and offices of friendship, and by a freedom and severity which seem to be her sole end for drawing a concourse to her. She has little taste and less knowledge, but protects artisans and authors, and courts a few people to have the credit of serving her dependents. In short, she is an epitome of empire, subsisting by rewards and punishments.”
Later, when he was less disinterested, perhaps, he writes to another friend: “Mme. du Deffand hates the philosophers, so you must give them up to her. She and Mme. Geoffrin are no friends; so if you go thither, don’t tell her of it–Indeed you would be sick of that house whither all the pretended beaux esprits and false savants go, and where they are very impertinent and dogmatic.”
The real power of this woman may be difficult to define, but a glance at her society reveals, at least partly, its secret. Nowhere has the glamour of a great name more influence than at Paris. A few celebrities form a nucleus of sufficient attraction to draw all the world, if they are selected with taste and discrimination. After the death of Fontenelle, d’Alembert, always witty, vivacious, and original, in spite of the serious and exact nature of his scientific studies, was perhaps the leading spirit of this salon. Among its constant habitues were Helvetius, who put his selfishness into his books, reserving for his friends the most amiable and generous of tempers; Marivaux, the novelist and dramatist, whose vanity rivaled his genius, but who represented only the literary spirit, and did not hesitate to ridicule his companions the philosophers; the caustic but brilliant and accomplished Abbe Morellet, who had “his heart in his head and his head in his heart;” the severe and cheerful Mairan, mathematician, astronomer, physician, musical amateur, and member of two academies, whose versatile gifts and courtly manners gave him as cordial a welcome in the exclusive salon at the Temple as among his philosophical friends; the gay young Marmontel, who has left so clear and simple a picture of this famous circle and its gentle hostess; Grimm, who combined the SAVANT and the courtier; Saint-Lambert, the delicate and scholarly poet; Thomas, grave and thoughtful, shining by his character and intellect, but forgetting the graces which were at that time so essential to brilliant success; the eloquent Abbe Raynal; and the Chevalier de Chastellux, so genial, so sympathetic, and so animated. To these we may add Galiani, the smallest, the wittiest, and the most delightful of abbes, whose piercing insight and Machiavellian subtlety lent a piquant charm to the stories with which for hours he used to enliven this choice company; Caraccioli, gay, simple, ingenuous, full of Neapolitan humor, rich in knowledge and observation, luminous with intelligence and sparkling with wit; and the Comte de Crentz, the learned and versatile Swedish minister, to whom nature had “granted the gift of expressing and painting in touches of fire all that had struck his imagination or vividly seized his soul.” Hume, Gibbon, Walpole, indeed every foreigner of distinction who visited Paris, lent to this salon the eclat of their fame, the charm of their wit, or the prestige of their rank. It was such men as these who gave it so rare a fascination and so lasting a fame.
A strong vein of philosophy was inevitable, though in this circle of diplomats and litterateurs there were many counter-currents of opinion. It was her consummate skill in blending these diverse but powerful elements, and holding them within harmonious limits, that made the reputation of the autocratic hostess. The friend of savants and philosophers, she had neither read nor studied books, but she had studied life to good purpose. Though superficial herself, she had the delicate art of putting every one in the most advantageous light by a few simple questions or words. It was one of her maxims that “the way not to get tired of people is to talk to them of themselves; at the same time, it is the best way to prevent them from getting tired of you.” Perhaps Mme. Necker was thinking of her when she compared certain women in conversation to “light layers of cotton wool in a box packed with porcelain; we do not pay much attention to them, but if they were taken away everything would be broken.”
Mme. Geoffrin was always at home in the evening, and there were simple little suppers to which a few women were invited. The fare was usually little more than “a chicken, some spinach, and omelet.” Among the most frequent guests were the charming, witty, and spirituelle Comtesse d’Egmont, daughter of the Duc de Richelieu, who added to the vivacious and elegant manners of her father an indefinable grace of her own, and a vein of sentiment that was doubtless deepened by her sad little romance; the Marquise de Duras, more dignified and discreet; and the beautiful Comtesse de Brionne, “a Venus who resembled Minerva.” These women, with others who came there, were intellectual complements of the men; some of them gay and not without serious faults, but adding beauty, rank, elegance, and the delicate tone of esprit which made this circle so famous that it was thought worth while to have its sayings and doings chronicled at Berlin and St. Petersburg. Perhaps its influence was the more insidious and far reaching because of its polished moderation. The “let us be agreeable” of Mme. Geoffrin was a potent talisman.
Among the guests at one time was Stanislas Poniatowski, afterwards King of Poland. Hearing that he was about to be imprisoned by his creditors, Mme. Geoffrin came forward and paid his debts. “When I make a statue of friendship, I shall give it your features,” he said to her; “this divinity is the mother of charity.” On his elevation to the throne he wrote to her, “Maman, your son is king. Come and see him.” This led to her famous journey when nearly seventy years of age. It was a series of triumphs at which no one was more surprised than herself, and they were all due, she modestly says, “to a few mediocre dinners and some petits soupers.” One can readily pardon her for feeling flattered, when the emperor alights from his carriage on the public promenade at Vienna and pays her some pretty compliments, “just as if he had been at one of our little Wednesday suppers.” There is a charm in the simple naivete with which she tells her friends how cordially Maria Theresa receives her at Schonbrunn, and she does not forget to add that the empress said she had the most beautiful complexion in the world. She repeats quite naturally, and with a slight touch of vanity perhaps, the fine speeches made to her by the “adorable Prince Galitzin” and Prince Kaunitz, “the first minister in Europe,” both of whom entertained her. But she would have been more than a woman to have met all this honor with indifference. No wonder she believes herself to be dreaming. “I am known here much better than in the Rue St. Honore,” she writes, “and in a fashion the most flattering. My journey has made an incredible sensation for the last fifteen days.” To be sure, she spells badly for a woman who poses as the friend of litterateurs and savants, and says very little about anything that does not concern her own fame and glory. But she does not cease to remember her friends, whom she “loves, if possible, better than ever.” Nor does she forget to send a thousand caresses to her kitten.
A messenger from Warsaw meets her with everything imaginable that can add to the comfort and luxury of her journey, and on reaching there she finds a room fitted up for her like her own boudoir in the Rue St. Honore. She accepts all this consideration with great modesty and admirable good sense. “This tour finished,” she writes to d’Alembert, “I feel that I shall have seen enough of men and things to be convinced that they are everywhere about the same. I have my storehouse of reflections and comparisons well furnished for the rest of my life. All that I have seen since leaving my Penates makes me thank God for having been born French and a private person.”
The peculiar charm which attracted such rare and marked attentions to a woman not received at her own court, and at a time when social distinctions were very sharply defined, eludes analysis, but it seems to have lain largely in her exquisite sense of fitness, her excellent judgment, her administrative talent, the fine tact and penetration which enabled her to avoid antagonism, an instinctive knowledge of the art of pleasing, and a kind but not too sensitive heart. These qualities are not those which appeal to the imagination or inspire enthusiasm. We find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual distinction. In her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of the heart. Her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship of self-consciousness. Of spontaneity she has none. “She loved nothing passionately, not even virtue,” says one of her critics. There was a certain method in her simplicity. She carried to perfection the art of savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom of thought and action, it was always strictly within conventional limits.
She suffered the fate of all celebrities in being occasionally attacked. The role assigned to her in the comedy of “The Philosophers” was not a flattering one, and some criticisms of Montesquieu wounded her so deeply that she succeeded in having them suppressed. She did not escape the shafts of envy, nor the sneers of the grandes dames who did not relish her popularity. But these were only spots on the surface of a singularly brilliant career. Calm, reposeful, charitable, without affectation or pretension, but not untouched by ennui, the malady of her time, she held her position to the end of a long life which closed in 1777.
“Alas,” said d’Alembert, who had been in the habit of spending his mornings with Mlle. de Lespinasse until her death, and his evenings with Mme. Geoffrin, “I have neither evenings nor mornings left.”
“She has made for fifty years the charm of her society,” said the Abbe Morellet. “She has been constantly, habitually virtuous and benevolent.” Her salon brought authors and artists into direct relation with distinguished patrons, especially foreigners, and thus contributed largely to the spread of French art and letters. It was counted among “the institutions of the eighteenth century.”
CHAPTER XIII. ULTRA-PHILOSOPHICAL SALONS–MADAME D’EPINAY Mme. de Graffigny–Baron d’Holbach–Mme. d’Epinay’s Portrait of Herself–Mlle. Quinault–Rousseau–La Chevrette–Grimm– Diderot–The Abbe Galiani–Estimate of Mme. d’Epinay
A few of the more radical and earnest of the philosophers rarely, if ever, appeared at the table of Mme. Geoffrin. They would have brought too much heat to this company, which discussed everything in a light and agreeable fashion. Perhaps, too, these free and brilliant spirits objected to the leading-strings which there held every one within prescribed limits. They could talk more at their ease at the weekly dinners of Baron d’Holbach, in the salons of Mme. Helvetius, Mme. de Marchais, or Mme. de Graffigny, in the Encyclopedist coterie of Mlle. de Lespinasse, or in the liberal drawing room of Mme. d’Epinay, who held a more questionable place in the social world, but received much good company, Mme. Geoffrin herself included.
Mme. de Graffigny is known mainly as a woman of letters whose life had in it many elements of tragedy. Her youth was passed in the brilliant society of the little court at Luneville. She was distantly related to Mme. du Chatelet, and finally took refuge from the cruelties of a violent and brutal husband in the “terrestrial paradise” at Cirey. La belle Emilie was moved to sympathy, and Voltaire wept at the tale of her sorrows. A little later she became a victim to the poet’s sensitive vanity. He accused her of sending to a friend a copy of his “Pucello,” an unfinished poem which was kept under triple lock, though parts of it had been read to her. Her letters were opened, her innocent praises were turned against her, there was a scene, and Cirey was a paradise no more. She came to Paris, ill, sad, and penniless. She wrote “Les Lettres d’une Peruvienne” and found herself famous. She wrote “Cenie,” which was played at the Comedie Francaise, and her success was established. Then she wrote another drama. “She read it to me,” says one of her friends; “I found it bad; she found me ill-natured. It was played; the public died of ennui and the author of chagrin.” “I am convinced that misfortune will follow me into paradise,” she said. At all events, it seems to have followed her to the entrance.
