Queer Places:
Lycée Charlemagne, 14 Rue Charlemagne, 75004 Paris, France
Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis
Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France
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Pierre-Daniel Huet (February 8, 1630 – January 26, 1721)
was a French man of letters. Huet – ‘learned Europe's memory’ as he was dubbed
in the early years of the eighteenth century – offers a most remarkable
insight into what could be the life of a homosexual of the French
establishment in the age of Louis XIV.
Born in Caen, Normandy, into a family of recent converts to Roman Catholicism who had some pretensions to belonging to the lower nobility, Huet understood at an early age that, being fatherless, with two sisters for whom he would become legally responsible, the only career that was open to him, given his natural gifts for the humanities, was that of the Church.
His early years read like a manual of homosociality in strategising and networking. Gifted as he was, the adolescent Huet formed friendships with his Jesuit masters and more elderly Humanists, such as the Dupuy brothers, conveners of a cabinet (club), a model for the Académie française (1635). In his Latin Memoirs (1718) he actually takes great care at showing how infatuated with him one of his Jesuit tutors was (to the point of falling ill) and how precious to him was the company of older men for whom he deployed all his charms. He soon realised that he had both to conceal his libertin tendencies (libertinage blossomed at court, in the circles of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and the Vendôme brothers) and to assert his independence by manoeuvering between Church and State, the French court and the ‘International of savants’ (the ‘Republic of Letters’), weaving networks of friends with whom he had passionate affairs, some platonic and some not. In his early twenties he was already the toast of humanist circles in Paris, a boy-wonder.
At 21, he pocketed some of his inheritance, and took himself, on horseback, to Holland and Sweden, where René Descartes had just died (1650). Huet narrates his many encounters, all literary, in Holland and, in veiled terms, a passionate affair with a certain Morus, later to become a pastor and minor Latin poet, an affair full of jealousy, bad nights, letters, recriminations and even a token young girl thrown in to delude the host family. They broke off in a tiff. Huet moved to Sweden (writing a wonderfully witty account) where Queen Christina of Sweden tried to force herself on him. He barely escaped his fate by punning in Greek to the literary-minded ‘king’ (such was her title) that he was one never to marry any woman. And she retorted, in Greek, she was herself one never to marry a man. As soon as he realised that the Minerva of the North would soon convert – and leave her library to Rome – he pilfered from her library an unknown commentary on St Matthew by the Church Father Origen, and cavalcaded back to France.
His career then took off, largely based upon the much awaited publication of his Latin Commentary on Origen (1668) and his careful usage of his now considerable network of friends and patrons. He even declined in 1663 the tutorship of young Karl-Gustav of Sweden, thus raising his stakes in France. His career was meteoric as a high official at the French court: given a pension by Louis XIV in 1663, he became first president of the Royal Academy of Physics (a forerunner of the Academy of Sciences), he landed the position of Under-Preceptor of Louis XIV's son, the Grand Dauphin (missing the top job, owing to lingering suspicions of libertinage), and for all intents and purposes he was the one who directed the education of Louis’ heir; he entered the French Academy in 1674. Yet, a strategist always, he frequented the préciosité salons which operated at the margins of the court, sometime a meeting-point for the disgruntled feudal aristocracy. There he collaborated with précieuse Madame de La Fayette (1634–1693) in at least two of her novels, including it seems the ground-breaking Princesse de Clèves (1678), and with Jean Segrais (1624–1701) with whom he had an awful fight (the reasons for which are still not elucidated). One has simply to picture Huet, ‘too beautiful for a man’, in such circles to have an idea of a brilliant homosexual in action in a milieu that adumbrated modern parisianisme.
At 45 he fell seriously ill (in spite of his addiction to swimming, exercise, fresh air and good food), tormented by a ‘secret illness’ contracted in Holland (it may have been a fistula that never healed properly: Huet coyly notes, in Latin, that it had prevented him from riding comfortably ever since his first trip to the Low Countries). He then took holy orders and was given the most prestigious Soissons bishopric, a royal prebend the pope refused to confirm (that pope, in sharp contrast to his predecessors, had no time for sodomites who played royal preceptors to the Most Christian King, nor for humanists who were too well versed in canon law, as Huet was, in support of regalian rights over the papal ones). Laden with honours and rich stipends, he still found time to publish, at prime minister Colbert's request, the first economic analysis of the Dutch colonial empire – and he is credited with being the first to offer a history of the development of the novel in Europe (Origin of Novels, 1666).
By that time Huet was a leading, if not the leading, figure of Europe's old-style humanism. His violent attacks against Descartes gave him the reputation of a sharp-tongued satirist: he compared Descartes to a Lapp living off moss and teaching fellow Eskimos in a frozen philosophical cuckoo-land. All over Europe his friends rallied to publish his Latin or Greek poems, his essays, his bons mots. Numerous translations attest to his fame down to the late nineteenth century, at least among philologists. In terms of the history of gay literature, his annotations to the Greek Anthology – a collection of mainly pederastic verse – are still used today. Why he spent so much time on them is anyone's guess.
Aged, having lost his two dearest friends, the writer Gilles Ménage and the diplomat Ezéchiel Spanheim (to whom we owe a first-hand account of Louis XIV's court), he settled at the Jesuits’ house in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, Paris. He lived there for 20 years, often causing irritation to his reluctant hosts, who were to inherit his considerable and priceless library, in due course taken over by the Royal Library. The Jesuit house is now the Lycée Charlemagne, located near the Saint-Paul Métro station, in the middle of Paris's gay district. Huet is buried in Saint-Paul church, next to the Lycée, whose exuberant teenagers certainly lull him to eternal peace. There he held court, surrounded by younger men who seem to have helped him pass sweet old years, a XVII-century André Gide, and like him an arbiter of literary tastes, a poly-math, a man avid for honours, industrious and passionate.
As far as the humanist backdrop to his homosexuality is concerned, Huet perpetuates the tradition of a François Rabelais or Michel de Montaigne, and, by his careful interlocking of amorous and official careers, he offers an example of a more modern sort of homosexual intellectual, at ease in a centralised and all-pervading French state, and whose later representatives would be Napoleonic Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, the bourgeois Élie, duc Decazes (so beautiful he got the premiership), the colonial proconsul in Morocco, Marshall Hubert Lyautey, and many a later Academician, such as Julien Green.
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