‘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.