Her salon was more or less celebrated. The freedom of the conversations may be inferred from the fact that Helvetius gathered there the materials for his “De l’Esprit,” a book condemned by the Pope, the Parliament, and the Sorbonne. It was here also that he found his charming wife, a niece of Mme. de Graffigny, and the light of her house as afterwards of his own.
A more permanent interest is attached to the famous dinners of Baron d’Holbach, where twice a week men like Diderot, Helvetius, Grimm, Marmontel, Duclos, the Abbe Galiani and for a time Buffon and Rousseau, met in an informal way to enjoy the good cheer and good wines of this “maitre d’hotel of philosophy,” and discuss the affairs of the universe. The learned and free-thinking baron was agreeable, kind, rich, and lavish in his hospitality, but without pretension. “He was a man simply simple,” said Mme. Geoffrin. We have many pleasant glimpses of his country place at Grandval, with its rich and rare collections, its library, its pictures, its designs, and of the beautiful wife who turned the heads of some of the philosophers, whom, as a rule, she did not like overmuch, though she received them so graciously. “We dine well and a long time,” wrote Diderot. “We talk of art, of poetry, of philosophy, and of love, of the greatness and vanity of our own enterprises . . . Of gods and kings, of space and time, of death and of life.”
“They say things to make a thunderbolt strike the house a hundred times, if it struck for that,” said the Abbe Morellet.
Among the few women admitted to these dinners was Mme. d’Epinay, for whom d’Holbach, as well as his amiable wife, always entertained the warmest friendship. This woman, whose position was not assured enough to make people overlook her peculiar and unfortunate domestic complications, has told the story of her own life in her long and confidential correspondence with Grimm, Galiani, and Voltaire. The senseless follies of a cruel and worthless husband, who plunged her from great wealth into extreme poverty, and of whom Diderot said that “he had squandered two millions without saying a good word or doing a good action,” threw her into intimate relations with Grimm; this brought her into the center of a famous circle. Her letters give us a clear but far from flattering reflection of the manners of the time. She unveils the bare and hard facts of her own experience, the secret workings of her own soul. The picture is not a pleasant one, but it is full of significance to the moralist, and furnishes abundant matter for psychological study.
The young girl, who had entered upon the scene about 1725, under the name of Louise Florence Petronille-Tardieu d’Esclavelles, was married at twenty to her cousin. It seems to have been really a marriage of love; but the weak and faithless M. d’Epinay was clearly incapable of truth or honor, and the torturing process by which the confiding young wife was disillusioned, the insidious counsel of a false and profligate friend, with the final betrayal of a tender and desolate heart, form a chapter as revolting as it is pathetic. The fresh, lively, pure-minded, sensitive girl, whose intellect had been fed on Rollin’s history and books of devotion, who feared the dissipations of the gay world and shrank with horror from the rouge which her frivolous husband compelled her to put on, learned her lesson rapidly in the school of suffering.
At thirty she writes of herself, after the fashion of the pen portraits of the previous century:
“I am not pretty; yet I am not plain. I am small, thin, very well formed. I have the air of youth, without freshness, but noble, sweet, lively, spirituelle, and interesting. My imagination is tranquil. My mind is slow, just, reflective, and inconsequent. I have vivacity, courage, firmness, elevation, and excessive timidity. I am true without being frank. Timidity often gives me the appearance of dissimulation and duplicity; but I have always had the courage to confess my weakness, in order to destroy the suspicion of a vice which I have not. I have the finesse to attain my end and to remove obstacles; but I have none to penetrate the purposes of others. I was born tender and sensible, constant and no coquette. I love retirement, a life simple and private; nevertheless I have almost always led one contrary to my taste. Bad health, and sorrows sharp and repeated, have given a serious cast to my character, which is naturally very gay.”
Her first entrance into the world in which wit reigned supreme was in the free but elegant salon of Mlle. Quinault, an actress of the Comedie Francaise, who had left the stage, and taking the role of a femme d’esprit, had gathered around her a distinguished and fashionable coterie. This woman, who had received a decoration for a fine motet she had composed for the queen’s chapel, who was loved and consulted by Voltaire, and who was the best friend of d’Alembert after the death of Mlle. de Lespinasse, represented the genius of esprit and finesse. She was the companion of princes, the adoration of princesses, the oracle of artists and litterateurs, the model of elegance, and the embodiment of social success. It did not matter much that the tone of her salon was lax; it was fashionable. “It distilled dignity, la convenance, and formality,” says the Marquise de Crequi, who relates an anecdote that aptly illustrates the glamour which surrounded talent at that time. She was taken by her grandmother to see Mlle. Quinault, and by some chance mistook her for Mlle. de Vertus, who was so much flattered by her innocent error that she left her forty thousand francs, when she died a few months later.
Mme. d’Epinay was delighted to find herself in so brilliant a world, and was greatly fascinated by its wit, though she was not sure that those who met there did not “feel too much the obligation of having it.” But she caught the spirit, and transferred it, in some degree, to her own salon, which was more literary than fashionable. Here Francueil presents “a sorry devil of an author who is as poor as Job, but has wit and vanity enough for four.” This is Rousseau, the most conspicuous figure in the famous coterie. “He is a man to whom one should raise altars,” wrote Mme. d’Epinay. “And the simplicity with which he relates his misfortunes! I have still a pitying soul. It is frightful to imagine such a man in misery.” She fitted up for him the Hermitage, and did a thousand kind things which entitled her to a better return than he gave. There is a pleasant moment when we find him the center of an admiring circle at La Chevrette, falling madly in love with her clever and beautiful sister-in-law the Comtesse d’Houdetot, writing “La Nouvelle Heloise” under the inspiration of this passion, and dreaming in the lovely promenades at Montmorency, quite at peace with the world. But the weeping philosopher, who said such fine things and did such base ones, turned against his benefactress and friend for some imaginary offense, and revenged himself by false and malicious attacks upon her character. The final result was a violent quarrel with the whole circle of philosophers, who espoused the cause of Mme. d’Epinay. This little history is interesting, as it throws so much light upon the intimate relations of some of the greatest men of the century. Behind the perpetual round of comedies, readings, dinners, music, and conversation, there is a real comedy of passion, intrigue, jealousy, and hidden misery that destroys many illusions.
Mme. d’Epinay has been made familiar to us by Grimm, Galiani, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Perhaps, on the whole, Voltaire has given us the most agreeable impression. She was ill of grief and trouble, and had gone to Geneva to consult the famous Tronchin when she was thrown into more or less intimacy with the Sage of Ferney. He invited her to dinner immediately upon her arrival. “I was much fatigued, besides having confessed and received communion the evening before. I did not find it fitting to dine with Voltaire two days afterward,” writes this curiously sensitive friend of the free-thinkers. He addresses her as ma belle philosophe, speaks of her as “an eagle in a cage of gauze,” and praises in verse her philosophy, her esprit, her heart, and her “two great black eyes.” He weeps at her departure, tells her she is “adored at Delices, adored at Paris, adored present and absent.” But “the tears of a poet do not always signify grief,” says Mme. d’Epinay.
There is a second period in her life, when she introduces us again to the old friends who always sustained her, and to many new ones. The world that meets in her salon later is much the same as that which dines with Baron d’Holbach. To measure its attractions one must recall the brilliancy and eloquence of Diderot; the wit, the taste, the learning, the courtly accomplishments of Grimm; the gaiety and originality of d’Holbach, who had “read everything and forgotten nothing interesting;” the sparkling conversation of the most finished and scholarly diplomats in Europe, many of whom we have already met at the dinners of Mme. Geoffrin. They discuss economic questions, politics, religion, art, literature, with equal freedom and ardor. They are as much divided on the merits of Gluck’s “Armida” and Piccini’s “Roland” as upon taxes, grains, and the policy of the government. The gay little Abbe Galiani brings perennial sunshine with the inexhaustible wit and vivacity that lights his clear and subtle intellect. “He is a treasure on rainy days,” says Diderot. “If they made him at the toy shops everybody would want one for the country.” “He was the nicest little harlequin that Italy has produced,” says Marmontel, “but upon the shoulders of this harlequin was the head of a Machiavelli. Epicurean in his philosophy and with a melancholy soul, seeing everything on the ridiculous side, there was nothing either in politics or morals apropos of which he had not a good story to tell, and these stories were always apt and had the salt of an unexpected and ingenious allusion.” He did not accept the theories of his friends, which he believed would “cause the bankruptcy of knowledge, of pleasure, and of the human intellect.” “Messieurs les philosophes, you go too fast,” he said. “I begin by saying that if I were pope I would put you in the Inquisition, and if I were king of France, into the Bastille.” He saw the drift of events; but if he reasoned like a philosopher he laughed like a Neapolitan. What matters tomorrow if we are happy today!
The familiar notes and letters of these clever people picture for us a little world with its small interests, its piques, its loves, its friendships, its quarrels, and its hatreds. Diderot, who refused for a long time to meet Mme. d’Epinay, but finally became an intimate and lasting friend, touches often, in his letters to Sophie, upon the pleasant informality of La Chevrette, with its curious social episodes and its emotional undercurrents. He does not forget even the pigeons, the geese, the ducks, and the chickens, which he calls his own. Pouf, the dog, has his place here too, and flits often across the scene, a tiny bit of reflected immortality. These letters represent the bold iconoclast on his best side, kind, simple in his tastes, and loyal to his friends. He was never at home in the great world. He was seen sometimes in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. Necker, and others, but he made his stay as brief as possible. Mme. d’Epinay succeeded better in attaching him to her coterie. There was more freedom, and he probably had a more sympathetic audience. “Four lines of this man make me dram more and occupy me more,” she said, “than a complete work of our pretended beaux esprits.” Grimm, too, was a central figure here, and Grimm was his friend. But over his genius, as over that of Rousseau, there was the trail of the serpent. The breadth of his thought, the brilliancy of his criticisms, the eloquence of his style were clouded with sensualism. “When you see on his forehead the reflection of a ray from Plato,” says Sainte-Beuve, “do not trust it; look well, there is always the foot of a satyr.”
