The Small and Marvelous: Emotional Communities in Madeleine de Scudéry’s ‘Story of Two Chameleons.’

In 1672, the French writer and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry warmly received two reptiles into her Parisian home. Sent from Alexandria, these chameleons represent a turning point in the history of emotions and science, as written by a woman during the Grand Siècle. More than a decade after their arrival, Scudéry published her scientific observations and her deeply emotive account of their lives in New Moral Conversations ( Nouvelles Conversations de Morale ) in 1688 as “Story of Two Chameleons” (“Histoire de deux caméléons”). In this article, I argue that scientific discourse and affective moments coexist to construct a landmark moment in how emotions were written, felt, and understood in seventeenth-century France. Through Scudéry’s brief but evocative text, we see Scudéry first use, and then subvert, the Cartesian animal-machine, and build shared emotional communities through a fusion of science and emotions that tap into cross-species shared affective circuits.