Who doesn’t love a map? Especially, perhaps, a fictional one that represents a place of the imagination, a dreamland, a form of utopia. An unusual example of this type of cartography appeared in France in the mid-17th century: the Carte de Tendre, a map of the imaginary land of Tender designed to chart the progress of love. Imagined by the author Madeleine de Scudéry, the map was published in 1654 with the first volume of her romance Clélie. Madeleine de Scudéry’s novels have over the course of the centuries fallen out of fashion, but the map she created has survived.

As a part of France’s literary heritage, it is remarkable on a number of counts. First, it is a product of specific cultural circumstances: in French society, the years 1650-60 marked the golden age of the salon. Further, unlike other allegorical maps produced at the time, the Map Of Tender makes no reference either to religion or politics. Yet it has a clear, practical and improving use, and it is also an expression of challenging new ideas about passion, desire, and a new social contract between the sexes.

The land of Tender features three rivers called Esteem, Inclination and Gratitude, a lake named Indifference and numerous small villages, including Sincerity, Respect and Generosity, but also Negligence, Indiscretion and Perfidy, and, high up on a hilltop, Pride. To the north lies the Dangerous Sea; to the east the Sea of Aversion. Distance is measured in leagues of friendship. In Madeleine de Scudéry’s romance, the heroine, Clélie, makes up the map as a jeu d’esprit – a kind of sentimental Snakes and Ladders – to entertain herself and her friends. The idea is to start at the bottom of the map in the city of Nouvelle-Amitié (New Friendship), where you have made an interesting initial encounter, and then attempt to reach one of three capital cities near the top of the map – Tender-upon-Inclination, Tender-upon-Esteem and Tender-upon-Gratitude. The quickest way, heading straight to the north of the country, leads to disaster, as the river Inclination flows into the Dangerous Sea. Some more considered pathways on either side of Inclination are preferable and lead to longer-lasting, more established feelings. But there are pitfalls all over the land of Tender.

The Map of Tender was a product of Madeleine de Scudéry’s social circle. She was part of a group of about 60 women, for the main part aristocrats and noblewomen such as the Marquise de Rambouillet and her daughters, the Duchesse de Longueville who was cousin to the king of France, Françoise d’Aubigné who would become Madame de Maintenon, the king’s mistress, who were collectively known as the Précieuses. They did not form a literary movement or an entirely coherent social group; but all championed delicacy and refinement in manners, especially in the relationship between the sexes. Many of these women were writers, though they published anonymously or, like Madeleine de Scudéry, under a borrowed name, that of her brother Georges. Several have endured as great names of French literature, most notably Madame de Lafayette, author of the classic historical 1678 novel La Princesse de Clèves, about the conflict between love and marriage, and Madame de Sévigné, whose exceptionally witty and vivid letters to her daughter form a thread of reference throughout Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

These women congregated in salons, which provided a new way of socialising away from court. Then known as ruelles, in reference to a recess in a lady’s house where she would entertain her friends, leading salons, all headed by women, codified polite manners and the art of conversation and encouraged discussion of new literary and scientific works. Mademoiselle de Scudéry held her own at-homes in rue de Beauce in the Marais on Saturdays. The company in these salons was mixed, an expression of the Précieuses’s ideas about elevating the relationship between men and women to a mutual respect far removed from boorishness and brutality. The salons of 17th-century France were also places where women would not only listen to eminent men, but also speak for themselves, taking part in the shaping and propagating of intellectual debate. The Map of Tender was devised during such gatherings, where the etiquette of love would often form a topic of conversation.

Were there contemporary British equivalents? This was a time when the novel was emerging as a new literary genre in both nations, and while Madeleine de Scudéry and her friends were exploring it in France, in Britain John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come (1678). Some editions of the book contain an illustrated fold-out map of the symbolic landscape traversed by Christian, the protagonist, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City by way of the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Hill of Error and Vanity Fair.

One map is about religion and the other is about love. This hints at important differences between the two nations: Bunyan’s map and journey, devised while he was imprisoned for religious non-conformism, is a response to the national cataclysms of Britain’s Civil Wars, Reformation and Restoration. On the other hand, while France had certainly been riven by religious civil wars in the 16th century, Madeleine de Scudéry and her circle lived in comparatively stable times. The civil uprising spearheaded by the aristocracy, known as La Fronde, had failed, leaving absolute monarchy in place, and this would remain the case until the French Revolution.

In what sense, precisely, is The Map of Tender about love? Its outlines are reminiscent of those of France, and yet it contains no reference either to the power of the king or to religion. Neither political utopia nor cosmographic allegory, it offers instead a metaphorical map of an interior landscape, of the heart and soul. Co-extensive with the development of the novel, the map is expressive of a nascent interest in what we would now call psychology and the psychological novel, with a greater focus on personal interiority, motives and inner tensions. In terms of purpose, the map is concerned with individual experience and choices in the problematic context of passion.

Described in Clélie as a ‘new invention, to teach the way to follow in order to win the tenderness of an honest person’, it offers a challenge that is not devoid of morality, albeit one of a new kind. How to find your way to mutual love while steering clear of amorous disorder and physical excess (figured by the Dangerous Sea and the Unknown Lands)? The map also outlines, crucially, the possibility of a private life outside of marriage. Madeleine de Scudéry, herself unmarried, had seen in her circle many cases of unhappy arranged marriages. The relationship here imagined is also (as in the salons) one of equals, in contrast with the medieval tradition of courtly love, which was one of knightly devotion to an inaccessible lady. The travellers represented in a corner of the Map of Tender are of both sexes.

The new social contract between men and women imagined by the Précieuses was perceived as irreligious and threatening to the institution of marriage. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the title of Précieuse, initially meant as a compliment, soon turned into an insult, especially after the great French dramatist Molière produced in 1659 a farce called Les précieuses ridicules, and later another play called Les femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies), both peppered with examples of langage précieux, a highfalutin jargon full of periphrases and tortured metaphors.

Alongside Molière’s satire of the Précieuses and their ideas we might place Voltaire’s 18th-century assessment of their legacy and that of their early salons: that in the softening and refining of relationships between the sexes that had happened in the previous century something of national import had happened. It was in the ruelles of these witty women that the habit of conversation in mixed company developed and that the art of causerie – informal conversation of quality – associated with French culture (though not, of course, exclusive to France) was born.

Worthy of note is a startling appearance of the Map of Tender in one of Louis Malle’s earlier films, Les amants (The Lovers), where it forms the background of the opening titles. Made in 1958, in a France that was still comparatively straitlaced, the film foreshadows the 1960s explosion of counterculture and sexual experimentation that was to come. It is the story of a coup de foudre: an upper-class woman who is in a cold marriage meets a younger man and falls in love with him. In the course of a day and a night they choose each other, sleep together, and drive off in the morning to start a new life together. The film is indicative of the evolution ­­– or convulsions – of French society three centuries after the creation of the Map of Tender, when new ideas of unconventional individualism and hedonism were beginning to take shape.

Today, almost four centuries on, the Unknown Lands the Précieuses steered clear of have been explored, conquered and mapped out. But, after the sexual revolution, human nature remains unchanged, as do the tensions between desire and civilised behaviour. Do we, 21st-century travellers in the Land of Tender, now agree that love or passion justify every transgression? Do we know the way to attain a lasting close intimacy with another? While the salons of 17th^t-century France are no longer with us, the debate goes on.