It was to the clear and penetrating intellect of Grimm, with its vein of German romanticism, that Mme. d’Epinay was indebted for the finest appreciation and the most genuine sympathy. “Bon Dieu,” he writes to Diderot, “how this woman is to be pitied! I should not be troubled about her if she were as strong as she is courageous. She is sweet and trusting; she is peaceful, and loves repose above all; but her situation exacts unceasingly a conduct forced and out of her character; nothing so wears and destroys a machine naturally frail.” She aided him in his correspondance litteraire; wrote a treatise on education, which had the honor of being crowned by the Academy; and, among other things of more or less value, a novel, which was not published until long after her death. With many gifts and attractions, kind, amiable, forgiving, and essentially emotional, Mme. d’Epinay seems to have been a woman of weak and undecided character, without sufficient strength of moral fiber to sustain herself with dignity under the unfortunate circumstances which surrounded her. “It depends only upon yourself,” said Grimm, “to be the happiest and most adorable creature in the world, provided that you do not put the opinions of others before your own, and that you know how to suffice for yourself.” Her education had not given her the worldly tact and address of Mme. Geoffrin, and her salon never had a wide celebrity; but it was a meeting place of brilliant and radical thinkers, of the men who have perhaps done the most to change the face of the modern world. In a quiet and intimate way, it was one among the numberless forces which were gathering and gaining momentum to culminate in the great tragedy of the century. Mme. d’Epinay did not live to see the catastrophe. Worn out by a life of suffering and ill health, she died in 1783.
Whatever her faults and weaknesses may have been, the woman who could retain the devoted affection of so brilliant and versatile a man as Grimm for twenty-seven years, who was the lifelong friend and correspondent of Galiani and Voltaire, and the valued confidante of Diderot, must have had some rare attractions of mind, heart, or character.
CHAPTER XIV. SALONS OF THE NOBLESSE–MADAME DU DEFFAND La Marechale de Luxembourg–The Temple–Comtesse de Boufflers– Mme. du Deffand–Her Convent Salon–Rupture with Mlle. de Lespinasse–Her Friendship with Horace Walpole–Her brilliancy and Her Ennui
While the group of iconoclasts who formed the nucleus of the philosophical salons was airing its theories and enjoying its increasing vogue, there was another circle which played with the new ideas more or less as a sort of intellectual pastime, but was aristocratic au fond, and carefully preserved all the traditions of the old noblesse. One met here the philosophers and men of letters, but they did not dominate; they simply flavored these coteries of rank and fashion. In this age of esprit no salon was complete without its sprinkling of literary men. We meet the shy and awkward Rousseau even in the exclusive drawing room of the clever and witty but critical Marechale de Luxembourg, who presides over a world in which the graces rule–a world of elegant manners, of etiquette, and of forms. This model of the amenities, whose gay and faulty youth ripened into a pious and charitable age, was at the head of that tribunal which pronounced judgment upon all matters relating to society. She was learned in genealogy, analyzed and traced to their source the laws of etiquette, possessed a remarkable memory, and without profound education, had learned much from conversation with the savants and illustrious men who frequented her house. Her wit was proverbial, and she was never at a loss for a ready repartee or a spicy anecdote. She gave two grand suppers a week. Mme. de Genlis, who was often there, took notes, according to her custom, and has left an interesting record of conversations that were remarkable not only for brilliancy, but for the thoughtful wisdom of the comments upon men and things. La Harpe read a great part of his works in this salon. Rousseau entertained the princely guests at Montmorency with “La Nouvelle Heloise” and “Emile,” and though never quite at ease, his democratic theories did not prevent him from feeling greatly honored by their friendly courtesies; indeed, he loses his usual bitterness when speaking of this noble patroness. He says that her conversation was marked by an exquisite delicacy that always pleased, and her flatteries were intoxicating because they were simple and seemed to escape without intention.
Mme. de Luxembourg was an autocrat, and did not hesitate to punish errors in taste by social ostracism. “Erase the name of Monsieur — — — from my list,” she said, as a gentleman left after relating a scandalous story reflecting upon some one’s honor. It was one of her theories that “society should punish what the law cannot attack.” She maintained that good manners are based upon noble and delicate sentiments, that mutual consideration, deference, politeness, gentleness, and respect to age are essential to civilization. The disloyal, the ungrateful bad sons, bad brothers, bad husbands, and bad wives, whose offenses were serious enough to be made public, she banished from that circle which called itself la bonne compagnie. It must be admitted, however, that it was les convenances rather than morality which she guarded.
A rival of this brilliant salon, and among the most celebrated of its day, was the one at the Temple. The animating spirit here was the amiable and vivacious Comtesse de Boufflers, celebrated in youth for her charms, and later for her talent. She was dame d’honneur to the Princesse de Conti, wife of the Duc d’Orleans, who was noted for her caustic wit, as well as for her beauty. It was in the salon of his clever and rather capricious sister that the learned Prince de Conti met her and formed the intimacy that ended only with his life. She was called the idole of the Temple, and her taste for letters gave her also the title of Minerve savante. She wrote a tragedy which was said to be good, though she would never let it go out of her hands, and has been immortalized by Rousseau, with whom she corresponded for sixteen years. Hume also exchanged frequent letters with her, and she tried in vain to reconcile these two friends after their quarrel. President Henault said he had never met a woman of so much esprit, adding that “outside all her charms she had character.” For society she had a veritable passion. She said that when she loved England the best she could not think of staying there without “taking twenty-four or twenty-five intimate friends, and sixty or eighty others who were absolutely necessary to her.” Her conversation was full of fire and brilliancy, and her gaiety of heart, her gracious manners, and her frank appreciation of the talent of others added greatly to her piquant fascination. She delighted in original turns of expression, which were sometimes far-fetched and artificial. One of her friends said that “she made herself the victim of consideration, and lost it by running after it.” Her rule of life may be offered as a model. “In conduct, simplicity and reason; in manners, propriety and decorum; in actions, justice and generosity; in the use of wealth, economy and liberality; in conversation, clearness, truth, precision; in adversity, courage and pride; in prosperity, modesty and moderation.” Unfortunately she did not put all this wisdom into practice, if we judge her by present standards. We have a glimpse of the famous circle over which she presided in an interesting picture formerly at Versailles, now at the Louvre. The figures are supposed to be portraits. Among others are Mme. de Luxembourg, the Comtesse de Boufflers, and the lovely but ill- fated young stepdaughter, Amelie, Comtesse de Lauzun, to whom she is so devoted; the beautiful Comtesse d’Egmont, Mme. de Beauvan, President Henault, the witty Pont de Veyle, Mairan, the versatile scientist, and the Prince de Conti. In the midst of this group the little Mozart, whose genius was then delighting Europe, sits at the harpsichord. The chronicles of the time give us pleasant descriptions of the literary diversions of this society, which met by turns at the Temple and Ile-Adam. But the Prince as well as the clever Comtesse had a strong leaning towards philosophy, and the amusements were interspersed with much conversation of a serious character that has a peculiar interest today when read by the light of after events.
Among the numerous salons of the noblesse there was one which calls for more than a passing word, both on account of its world- wide fame and the exceptional brilliancy of its hostess. Though far less democratic and cosmopolitan than that of Mme. Geoffrin, with which it was contemporary, its character was equally distinct and original. Linked by birth with the oldest of the nobility, allied by intellect with the most distinguished in the world of letters, Mme. du Deffand appropriated the best in thought, while retaining the spirit of an elegant and refined social life. She was exclusive by nature and instinct, as well as by tradition, and could not dispense with the arts and amenities which are the fruit of generations of ease; but the energy and force of her intellect could as little tolerate shallowness and pretension, however disguised beneath the graceful tyranny of forms. Her salon offers a sort of compromise between the freedom of the philosophical coteries and the frivolities of the purely fashionable ones. It included the most noted of the men of letters–those who belonged to the old aristocracy and a few to whom nature had given a prescriptive title of nobility–as well as the flower of the great world. Her sarcastic wit, her clear intelligence, and her rare conversational gifts added a tone of individuality that placed her salon at the head of the social centers of the time in brilliancy and in esprit. In this group of wits, LITTERATEURS, philosophers, statesmen, churchmen, diplomats, and men of rank, Mme. du Deffand herself is always the most striking figure. The art of self-suppression she clearly did not possess. But the art of so blending a choice society that her own vivid personality was a pervading note of harmony she had to an eminent degree. She could easily have made a mark upon her time through her intellectual gifts without the factitious aid of the men with whom her name is associated. But society was her passion society animated by intellect, sparkling with wit, and expressing in all its forms the art instincts of her race. She never aspired to authorship, but she has left a voluminous correspondence in which one reads the varying phases of a singularly capricious character. In her old age she found refuge from a devouring ennui in writing her own memoirs. Merciless to herself as to others, she veils nothing, revealing her frailties with a freedom that reminds one of Rousseau.
It is not the portrait of an estimable woman that we can paint from these records; but in her intellectual force, her social gifts, and her moral weakness she is one of the best exponents of an age that trampled upon the finest flowers of the soul in the blind pursuit of pleasure and the cynical worship of a hard and unpitying realism. Living from 1697 to 1780, she saw the train laid for the Revolution, and died in time to escape its horrors. She traversed the whole experience of the women of her world with the independence and abandon of a nature that was moderate in nothing. It is true she felt the emptiness of this arid existence, and had an intellectual perception of its errors, but she saw nothing better. “All conditions appear to me equally unhappy, from the angel to the oyster,” is the burden of her hopeless refrain.
She reveals herself to us as two distinct characters. The one best known is hard, bitter, coldly analytic, and mocks at everything bordering upon sentiment or feeling. The other, which underlies this, and of which we have rare glimpses, is frank, tender, loving even to weakness, and forever at war with the barrenness of a period whose worst faults she seems to have embodied, and whose keenest penalties she certainly suffered.
Voltaire, the lifelong friend whom she loved, but critically measured, was three years old when she was born; Mme. de Sevigne had been dead nearly a year. Of a noble family in Burgundy, Marie de Vichy-Chamroud was brought to Paris at six years of age and placed in the convent of St. Madeleine de Traisnel, where she was educated after the superficial fashion which she so much regrets in later years. She speaks of herself as a romantic, imaginative child, but she began very early to shock the pious sisters by her dawning skepticism. One of the nuns had a wax figure of the infant Jesus, which she discovered to have been a doll formerly dressed to represent the Spanish fashions to Anne of Austria. This was the first blow to her illusions, and had a very perceptible influence upon her life. She pronounced it a deception. Eight days of solitude with a diet of bread and water failed to restore her reverence. “It does not depend upon me to believe or disbelieve,” she said. The eloquent and insinuating Massillon was called in to talk with her. “She is charming,” was his remark, as he left her after two hours of conversation; adding thoughtfully, “Give her a five-cent catechism.”
