through the conduit of the administrator. This, as Craig Moyes points out, is the subtlety of Furtière’s lampooning of the articulations (in the sense of connective structures) that quietly link writers to the social world they inhabit, and without which they would be even less successful in denouncing their exploitation by those in the book trade and by glory-hunting patrons who stifle their creative genius.⁽⁶²⁾ Writing at the interface of administration and the literary economy, Furetière offers a sharp, meta-fictional critique of both.⁽⁶³⁾

In filtering the authorial voice of a deceased poet through the voice of an increasingly irritated clerk, Furetière furthermore forces his readers to rethink what authorship amounted to in his day. In an age where the literary field was not yet an autonomous entity,⁽⁶⁴⁾ where writers could not guarantee a stable income from their works, and where few would become household names, what trace did writers leave behind other than that which probate inventories record? Which of a writer’s surviving possessions reveals most about him—his non-literary objects, or his books? Ironically, we learn about as much about Mythophilacte’s life through his »Almanach of dinner invitations« (a small carnet tabulating wealthy Parisians known to offer dinners to parasitical authors, one for each day of the month) as we can glean from the »Catalogue« of his books (of which only twenty-one titles are inventoried). In the bathetic style of the »Roman bourgeois«, the revelation of Mythophilacte, not as a literary genius, but as an arch-toady, should come as little surprise. As Charrosselles, himself given to sponging, puts it, »›how else could an author make a living, if he lacked patrimony‹«?⁽⁶⁵⁾

It is equally unsurprising that, once the titles of Mythophilacte’s books are read out, the one that really grabs Charrosselles’s attention is a »Somme dédicatoire« (a four-volume summa of dedications) which dissects, chapter by chapter, the art of dedicating one’s work to patrons. For Moyes, this is where Furetière really puts his finger on the pulse of 1660s authorial anxieties, namely the prospect that autonomous author-patron relationships might disappear now that the state has taken charge of administering gratifications for authors.⁽⁶⁶⁾ The »Somme dédicatoire« does not, however, disclose a comprehensive digest of strategies for authorial survival. We are simply left guessing what further insights it may disclose, if perused in its entirety. The limits of fictional orality manifestly will not stretch to a complete narration of this work by Volaterran, much to the disappointment of Charrosselles. Instead, the titular précis of each chapter of the »Somme dédicatoire« will have to suffice. Ironically, these précis still occupy some eleven pages of text, over twice as many pages as the preceding »Catalogue«. One wonders just how much lower Furetière’s narrative baseline can go—and yet he still finds a substrate, beneath the précis of the twenty-ninth and final chapter of the fourth and final volume of the »Somme«.⁽⁶⁷⁾ Here at last is the reductio ad absurdum: yet another list, this one taking the form of a roll of taxes on patrons to establish a fund for the subsistence of impoverished authors. Under this ingenious fiscal scheme, the sum-total (»sommes«) of known poetic genres, together with diverse components of the heroic novel, its characters, its episodic plot devices, its pastoral scene-settings— all of which are incessantly mocked throughout the »Roman bourgeois«—are duly monetized and become taxable entities. The list of entries is pointedly open-ended, given that (and here Furetière again winks back at Rabelais) rot or rat damage has defaced the paper, eventually to the point of illegibility.⁽⁶⁸⁾

Overall, then, the second book of Furetière’s »Roman bourgeois« orchestrates a deft comic sequence of object-events that pique but quickly fail to sate readerly and writerly curiosity. If the spoof récolement performed by Volaterran and his three hearers yields a handful of anecdotes about Mythophilacte’s career, these are but wistful recollections of an absent author sinking fast beneath the historical horizon as his remaining writings fade into obscurity. They will not be posthumously rescued by a fellow author: Charrosselles is not prepared to issue the extant, fragmentary oeuvre into print at his own cost.⁽⁶⁹⁾ And yet, such is the persistence of Charrosselles’s attachment to the paper-trail of Mythophilacte’s inventoried works that the narrative keeps on going and going. Thus, Furetière’s inward meta-discursive trajectory offers a shifting critique of the material conditions of authorship, through a intercalation of four kinds of lists, which may be schematized as follows:

Inventory of Mythophilacte’s possessions

    Catalogue of Mythophilacte’s books

        Dedicatory summa

            Tax Role

Not even a mouldy old tax role is enough to kill off the absurd fascination with papers and books in the »Roman bourgeois«. Volaterran is still forced to read out a dedicatory epistle from the »Somme dédicatoire« before he escapes back to his office. As he hastily gathers his papers, heading for the door, two loose sheeves fly out of his case-bag whereupon they are seized by Charrosselles and Collantine. We are left to imagine Volaterran’s chagrin upon unpacking his sack and discovering that, in spite of all his inventorial acumen, there are documents missing. The sheeves that got away, that refused to sit flat, that would not lie still, are emblematic of this study’s inquiry into the unsettledness of storing and maintaining collections of information-objects in early modern France—problems that played out in the course of various administrative operations in adjacent office, library and fictional spaces. Registers missing from the municipal archives, unreturned library books, mildewed pages, and bindings defaced by rodents… such »de-filing« mishaps were routinely incurred across early modern knowledge economies, as their objects were moved from one orbit to another, only to be left for long periods unattended.⁽⁷⁰⁾ We should not, however, dismiss such mishaps as mere symptoms of pre-modern administrative clumsiness. The challenges of storage and circulation spurred inventive practical solutions, such as Naudé’s, or those of the eighteenth-century clerks of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris. Indeed for Naudé, intellectual curiosity and administrative finesse were attainable ideals; they went hand in glove. But as we have seen, in Furetière, curiosity finds curious outlets beyond the august catalogues and walls of a Naudean library. Even the humble inventory, that most basic and indispensable tool of the clerk, has an extraordinary fictional mileage for those of a suitably eccentric sense of humour.

Two hundred or so years later, and we arrive at Honoré de Balzac’s »Comédie humaine« that represents arguably the most coherent endeavour ever undertaken by a French writer to write archival fiction.⁽⁷¹⁾ Balzac’s literary representations of bureaucracy merit a brief mention by way of concluding remarks:

France possesses the most ferreting, meticulous, scribbling, paper-pushing, inventory-keeping, cross-checking, tidy set of bureaucrats—in fact, the famed housekeeper of administrations!⁽⁷²⁾