Accessory Ideas

Accessory Ideas is the force by which meanings gather associations beyond a word’s literal sense, changing how it is heard, used, and judged. In the Navarre episode, “whiskers” moves from ordinary courtly speech to suggestive ambiguity and finally to indecency: the word itself has not changed, but the implications surrounding it have. The episode makes that social transformation both its subject and its joke, showing how a community can ruin a word by attaching to it meanings that no dictionary can contain.

Meaning and Mechanism

The concept is introduced through the narrator’s rueful apology for having promised a chapter upon whiskers. He calls the promise inconsiderate, says that the world will not bear such a delicate subject, and explains that he would have avoided it had he known what sort of world it was or seen the fragment that follows. His distinction between noses and whiskers insists, comically, on the literal categories even as the chapter demonstrates that words do not remain safely within literal meaning.

The fragment shows how readers and listeners supply what is not explicitly said. Certain trains of ideas, it observes, leave their marks around the eyes and eyebrows; people recognize those marks and put them together without needing a dictionary. Meaning is therefore conveyed not only by the word spoken but by the expressions, circumstances, and shared assumptions through which it is received. The social knowledge that makes such inference possible also makes language vulnerable to innuendo.

The Word at Court

At the court of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, “whiskers” initially remains in use among the best companies despite La Fosseuse’s indiscreet use of it. She has spoken the word before the queen and on other occasions at court with an accent that implies mystery. The word’s fortunes are divided: the clergy support it, the laity oppose it, and the women disagree among themselves. Its survival depends not on a settled definition but on the rival associations different listeners bring to it.

The court’s gallantry and devotion make the ambiguity especially potent, since whiskers can be applied to either. The young Sieur De Croix’s appearance and bearing attract the maids of honour toward the terrace before the palace gate, while the episode’s repeated gestures and glances make the word’s unsaid implications legible. Lady Baussiere’s invitation to take hold of her whiskers is answered by the page taking hold of her palfrey; the gap between the suggestive phrase and its literal object stages the double meaning without resolving it into explicit speech.

Gesture, Inference, and Ruin

The court reads one another through looks as much as words. La Guyol and La Sabatiere study each other’s expressive “prints”; other women answer with laughter, hushing, and exclamations. Lady Carnavallette is identified as the one who had “bewhisker’d St. Bridget.” La Fosseuse then draws a bodkin from her hair, outlines a small whisker on her upper lip, and passes the bodkin to La Rebours, who shakes her head. Lady Baussiere coughs into her muff, La Guyol smiles, and the queen touches her eye with a fingertip to signal that she understands. These acts make shared inference visible: the court communicates through a chain of marks and reactions, not through a formal explanation.

The narrator declares that the word has been ruined. La Fosseuse has given it a wound, and its passage through these social “defiles” has not improved it. It makes a faint stand for a few months; then Sieur De Croix, finding it time to leave Navarre for want of whiskers, departs. In the course of events, the word becomes indecent and, after a few efforts, unfit for use. The sequence links language to circumstance: suggestive use initiates the change, courtly repetition consolidates it, and the disappearance of the man whose whiskers gave the word a literal reference leaves its compromised associations behind.

The Curate’s Warning and the Joke’s Reversal

The curate of d’Estella writes against whiskers, warning the Navarois about the dangers of accessory ideas. He argues that words may suffer from combinations attached to them, and points to noses as a precedent: in many parts of Europe, he says, noses had met the same fate centuries earlier. He extends the warning to beds, bolsters, night-caps, chamber-pots, trouse, placket-holes, pump-handles, spigots, and faucets, each supposedly threatened by similar associations. His caution turns linguistic instability into a broad social danger, while the narrator’s framing gives the argument an unmistakably comic scale.

Yet the curate’s point is not understood. His audience follows the scent in the wrong direction, and the world bridles his ass at the tail. The episode thus doubles its demonstration: first, accessory ideas compromise a word; then misunderstanding compromises an argument about that very process. The narrator suggests that delicacy and concupiscence, meeting in a future provincial chapter, may even decree bawdy itself. The conclusion leaves no secure border between innocent words and indecent ones. Their fate depends on the associations a community makes, the signs by which it recognizes them, and the misunderstandings through which it tries to police them.