Skeptical by nature and saturated with the free-thinking spirit of the time, she reasoned that all religion was au fond, only paganism disguised. In later years, when her isolated soul longed for some tangible support, she spoke regretfully of the philosophic age which destroyed beliefs by explaining and analyzing everything.
But a beautiful, clever, high-spirited girl of sixteen is apt to feel her youth all suffering. It is certain that she had no inclination towards the life of a religieuse, and the country quickly became insupportable after her return to its provincial society. Ennui took possession of her. She was glad even to go to confessional, for the sake of telling her thoughts to some one. She complained bitterly that the life of women compelled dependence upon the conduct of others, submission to all ills and all consequences. Long afterwards she said that she would have married the devil if he had been clothed as a gentleman and assured her a moderate life. But a husband was at last found for her, and merely to escape the monotony of her secluded existence, she was glad, at twenty-one, to become the wife of the Marquis du Deffand–a good but uninteresting man, much older than herself.
Brilliant, fascinating, restless, eager to see and to learn, she felt herself in her element in the gay world of Paris. She confessed that, for the moment, she almost loved her husband for bringing her there. But the moment was a short one. They did not even settle down to what a witty Frenchman calls the “politeness of two indifferences.” It is a curious commentary upon the times, that the beautiful but notorious Mme. de Parabere, who introduced her at once into her own unscrupulous world and the petits soupers of the Regent, condoled with the young bride upon her marriage, regretting that she had not taken the easy vows of a chanoinesse, as Mme. de Tencin had done. “In that case,” she said, “you would have been free; well placed everywhere; with the stability of a married woman; a revenue which permits one to live and accept aid from others; the independence of a widow, without the ties which a family imposes; unquestioned rank, which you would owe to no one; indulgence, and impunity. For these advantages there is only the trouble of wearing a cross, which is becoming; black or gray habits, which can be made as magnificent as one likes; a little imperceptible veil, and a knitting sheath.”
Under such teaching she was not long in taking her own free and independent course, which was reckless even in that age of laxity. At her first supper at the Palais Royal she met Voltaire and fascinated the Regent, though her reign lasted but a few days. The counsels of her aunt, the dignified Duchesse de Luynes, availed nothing. Her husband was speedily sent off on some mission to the provinces and she plunged into the current. Once afterwards, in a fit of ennui, she recalled him, frankly stating her position. But she quickly wearied of him again, grew dull, silent, lost her vivacity, and fell into a profound melancholy. Her friend Mme. de Parabere took it upon herself to explain to him the facts, and he kindly relieved her forever of his presence, leaving a touching and pathetic letter which gave her a moment of remorse in spite of her lightened heart. This sin against good taste the Parisian world could not forgive, and even her friends turned against her for a time. But the Duchesse due Maine came to her aid with an all-powerful influence, and restored her finally to her old position. For some years she passed the greater part of her time at Sceaux, and was a favorite at this lively little court.
It is needless to trace here the details of a career which gives us little to admire and much to condemn. It was about 1740 when her salon became noted as a center for the fashionable and literary world of Paris. Montesquieu and d’Alembert were then among her intimate friends. Of the latter she says: “The simplicity of his manners, the purity of his morals, the air of youth, the frankness of character, joined to all his talents, astonished at first those who saw him.” It is said to have been through her zeal that he was admitted to the Academy so young. Among others who formed her familiar circle were her devoted friend Pont de Veyle; the Chevalier d’Aydie; Formont, the “spirituel idler and amiable egotist,” who was one of the three whom she confesses really to have loved; and President Henault, who brought always a fund of lively anecdote and agreeable conversation. This world of fashion and letters, slightly seasoned with philosophy, is also the world of Mme. de Luxembourg, of the brilliant Mme. de Mirepoix, of the Prince and Princesse de Beauvau, and of the lovely Duchesse de Choiseul, a femme d’esprit and “mistress of all the elegances,” whose gentle virtues fall like a ray of sunlight across the dark pages of this period. It is the world of elegant forms, the world in which a sin against taste is worse than a sin against morals, the world which hedges itself in by a thousand unwritten laws that save it from boredom.
After the death of the Duchesse du Maine, Mme. du Deffand retired to the little convent of St. Joseph, where, after the manner of many women of rank with small fortunes, she had her menage and received her friends. “I have a very pretty apartment,” she writes to Voltaire; “very convenient; I only go out for supper. I do not sleep elsewhere, and I make no visits. My society is not numerous, but I am sure it will please you; and if you were here you would make it yours. I have seen for some time many savants and men of letters; I have not found their society delightful.” The good nuns objected a little to Voltaire at first, but seem to have been finally reconciled to the visits of the arch-heretic. At this time Mme. du Deffand had supposably reformed her conduct, if not her belief.
She continued to entertain the flower of the nobility and the stars of the literary and scientific world. But while the most famous of the men of letters were welcome in her salon, the tone was far from pedantic or even earnest. It was a society of conventional people, the elite of fashion and intelligence, who amused themselves in an intellectual but not too serious way. Montesquieu, who liked those houses in which he could pass with his every-day wit, said, “I love this woman with all my heart; she pleases and amuses me; it is impossible to feel a moment’s ennui in her company.” Mme. de Genlis, who did not love her expressed her surprise at finding her so natural and so kindly. Her conversation was simple and without pretension. When she was pleased, her manners were even affectionate. She never entered into a discussion, confessing that she was not sufficiently attached to any opinion to defend it. She disliked the enthusiasm of the philosophers unless it was hidden behind the arts of the courtier, as in Voltaire, whose delicate satire charmed her. Diderot came once, “eyed her epicurean friends,” and came no more. The air was not free enough. When at home she had three or four at supper every day, often a dozen, and, once a week, a grand supper. All the intellectual fashions of the time are found here. La Harpe reads a translation from Sophocles and his own tragedy. Clairon, the actress in vogue, recites the roles of Phedre and Agrippine, Lekain reads Voltaire, and Goldoni a comedy of his own, which the hostess finds tiresome. New books, new plays, the last song, the latest word of the philosophers–all are talked about, eulogized, or dismissed with a sarcasm. The wit of Mme. du Deffand is feared, but it fascinates. She delights in clever repartees and sparkling epigrams. A shaft of wit silences the most complacent of monologues. “What tiresome book are you reading?” she said one day to a friend who talked too earnestly and too long–saving herself from the charge of rudeness by an easy refuge in her blindness.
Her criticisms are always severe. “There are only two pleasures for me in the world–society and reading,” she writes. “What society does one find? Imbeciles, who utter only commonplaces, who know nothing, feel nothing, think nothing; a few people of talent, full of themselves, jealous, envious, wicked, whom one must hate or scorn.” To some one who was eulogizing a mediocre man, adding that all the world was of the same opinion, she replied, “I make small account of the world, Monsieur, since I perceive that one can divide it into three parts, les trompeurs, les trompes, et les trompettes.” Still it is life alone that interests her. Though she is not satisfied with people, she has always the hope that she will be. In literature she likes only letters and memoirs, because they are purely human; but the age has nothing that pleases her. “It is cynical or pedantic,” she writes to Voltaire; “there is no grace, no facility, no imagination. Everything is a la glace, hardness without force, license without gaiety; no talent, much presumption.”
As age came on, and she felt the approach of blindness, she found a companion in Mlle. de Lespinasse, a young girl of remarkable gifts, who had an obscure and unacknowledged connection with her family. For ten years the young woman was a slave to the caprices of her exacting mistress, reading to her through long nights of wakeful restlessness, and assisting to entertain her guests. The one thing upon which Mme. du Deffand most prided herself was frankness. She hated finesse, and had stipulated that she would not tolerate artifice in any form. It was her habit to lie awake all night and sleep all day, and as she did not receive her guests until six o’clock, Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose amiable character and conversational charm had endeared her at once to the circle of her patroness, arranged to see her personal friends–among whom were d’Alembert, Turgot, Chastellux, and Marmontel–in her own apartments for an hour before the marquise appeared. When this came to the knowledge of the latter, she fell into a violent rage at what she chose to regard as a treachery to herself, and dismissed her companion at once. The result was the opening of a rival salon which carried off many of her favorite guests, notably d’Alembert, to whom she was much attached. “If she had died fifteen years earlier, I should not have lost d’Alembert,” was her sympathetic remark when she heard of the death of Mlle. de Lespinasse.
But the most striking point in the career of this worldly woman was her friendship for Horace Walpole. When they first met she was nearly seventy, blind, ill-tempered, bitter, and hopelessly ennuyee. He was not yet fifty, a brilliant, versatile man of the world, and saw her only at long intervals. Their curious correspondence extends over a period of fifteen years, ending only with her death.
In a letter to Grayson, after meeting her, he writes: “Mme. du Deffand is now very old and stone blind, but retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgment, passion, and agreeableness. She goes to operas, plays, suppers, Versailles; gives supper twice a week; has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams–aye, admirably–and remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as possible; for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved–I don’t mean by lovers–and a vehement enemy openly.”
The acquaintance thus begun quickly drilled into an intimacy. Friendship she calls this absorbing sentiment, but it has all the caprices and inconsistencies of love. Fed by the imagination, and prevented by separation from wearing itself out, it became the most permanent interest of her life. There is something curiously pathetic in the submissive attitude of this blind, aged, but spirited woman–who scoffs at sentiment and confesses that she could never love anything–towards the man who criticizes her, scolds her, crushes back her too ardent feeling, yet calls her his dear old friend, writes her a weekly letter, and modestly declares that she “loves him better than all France together.”
