Christiaan Huygens – A family affair - Proeven van Vroeger

From Huygens’s defense it shows that there was a certain issue that may have caused
some jealousy with other courtiers. Constantijn Sr. wrote to Amalia that:
[o]ne will find that I have gained some commodity [in the service of His Highness], but at the
expense of my sight, and well below the level that many imagine it to be, who would find it hard
to believe that much more often I have refused and sometimes given than received, and, at the
least, they will never prove, that I have enriched myself either at the expense of H[is]
H[ighness]’s glory or wallet, as many others do, who have not been chastised for it. 98
The “love” between the Stadholder and his secretary had not been purely platonic. As
Castiglione had taught, the Courtier’s unconditional love for his prince would eventually result
(in the case of a good prince) in well-deserved “favors” of the patron to the Courtier.
Constantijn Sr.’s rebuttal could not disguise that his prince had been more than generous to
him – a crucial element of the “unconditional” love. 99
ii. Seeing through linguistic fog
Thus, language, however important, was only language. Though by Greenblatt’s
standards “self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language,” 100 in the end
what made it such an interesting enterprise were the “real” effects it accomplished. Courtly
language was directly intertwined with professional power, social prestige and material
wealth for the courtier and his family, and, if they preferred, a possibility to do good for the
public cause. “Sympathy” and “love” were terms with a much wider recollection of
courtier : the practice of science in the culture of absolutism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. chapter 7, on
“fall of the favorite.”
97 HUYGENS, C. & BLOM, F. R. E. (2003) Mijn leven verteld aan mijn kinderen in twee boeken (De vita
propria sermonum inter liberos), Amsterdam, Prometheus., p156-7. In fact, Huygens became Amalia’s and
Willem III’s “Counsellor in ordinary and Treasurer, etc.:" ZUYLEN VAN NYEVELT, S. V. (1906)
Court life in the Dutch Republic, 1638-1689, London, New York,, J. M. Dent & co.; E. P. Dutton & co.,
p154-55.
98 HUYGENS, C. & WORP, J. A. (1911) De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens, 1608-1687, 's-
Gravenhage,, M. Nijhoff., Vol. 24, No. 4538, p386: “[o]n trouvera que j’y ay gaigné quelque commodité,
mais à la sueur de mon visage, et bien au bas du point que plusieurs l’imaginent, qui auroyent bien de la
peine à croire que j’en ay souvent plus refusé et parfois donné que receu, et, pour le moins, ne
prouveront jamais, que je me soye enrichi aux despens ny de la gloire, ny de la boursse de S. A., comme
font bien d’autres, qui n’en sont pas chastiez.”
99 CASTIGLIONE, B. & JAVITCH, D. (2002b) The book of the courtier: the Singleton translation: an
authoritative text, criticism, New York, W.W. Norton., p80-1, 83
100 GREENBLATT, S. (2005) Renaissance self-fashioning : from More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press., p9
33