Quand la fiction libertine vient parasiter l’esthétique musicale : le cas très singulier des Sonnettes de Guillard de Sévigné (1749)

We intend to confront a singular topical situation identified in Les Sonnettes of Guillard by Sévigné with the context of the discourses on sound and music in the Age of Enlightenment.  The text takes up, but also reverses, the fundamental topical situation of libertine literature, i.e. libertin_observer_scène_érotique. The mechanism that gives its name to the novel is an array of doorbells operated by the movements that the erotic frolicking of guests spread over several rooms transmit to the ears of their host. The resulting harmonies help compensate for his declining desire. This substitution from sound to sight, by reversing the scopic law of libertine literature, implements and subverts both the aesthetic and the anthropological discourse while blurring their internal oppositions, from Du Bos for whom music, by adding energy to energy, fulfills its function of translation/transmission by an overflow of intensity until the topical topography of the genre of idyll and the Rousseauist conception of the truth of feelings expressed by the voice, and the song by hypotyposis and scenic immediacy, or to Rameau for whom harmony is a natural effect “whose cause lies in the air agitated by the shock of each body of sound in particular”.