The spirit of this correspondence greatly modifies the impression which her own words, as well as the facts of her career, would naturally give us. We find in the letters of this period little of the freshness and spontaneity that lent such a charm to the letters of Mme. de Sevigne and her contemporaries. Women still write of the incidents of their lives, the people they meet, their jealousies, their rivalries, their loves, and their follies; but they think, where they formerly mirrored the world about them. They analyze, they compare, the criticize, they formulate their own emotions, they add opinions to facts. The gaiety, the sparkle, the wit, the play of feeling, is not there. Occasionally there is the tone of passion, as in the letters of Mlle. Aisse and Mlle. de Lespinasse, but this is rare. Even passion has grown sophisticated and deals with phrases. There is more or less artificiality in the exchange of written thoughts. Mme. du Deffand thinks while she writes, and what she sees takes always the color of her own intelligence. She complains of her inability to catch the elusive quality, the clearness, the flexibility of Mme. de Sevigne, whom she longs to rival because Walpole so admires her. But if she lacks the vivacity, the simplicity, the poetic grace of her model, she has qualities not less striking, though less lovable. Her keen insight is unfailing. With masterly penetration she grasps the essence of things. No one has portrayed so concisely and so vividly the men and women of her time. No one has discriminated between the shades of character with such nicety. No one has so clearly fathomed the underlying motives of action. No one has forecast the outcome of theories and events with such prophetic vision. The note of bitterness and cynicism is always there. The nature of the woman reveals itself in every line: keen, dry, critical, with clear ideals which she can never hope to attain. But we feel that she has stripped off the rags of pretension and brought us face to face with realities. “All that I can do is to love you with all my heart, as I have done for about fifty years,” wrote Voltaire. “How could I fail to love you? Your soul seeks always the true; it is a quality as rare as truth itself.” So far does she carry her hatred of insincerity that one is often tempted to believe she affects a freedom from affectation. “I am so fatigued with the vanity of others that I avoid the occasion of having any myself,” she writes. Is there not here a trace of the quality she so despises?
But beneath all this runs the swift undercurrent of an absorbing passion. A passion of friendship it may be, but it forces itself through the arid shells of conventionalism; it is at once the agony and the consolation of a despairing soul. Heartless, Mme. du Deffand is called, and her life seems to prove the truth of the verdict; but these letters throb and palpitate with feeling which she laughs at, but cannot still. It is the cry of the soul for what it has not; what the world cannot give; what it has somehow missed out of a cold, hard, restless, and superficial existence. With a need of loving, she is satisfied with no one. There is something wanting; even in the affection of her friends. “Ma grand’maman,” she says to the gentle Duchesse de Choiseul, “you KNOW that you love me, but you do not FEEL it.”
Devouring herself in solitude, she despises the society she cannot do without. “Men and women appear to me puppets who go, come, talk, laugh, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling,” she writes. She confesses that she has a thousand troubles in assembling a choice company of people who bore her to death. “One sees only masks, one hears only lies,” is her constant refrain. She does not want to live, but is afraid to die; she says she is not made for this world, but does not know that there is any other. She tries devotion, but has no taste for it. Of the light that shines from within upon so many darkened and weary souls she has no knowledge. Her vision is bounded by the tangible, which offers only a rigid barrier, against which her life flutters itself away. She dies as she has lived, with a deepened conviction of the nothingness of existence. “Spare me three things,” she said to her confessor in her last moments; “let me have no questions, no reasons, and no sermons.” Seeing Wiart, her faithful servitor, in tears, she remarks pathetically, as if surprised, “You love me then?” “Divert yourself as much as you can,” was her final message to Walpole. “You will regret me, because one is very glad to know that one is loved.” She commends to his care and affection Tonton, her little dog.
Strong but not gentle, brilliant but not tender, too penetrating for any illusions, with a nature forever at war with itself, its surroundings, and its limitations, no one better points the moral of an age without faith, without ideals, without the inner light that reveals to hope what is denied to sense.
The influence of such a woman with her gifts, her energy, her power, and her social prestige, can hardly be estimated. It was not in the direction of the new drift of thought. “I am not a fanatic as to liberty,” she said; “I believe it is an error to pretend that it exists in a democracy. One has a thousand tyrants in place of one.” She had no breadth of sympathy, and her interests were largely personal; but in matters of style and form her taste was unerring. Pitiless in her criticisms, she held firmly to her ideals of clear, elegant, and concise expression, both in literature and in conversation. She tolerated no latitudes, no pretension, and left behind her the traditions of a society that blended, more perfectly, perhaps, than any other of her time, the best intellectual life with courtly manners and a strict observance of les convenances.
CHAPTER XV. MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE A Romantic Career–Companion of Mme. du Deffand–Rival Salons– Association with the Encyclopedists–D’Alembert–A Heart Tragedy–Impassioned Letters–A Type Unique in her Age
Inseparably connected with the name of Mme. du Deffand is that of her companion and rival, Mlle. de Lespinasse, the gifted, charming, tender and loving woman who presided over one of the most noted of the philosophical salons; who was the chosen friend and confidante of the Encyclopedists; and who died in her prime of a broken heart, leaving the world a legacy of letters that rival those of Heloise or the poems of Sappho, as “immortal pictures of passion.” The memory of her social triumphs, remarkable as they were, pales before the singular romances of her life. In the midst of a cold, critical, and heartless society, that adored talent and ridiculed sentiment, she became the victim of a passion so profound, so ardent, so hopeless, that her powerful intellect bent before it like a reed before a storm. She died of that unsuspected passion, and years afterwards these letters found the light and told the tale.
The contrast between the two women so closely linked together is complete. Mme. du Deffand belonged to the age of Voltaire by every fiber of her hard and cynical nature. What she called love was a fire of the intellect which consumed without warming. It was a violent and fierce prejudice in favor of those who reflected something of herself. The tenderness of self-sacrifice was not there. Mlle. de Lespinasse was of the later era of Rousseau; the era of exaggerated feeling, of emotional delirium, of romantic dreams; the era whose heroine was the loving and sentimental “Julie,” for whose portrait she might have sat, with a shade or so less of intellect and brilliancy. But it was more than a romantic dream that shadowed and shortened the life of Mlle. de Lespinasse. She had a veritable heart of flame, that consumed not only itself but its frail tenement as well.
Julie-Jeanne-Eleonore de Lespinasse, who was born at Lyons in 1732, had a birthright of sorrow. Her mother, the Comtesse d’Albon, could not acknowledge this fugitive and nameless daughter, but after the death of her husband she received her on an inferior footing, had her carefully educated, and secretly gave her love and care. Left alone and without resources at fifteen, Julie was taken, as governess and companion, into the family of a sister who was the wife of Mme. du Deffand’s brother. Here the marquise met her on one of her visits and heard the story of her sorrows. Tearful, sad, and worn out by humiliations, the young girl had decided to enter a convent. “There is no misfortune that I have not experienced,” she wrote to Guibert many years afterwards. “Some day, my friend, I will relate to you things not to be found in the romances of Prevost nor of Richardson . . . I ought naturally to devote myself to hating; I have well fulfilled my destiny; I have loved much and hated very little. Mon Dieu, my friend, I am a hundred years old.” Mme. du Deffand was struck with her talent and a certain indefinable fascination of manner which afterwards became so potent. “You have gaiety,” she wrote to her, “you are capable of sentiment; with these qualities you will be charming so long as you are natural and without pretension.” After a negotiation of some months, Mlle. de Lespinasse went to Paris to live with her new friend. The history of this affair has been already related.
Parisian society was divided into two factions on the merits of the quarrel–those who censured the ingratitude of the younger woman, and those who accused the marquise of cruelty and injustice. But many of the oldest friends of the latter aided her rival. The Marechale de Luxembourg furnished her apartments in the Rue de Belle-Chasse. The Duc de Choiseul procured her a pension, and Mme. Geoffrin gave her an annuity. She carried with her a strong following of eminent men from the salon of Mme. du Deffand, among whom was d’Alembert, who remained faithful and devoted to the end. It is said that President Henault even offered to marry her, but how, under these circumstances, he managed to continue in the good graces of his lifelong friend, the unforgiving marquise, does not appear. A letter which he wrote to Mlle. de Lespinasse throws a direct light upon her character, after making due allowance for the exaggeration of French gallantry.
“You are cosmopolitan; you adapt yourself to all situations. The world pleases you; you love solitude. Society amuses you, but it does not seduce you. Your heart does not give itself easily. Strong passions are necessary to you, and it is better so, for they will not return often. Nature, in placing you in an ordinary position, has given you something to relieve it. Your soul is noble and elevated, and you will never remain in a crowd. It is the same with your person. It is distinguished and attracts attention, without being beautiful. There is something piquante about you . . . You have two things which do not often go together: you are sweet and strong; your gaiety adorns you and relaxes your nerves, which are too tense . . . You are extremely refined; you have divined the world.”
The age of portraits was not quite passed, and the privilege of seeing one’s self in the eyes of one’s friends was still accorded, a fact to which we owe many striking if sometimes rather highly colored pictures. A few words from d’Alembert are of twofold interest. He writes some years later:
“The regard one has for you does not depend alone upon your external charms; it depends, above all, upon your intellect and your character. That which distinguishes you in society is the art of saying to every one the fitting word and that art is very simple with you; it consists in never speaking of yourself to others, and much of themselves. It is an infallible means of pleasing; thus you please every one, though it happens that all the world pleases you; you know even how to avoid repelling those who are least agreeable.”
This epitome of the art of pleasing may be commended for its wisdom, aside from the very delightful picture it gives of an amiable and attractive woman. Again he writes:
“The excellence of your tone would not be a distinction for one reared in a court, and speaking only the language she has learned. In you it is a merit very real and very rare. You have brought it from the seclusion of a province, where you met no one who could teach you. You were, in this regard, as perfect the day after your arrival at Paris as you are today. You found yourself, from the first, as free, as little out of place in the most brilliant and most critical society as if you had passed your life there; you have felt its usages before knowing them, which implies a justness and fineness of tact very unusual, an exquisite knowledge of les convenances.”
