‘The Story of Two Chameleons’

Perhaps Scudéry’s best-known text from across her Conversations, ‘The Story of Two Chameleons’, published in the 1688 New Moral Conversations [Nouvelles conversations de morale], relays Scudéry’s observations of her two chameleons as they are read together by a group of fictional friends. It is written in dialogue with the Description anatomique d’un caméléon [Anatomical description of a chameleon] (1669) by Claude Perrault of the Royal Academy of Sciences, although Scudéry’s narrative voice is pitched modestly in comparison to the Royal Academician’s expertise. She chronicles the chameleons’ eating and sleeping habits, their movement, their colour, shape, and changes, and uses her affective relationship with the two chameleons – particularly the surviving male, Méléon – to complicate Cartesian ideas of the machine animal. She also draws attention to the limits of what observation can reveal, while practising empirical enquiry. These observations are accompanied by a series of poems, penned by her friends using their salon pseudonyms, celebrating Scudéry’s chameleon and France’s imperial glory.

Contributors

Helena Taylor

(author)

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at University of Exeter

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5683-7967

Helena Taylor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century: she is interested in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels, and translation studies. Her first book, The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century Culture (OUP, 2017) examines the reception of the life of the ancient Roman poet Ovid in 17th-century French culture. Her second book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP, 2024), was written thanks to a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Book Prize. She is the co-editor of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP, 2023); and Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (a special issue of Romanic Review, 2021). Helena is currently leading a five-year project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, originally awarded as a European Research Council Horizon Europe Starting Grant in the 2022 round (€1.5 million) and now funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number EP/Y006372/1].