It was her innate tact and social instinct, combined with rare gifts of intellect and great conversational charm, that gave this woman without name, beauty, or fortune so exceptional a position, and her salon so distinguished a place among the brilliant centers of Paris. As she was not rich and could not give costly dinners, she saw her friends daily from five to nine, in the interval between other engagements. This society was her chief interest, and she rarely went out. “If she made an exception to this rule, all Paris was apprised of it in advance,” says Grimm. The most illustrious men of the State, the Church, the Court, and the Army, as well as celebrated foreigners and men of letters, were sure to be found there. “Nowhere was conversation more lively, more brilliant, or better regulated,” writes Marmontel. . . “It was not with fashionable nonsense and vanity that every day during four hours, without languor or pause, she knew how to make herself interesting to a circle of sensible people.” Caraccioli went from her salon one evening to sup with Mme. du Deffand. “He was intoxicated with all the fine works he had heard read there,” writes the latter. “There was a eulogy of one named Fontaine by M. de Condorcet. There were translations of Theocritus; tales, fables by I know not whom. And then some eulogies of Helvetius, an extreme admiration of the esprit and the talents of the age; in fine, enough to make one stop the ears. All these judgments false and in the worst taste.” A hint of the rivalry between the former friends is given in a letter from Horace Walpole. “There is at Paris,” he writes, “a Mlle. de Lespinasse, a pretended bel esprit, who was formerly a humble companion of Mme. du Deffand, and betrayed her and used her very ill. I beg of you not to let any one carry you thither. I dwell upon this because she has some enemies so spiteful as to try to carry off all the English to Mlle. de Lespinasse.”
But this “pretended bel esprit” had socially the touch of genius. Her ardent, impulsive nature lent to her conversation a rare eloquence that inspired her listeners, though she never drifted into monologue, and understood the value of discreet silence. “She rendered the marble sensible, and made matter talk,” said Guibert. Versatile and suggestive herself, she knew how to draw out the best thoughts of others. Her swift insight caught the weak points of her friends, and her gracious adaptation had all the fascination of a subtle flattery. Sad as her experience had been, she had nevertheless been drawn into the world most congenial to her tastes. “Ah, how I dislike not to love that which is excellent,” she wrote later. “How difficult I have become! But is it my fault? Consider the education I have received with Mme. du Deffand. President Henault, Abbe Bon, the Archbishop of Toulouse, the Archbishop of Aix, Turgot, d’Alembert, Abbe de Boismont–these are the men who have taught me to speak, to think, and who have deigned to count me for something.”
It was men like these who thronged her own salon, together with such women as the Duchesse d’Anville, friend of the economists, the Duchesse de Chatillon whom she loved so passionately, and others well-known in the world of fashion and letters. But its tone was more philosophical than that of Mme. du Deffand. Though far from democratic by taste or temperament, she was so from conviction. The griefs and humiliations of her life had left her peculiarly open to the new social and political theories which were agitating France. She liked free discussion, and her own large intelligence, added to her talent for calling out and giving point to the ideas of others, went far towards making the cosmopolitan circle over which she presided one of the most potent forces of the time. Her influence may be traced in the work of the encyclopedists, in which she was associated, and which she did more than any other woman to aid and encourage. As a power in the making of reputations and in the election of members to the Academy she shared with Mme. Geoffrin the honor of being a legitimate successor of Mme. de Lambert. Chastellux owed his admission largely to her, and on her deathbed she secured that of La Harpe.
But the side of her character which strikes us most forcibly at this distance of time is the emotional. The personal charm which is always so large a factor in social success is of too subtle a quality to be caught in words. The most vivid portrait leaves a divine something to be supplied by the imagination, and the fascination of eloquence is gone with the flash of the eye, the modulation of the voice, or some fleeting grace of manner. But passion writes itself out in indelible characters, especially when it is a rare and spontaneous overflow from the heart of a man or woman of genius, whose emotions readily crystallize into form.
Her friendship for d’Alembert, loyal and devoted as it was, seems to have been without illusions. It is true she had cast aside every other consideration to nurse him through a dangerous illness, and as soon as he was able to be removed, he had taken an apartment in the house where she lived, which he retained until her death. But he was not rich, and marriage was not to be thought of. On this point we have his own testimony. “The one to whom they marry me in the gazettes is indeed a person respectable in character, and fitted by the sweetness and charm of her society to render a husband happy,” he writes to Voltaire; “but she is worthy of an establishment better than mine, and there is between us neither marriage nor love, but mutual esteem, and all the sweetness of friendship. I live actually in the same house with her, where there are besides ten other tenants; this is what has given rise to the rumor.” His devotion through so many years, and his profound grief at her loss, as well as his subsequent words, leave some doubt as to the tranquillity of his heart, but the sentiments of Mlle. de Lespinasse seem never to have passed the calm measure of an exalted and sympathetic friendship. It was remarked that he lost much of his prestige, and that his society which had been so brilliant, became infinitely more miscellaneous and infinitely less agreeable after the death of the friend whose tact and finesse had so well served his ambition.
Not long after leaving Mme. du Deffand she met the Marquis de Mora, a son of the Spanish ambassador, who became a constant habitue of her salon. Of distinguished family and large fortune, brilliant, courtly, popular, and only twenty-four, he captivated at once the fiery heart of this attractive woman of thirty-five. It seems to have been a mutual passion, as during one brief absence of ten days he wrote her twenty-two letters. But his family became alarmed and made his delicate health a pretext for recalling him to Spain. Her grief at the separation enlisted the sympathy of d’Alembert. At her request he procured from his physician a statement that the climate of Madrid would prove fatal to M. de Mora, whose health had steadily failed since his return home, and that if his friends wished to save him they must lose no time in sending him back to Paris. The young man was permitted to leave at once, but he died en route at Bordeaux.
In the meantime Mlle. de Lespinasse, sad and inconsolable, had met M. Guibert, a man of great versatility and many accomplishments, whose genius seems to have borne no adequate fruit. We hear of him later through the passing enthusiasm of Mme. de Stael, who in her youth, made a pen-portrait of him, sufficiently flattering to account in some degree for the singular passion of which he became the object. Mlle. de Lespinasse was forty. He was twenty-nine, had competed for the Academie Francaise, written a work on military science, also a national tragedy which was still unpublished. She was dazzled by his brilliancy, and when she fathomed his shallow nature, as she finally did, it was too late to disentangle her heart. He was a man of gallantry, and was flattered by the preference of a woman much in vogue, who had powerful friends, influence at the Academy, and the ability to advance his interest in many ways. He clearly condescended to be loved, but his own professions have little of the true ring.
Distracted by this new passion on one side, and by remorse for her disloyalty to the old one, on the other, the health of Mlle. de Lespinasse, naturally delicate and already undermined, began to succumb to the hidden struggle. The death of M. de Mora solved one problem; the other remained. Mr. Guibert wished to advance his fortune by a brilliant marriage without losing the friend who might still be of service to him. She sat in judgment upon her own fate, counseled him, aided him in his choice, even praised the woman who became his wife, hoping still, perhaps, for some repose in that exaltation of friendship which is often the last consolation of passionate souls. But she was on a path that led to no haven of peace. There was only a blank wall before her, and the lightning impulses of her own heart were forced back to shatter her frail life. The world was ignorant of this fresh experience; and, believing her crushed by the death of M. de Mora, sympathized with her sorrow and praised her fidelity. She tried to sustain a double role–smiles and gaiety for her friends, tears and agony for the long hours of solitude. The tension was too much for her. She died shortly afterwards at the age of forty-three. “If to think, to love, and to suffer is that which constitutes life, she lived in these few years many ages,” said one who knew her well.
It was not until many years later, when those most interested were gone, that the letters to Guibert, which form her chief title to fame, were collected, and, curiously enough, by his widow. Then for the first time the true drama of her life was unveiled. It is impossible in a few extracts to convey an adequate idea of the passion and devotion that runs through these letters. They touch the entire gamut of emotion, from the tender melancholy of a lonely soul, the inexpressible sweetness of self- forgetful love, to the tragic notes or agony and despair. There are many brilliant passages in them, many flashes of profound thought, many vivid traits of the people about her; but they are, before all, the record of a soul that is rapidly burning out its casket.
“I prefer my misery to all that the world calls happiness or pleasure,” she writes. “I shall die of it, perhaps, but that is better than never to have lived.”
“I have no more the strength to love,” she says again; “my soul fatigues me, torments me; I am no more sustained by anything. I have every day a fever; and my physician, who is not the most skillful of men, repeats to me without ceasing that I am consumed by chagrin, that my pulse, my respiration, announce an active grief, and he always goes out saying, ‘We have no cure for the soul.'”
“Adieu, my friend,” were her last words to him. “If I ever return to life I shall still love to employ it in loving you; but there is no more time.”
One could almost wish that these letters had never come to light. A single grand passion has always a strong hold upon the imagination and the sympathies, but two passions contending for the mastery verge upon something quite the reverse of heroic. The note of heart-breaking despair is tragic enough, but there is a touch of comedy behind it. Though her words have the fire, the devotion, the abandon of Heloise, they leave a certain sense of disproportion. One is inclined to wonder if they do not overtop the feeling.
D’Alembert was her truest mourner, and fell into a profound melancholy after her death. “Yes,” he said to Marmontel, “she was changed, but I was not; she no longer lived for me, but I ever lived for her. Since she is no more, I know not why I exist. Ah! Why have I not still to suffer those moments of bitterness that she knew so well how to sweeten and make me forget? Do you remember the happy evenings we passed together? Now what have I left? I return home, and instead of herself I find only her shade. This lodging at the Louvre is itself a tomb, which I never enter but with horror.” To this “shade” he wrote two expressive and well-considered eulogies, which paint in pathetic words the perfections of his friend and his own desolation. “Adieu, adieu, my dear Julie,” says the heartbroken philosopher; “for these eyes which I should like to close forever fill with tears in tracing these last lines, and I see no more the paper on which I write.” His grief called out a sympathetic letter from Frederick the Great which shows the philosophic warrior and king in a new light. There is a touch of bitter irony in the inflated eulogy of Guibert, who gave the too-loving woman a death blow in furthering his ambition, then exhausted his vocabulary in laments and praises. Perhaps he hoped to borrow from this friendship a fresh ray of immortality.
Whatever we may think of the strange inconsistencies of Mlle. de Lespinasse, she is doubly interesting to us as a type that contrasts strongly with that of her age. Her exquisite tact, her brilliant intellect, her conversational gifts, her personal charm made her the idol of the world in which she lived. Her influence was courted, her salon was the resort of the most distinguished men of the century, and while she loved to discuss the great social problems which her friends were trying to solve, she forgot none of the graces. With the intellectual strength and grasp of a man, she preserved always the taste, the delicacy, the tenderness of a woman. Her faults were those of a strong nature. Her thoughts were clear and penetrating, her expression was lively and impassioned. But in her emotional power she reached the proportion of genius. With “the most ardent soul, the liveliest fancy, the most inflammable imagination that has existed since Sappho,” she represents the embodied spirit of tragedy outlined against the cold, hard background of a skeptical, mocking, realistic age. “I love in order to live,” she said, “and I live to love.” This is the key-note of her life.
CHAPTER XVI. THE SALON HELVETIQUE
The Swiss Pastor’s Daughter–Her Social Ambition–Her Friends– Mme. de Marchais–Mme. d’Houdetot–Duchesse de Lauzun– Character of Mme. Necker–Death at Coppet–Close of the most Brilliant Period of the Salons.
There was one woman who held a very prominent place in the society of this period, and who has a double interest for us, though she was not French, and never quite caught the spirit of the eighteenth-century life whose attractive forms she loved so well. Mme. Necker, whose history has been made so familiar through the interesting memoirs of the Comte d’Haussonville, owes her fame to her marked qualities of intellect and character rather than to the brilliancy of her social talents. These found an admirable setting in the surroundings which her husband’s fortune and political career gave her. The Salon Helvetique had a distinctive color of its own, and was always tinged with the strong convictions and exalted ideals of the Swiss pastor’s daughter, who passed through this world of intellectual affluence and moral laxity like a white angel of purity–in it, but not of it. The center of a choice and lettered circle which included the most noted men and women of her time, she brought into it not only rare gifts, a fine taste, and genuine literary enthusiasm, but the fresh charm of a noble character and a beautiful family life, with the instincts of duty and right conduct which she inherited from her simple Protestant ancestry. She lacked a little, however, in the tact, the ease, the grace, the spontaneity, which were the essential charm of the French women. Her social talents were a trifle theoretical. “She studied society,” says one of her critics, “as she would a literary question.” She had a theory of conducting a salon, as she had of life in general, and believed that study would attain everything. But the ability to do a thing superlatively well is by no means always implied in the knowledge of how it ought to be done. Social genius is as purely a gift of nature as poetry or music; and, of all others, it is the most subtle and indefinable. It was a long step from the primitive simplicity in which Suzanne Curchod passed her childhood on the borders of Lake Leman to the complex life of a Parisian salon; and the provincial beauty, whose fair face, soft blue eyes, dignified but slightly coquettish manner, brilliant intellect, and sparkling though sometimes rather learned conversation had made her a local queen, was quick to see her own shortcomings. She confessed that she had a new language to learn, and she never fully mastered it. “Mme. Necker has talent, but it is in a sphere too elevated for one to communicate with her,” said Mme. du Deffand, though she was glad to go once a week to her suppers at Saint-Ouen, and admitted that in spite of a certain stiffness and coldness she was better fitted for society than most of the grandes dames. The salon of Mme. Necker marks a transition point between two periods, and had two quite distinct phases. One likes best to recall her in the freshness of her early enthusiasm, when she gave Friday dinners, modeled after those of Mme. Geoffrin, to men of letters, and received a larger world in the evening; when her guests were enlivened by the satire of Diderot, the anecdotes of Marmontel, the brilliancy or learning of Grimm, d’Alembert, Thomas, Suard, Buffon, the Abbe Raynal, and other wits of the day; when they discussed the affairs of the Academy and decided the fate of candidates; when they listened to the recitations of Mlle. Clairon, and the works of many authors known and unknown. It is interesting to recall that “Paul and Virginia” was first read here. But there was apt to be a shade of stiffness, and the conversation had sometimes too strong a flavor of pedantry. “No one knows better or feels more sensibly than you, my dear and very amiable friend,” wrote Mme. Geoffrin, “the charm of friendship and its sweetness; no one makes others experience them more fully. But you will never attain that facility, that ease, and that liberty which give to society its perfect enjoyment.” The Abbe Morellet complained of the austerity that always held the conversation within certain limits, and the gay little Abbe Galiani found fault with Mme. Necker’s coldness and reserve, though he addresses her as his “Divinity” after his return to Naples, and his racy letters give us vivid and amusing pictures of these Fridays, which in his memory are wholly charming.
In spite of her firm religious convictions, Mme. Necker cordially welcomed the most extreme of the philosophers. “I have atheistic friends,” she said. “Why not? They are unfortunate friends.” But her admiration for their talents by no means extended to their opinions, and she did not permit the discussion of religious questions. It was at one of her own dinners that she started the subscription for a statue of Voltaire, for whom she entertained the warmest friendship. One may note here, as elsewhere, a fine mental poise, a justness of spirit, and a discrimination that was superior to natural prejudices. Sometimes her frank simplicity was misunderstood. “There is a Mme. Necker here, a pretty woman and a bel esprit, who is infatuated with me; she persecutes me to have me at her house,” wrote Diderot to Mlle. Volland, with an evident incapacity to comprehend the innocent appreciation of a pure-hearted woman. When he knew her better, he expressed his regret that he had not known her sooner. “You would certainly have inspired me with a taste for purity and for delicacy,” he says, “which would have passed from my soul into my works.” He refers to her again as “a woman who possesses all that the purity of an angelic soul adds to an exquisite taste.”
Among the many distinguished foreigners who found their way into this pleasant circle was her early lover, Gibbon. The old days were far away when she presided over the literary coterie at Lausanne, speculated upon the mystery of love, talked of the possibility of tender and platonic friendships between men and women, after the fashion of the precieuses, and wept bitter tears over the faithlessness of the embryo historian. The memory of her grief had long been lost in the fullness of subsequent happiness, and one readily pardons her natural complacency in the brilliancy of a position which took little added luster from the fame of the man who had wooed and so easily forgotten her.
This period of Mme. Necker’s career shows her character on a very engaging side. Loving her husband with a devotion that verged upon idolatry, she was rich in the friendship of men like Thomas, Buffon, Grimm, Diderot, and Voltaire, whose respectful tone was the highest tribute to her dignity and her delicacy. But the true nature of a woman is best seen in her relations with her own sex. There are a thousand fine reserves in her relations with men that, in a measure, veil her personality. They doubtless call out the most brilliant qualities of her intellect, and reveal her character, in some points, on its best and most lovable side; but the rare shades of generous and unselfish feeling are more clearly seen in the intimate friendships, free from petty vanities and jealous rivalries, rich in cordial appreciation and disinterested affection, which we often find among women of the finest type. It is impossible that one so serious and so earnest as Mme. Necker should have cherished such passionate friendships for her own sex, if she had been as cold or as calculating as she has been sometimes represented. Her intimacy with Mme. de Marchais, of which we have so many pleasant details, furnishes a case in point.
This graceful and vivacious woman, who talked so eloquently upon philosophical, political, and economic questions, was the center of a circle noted for its liberal tendencies. A friend of Mme. de Pompadour, at whose suppers she often sang; gifted, witty, and, in spite of a certain seriousness, retaining always the taste, the elegance, the charming manners which were her native heritage, she attracted to her salon not only a distinguished literary company, but many men and women from the great world of which she only touched the borders. Mme. Necker had sought the aid and advice of Mme. de Marchais in the formation of her own salon, and had taken for her one of those ardent attachments so characteristic of earnest and susceptible natures. She confided to her all the secrets of her heart; she felt a double pleasure when her joys and her little troubles were shared with this sympathetic companion. “I had for her a passionate affection,” she says. “When I first saw her my whole soul was captivated. I thought her one of those enchanting fairies who combine all the gifts of nature and of magic. I loved her; or, rather, I idolized her.” So pure, so confiding, so far above reproach herself, she refuses to see the faults of one she loves so tenderly. Her letters glow with exalted sentiment. “Adieu, my charming, my beautiful, my sweet friend,” she writes. “I embrace you. I press you to my bosom; or, rather, to my soul, for it seems to me that no interval can separate yours from mine.”
But the character of Mme. de Marchais was evidently not equal to her fascination. Her vanity was wounded by the success of her friend. She took offense at a trifling incident that touched her self-love. “The great ladies have disgusted me with friendship,” she wrote, in reply to Mme. Necker’s efforts to repair the breach. They returned to each other the letters so full of vows of eternal fidelity, and were friends no more. Apparently without any fault of her own, Mme. Necker was left with an illusion the less, and the world has another example to cite of the frail texture of feminine friendships.
She was not always, however, so unfortunate in her choice. She found a more amiable and constant object for her affections in Mme. d’Houdetot, a charming woman who, in spite of her errors, held a very warm place in the hearts of her cotemporaries. We have met her before in the philosophical circles of La Chevrette, and in the beautiful promenades of the valley of Montmorency, where Rousseau offered her the incense of a passionate and poetic love. She was facile and witty, graceful and gay, said wise and thoughtful things, wrote pleasant verses which were the exhalations of her own heart, and was the center of a limited though distinguished circle; but her chief attraction was the magic of a sunny temper and a loving spirit. “He only is unhappy who can neither love, nor work, nor die,” she writes. Though more or less linked with the literary coteries of her time, Mme. d’Houdetot seems to have been singularly free from the small vanities and vulgar ambitions so often met there. She loved simple pleasures and the peaceful scenes of the country. “What more have we to desire when we can enjoy the pleasures of friendship and of nature?” she writes. “We may then pass lightly over the small troubles of life.” She counsels repose to her more restless friend, and her warm expressions of affection have always the ring of sincerity, which contrasts agreeably with the artificial tone of the time. Mme. d’Houdetot lived to a great age, preserving always her youthfulness of spirit and sweet serenity of temper, in spite of sharp domestic sorrows. She took refuge from these in the life-long friendship of Saint-Lambert, for whom Mme. Necker has usually a gracious message. It is a curious commentary upon the manners of the age that one so rigid and severe should have chosen for her intimate companionship two women whose lives were so far removed from her own ideal of reserved decorum. But she thought it best to ignore errors which her world did not regard as grave, if she was conscious of them at all.
One finds greater pleasure in recalling her ardent and romantic attachment to the granddaughter of the Marechale de Luxembourg, the lovely Amelie de Boufflers, Duchesse de Lauzun, whose pen- portrait she sketched so gracefully and so tenderly; whose gentle sweetness and shy delicacy, in the rather oppressive glare of her surroundings, suggest a modest wild flower astray among the pretentious beauties of the hothouse, and whose untimely death on the scaffold has left her fragrant memory entwined with a garland of cypress. But we cannot dwell upon the intimate phases of this friendship, whose fine quality is shown in the few scattered leaves of a correspondence overflowing with the wealth of two rare though unequally gifted natures.
At a later period her husband’s position in the ministry, and the pronounced opinions of her brilliant daughter, gave to the salon of Mme. Necker a marked political and semi-revolutionary coloring. Her inclinations always led her to literary diversions, rather than to the discussion of economic questions, but as Mme. de Stael gradually took the scepter that was falling from her hand, she found it difficult to guide the conversation into its old channels. Her pale, thoughtful face, her gentle manner, her soft and penetrating voice, all indicated an exquisitely feminine quality quite in unison with the spirit of urbanity and politeness that was even then going out of fashion. Her quiet and earnest though interesting conversation was somewhat overshadowed by the impetuous eloquence of Mme. de Stael, who gave the tone to every circle into which she came. “I am more and more convinced that I am not made for the great world,” she said to the Duchesse de Lauzun, with an accent of regret. “It is Germaine who should shine there and who should love it, for she possesses all the qualities which put her in a position to be at once feared and sought.”
If she was allied to the past, however, by her tastes and her sympathies, she belonged to the future by her convictions, and her many-sided intellect touched upon every question of the day. Profoundly religious herself, she was broadly tolerant; always delicate in health, she found time amid her numerous social duties to aid the poor and suffering, and to establish the hospital that still bears her name. Her letters and literary records reveal a woman of liberal thought and fine insight, as well as scholarly tastes. If she lacked a little in the facile graces of the French women, she had to an eminent degree the qualities of character that were far rarer in her age and sphere. Though she was cold and reserved in manner, beneath the light snow which she brought from her native hills beat a heart of warm and tender, even passionate, impulses. Devoted wife, loyal friend, careful mother, large-minded and large-souled woman, she stands conspicuous, in a period of lax domestic relations, for the virtues that grace the fireside as well as for the talents that shine in the salon.
But she was not exempt from the sorrows of a nature that exacts from life more than life can give, and finds its illusions vanish before the cold touch of experience. She had her hours of darkness and of suffering. Even the love that was the source of her keenest happiness was also the source of her sharpest griefs. In the days of her husband’s power she missed the exclusive attention she craved. There were moments when she doubted the depth of his affection, and felt anew that her “eyes were wedded to eternal tears.” She could not see without pain his extreme devotion to her daughter, whose rich nature, so spontaneous, so original, so foreign to her own, gave rise to many anxieties and occasional antagonisms. This touches the weak point in her character. She was not wholly free from a certain egotism and intellectual vanity, without the imagination to comprehend fully an individuality quite remote from all her preconceived ideas. She was slow to accept the fact that her system of education was at fault, and her failure to mold her daughter after her own models was long a source of grief and disappointment. She was ambitious too, and had not won her position without many secret wounds. When misfortunes came, the blows that fell upon her husband struck with double force into her own heart. She was destined to share with him the chill of censure and neglect, the bitter sting of ingratitude, the lonely isolation of one fallen from a high place, whose friendship and whose favors count no more.
In the solitude of Coppet, where she died at fifty-seven, during the last and darkest days of the Revolution, perhaps she realized in the tireless devotion of her husband and the loving care of Mme. de Stael the repose of heart which the brilliant world of Paris never gave her.
With all her gifts, which have left many records that may be read, and in spite of a few shadows that fall more or less upon all earthly relations, not the least of her legacies to posterity was the beautiful example, rarer then than now, of that true and sympathetic family life in which lies the complete harmony of existence, a safeguard against the storms of passion, a perennial fount of love that keeps the spirit young, the tranquility out of which spring the purest flowers of human happiness and human endeavor.
There were many salons of lesser note which have left agreeable memories. It would be pleasant to recall other clever and beautiful women whose names one meets so often in the chronicles of the time, and whose faces, conspicuous for their clear, strong outlines, still look out upon us from the galleries that perpetuate its life; but the list is too long and would lead us too far. From the moving procession of social leaders who made the age preceding the Revolution so brilliant I have chosen only the few who were most widely known, and who best represent its dominant types and its special phases.
The most remarkable period of the literary salons was really closed with the death of Mme. du Deffand, in 1780. Mme. Geoffrin had already been dead three years, and Mlle. de Lespinasse, four. Some of the most noted of the philosophers and men of letters were also gone, others were past the age of forming fresh ties, the young men belonged to another generation, and no new drawing rooms exactly replaced the old ones. Mme. Necker still received the world that was wont to assemble in the great salons, Mme. de Condorcet presided over a rival coterie, and there were numerous small and intimate circles; but the element of politics was beginning to intrude, and with it a degree of heat which disturbed the usual harmony. The reign of esprit, the perpetual play of wit had begun to pall upon the tastes of people who found themselves face to face with problems so grave and issues so vital. There was a slight reaction towards nature and simplicity. “They may be growing wiser,” said Walpole, “but the intermediate change is dullness.” For nearly half a century learned men and clever women had been amusing themselves with utopian theories, a few through conviction, the majority through fashion, or egotism, or the vanity of saying new things, just as the world is doing today. The doctrines put forth by Montesquieu, vivified by Voltaire, and carried to the popular heart by Rousseau had been freely discussed in the salons, not only by philosophers and statesmen, but by men of the world, poets, artists, and pretty women. The sparks of thought with which they played so lightly filtered slowly through the social strata. The talk of the drawing room at last reached the street. But the torch of truth which, held aloft, serves as a beacon star to guide the world towards some longed for ideal becomes often a deadly explosive when it falls among the poisonous vapors of inflammable human passions. Liberty, equality, fraternity assumed a new and fatal significance in the minds of the hungry and restless masses who, embittered by centuries of wrong, were ready to carry these phrases to their immediate and living conclusions. They had found their watchwords and their hour. The train was already laid beneath this complex social structure, and the tragedy that followed carried to a common ruin court and salon, philosophers and beaux esprits, innocent women and dreaming men.
That the salons were unconscious instruments in hastening the catastrophe, which was sooner or later inevitable, is undoubtedly true. Their influence in the dissemination of thought was immense. The part they played was, to a limited extent, precisely that of the modern press, with an added personal element. They moved in the drift of their time, directed its intelligence, and reflected its average morality. As centers of serious conversation they were distinctly stimulating. It is quite possible that they stimulated the intellect to the exclusion of the more solid qualities of character, and that they were the source of a vast amount of affectation. It was the fashion to have esprit, and those who were deficient in an article so essential to success were naturally disposed to borrow it, or to put on the semblance of it. But no phase of life is without its reverse side, and the present generation cannot claim freedom from pretension of the same sort. It is not unlikely that in expanding the intelligence they established new standards of distinction, which in a measure weakened the old ones. But if they precipitated the downfall of the court they began by rivaling, it was in the logical course of events, which few were wise enough to foresee, much less to determine.
It is worthy of remark that this reign of women, in which the manners and forms of modern society found their initiative and their models, was not a reign of youth, or beauty, though these qualities are never likely to lose their own peculiar fascination. It was, before all things, a reign of intelligence, and ascendency of women who had put on the hues of age without laying aside the permanent charm of a fully developed personality. It was intelligence blended with practical knowledge of the world and with the graceful amenities that heightened while half disguising its power. The women of the present have different aims. They are no longer content with the role of inspirer. Their methods are more direct. They depend less upon finesse, more upon inherent right and strength. But it is to the women who shone so conspicuously in France for more than two hundred years that we may trace the broadened intellectual life, the unfettered activities, the wide and beneficent influence of the women of today.
CHAPTER XVII. SALONS OF THE REVOLUTION–MADAME ROLAND Change in the Character of the Salons–Mme. de Condorcet–Mme. Roland’s Story of Her Own Life–A Marriage of Reason– Enthusiasm for the Revolution–Her Modest Salon–Her Tragical Fate
The salons of the Revolution were no longer simply the fountains of literary and artistic criticism, the centers of wit, intelligence, knowledge, philosophy, and good manners, but the rallying points of parties. They took the tone of the time and assumed the character of political clubs. The salon of 1790 was not the salon of 1770. A new generation had arisen, with new ideals and a new spirit that made for itself other forms or greatly modified the old ones. It was not led by philosophers and beaux esprits who evolved theories and turned them over as an intellectual diversion, but by men of action, ready to test these theories and force them to their logical conclusions. Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Robespierre had succeeded Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. Impelled towards one end, by vanity, ambition, love of glory, or genuine conviction, these men and their colleagues turned the salon, which had so long been the school of public opinion, into an engine of revolution. The exquisite flower of the eighteenth century had blossomed, matured, and fallen. Perhaps it was followed by a plant of sturdier growth, but the rare quality of its beauty was not repeated. The time was past when the gentle touch of women could temper the violence of clashing opinions, or subject the discussion of vital questions to the inflexible laws of taste. No tactful hostess could hold in leading strings these fiery spirits. The voices that had charmed the old generation were silent. Of the women who had made the social life of the century so powerful and so famous, many were quietly asleep before the storm broke; many were languishing in prison cells, with no outlook but the scaffold; some were pining in the loneliness of exile; and a few were buried in a seclusion which was their only safeguard.
But nature has always in reserve fresh types that come to the surface in a great crisis. The women who made themselves felt and heard above the din of revolution, though by no means deficient in the graces, were mainly distinguished for quite other qualities than those which shine in a drawing room or lead a coterie. They were either women of rare genius and the courage of their convictions, or women trained in the stern school of a bitter experience, who found their true milieu in the midst of stirring events. The names of Mme. de Stael, Mme. Roland, and Mme. de Condorcet readily suggest themselves as the most conspicuous representatives of this stormy period. With different gifts and in different measure, each played a prominent role in the brief drama to which they lent the inspiration of their genius and their sympathy, until they were forced to turn back with horror from that carnival of savage passions which they had unconsciously helped to let loose upon the world.
The salon of the young, beautiful, and gifted Mme. de Condorcet had its roots in the old order of things. During the ministry of Necker it was in come degree a rival of the Salon Helvetique, and included many of the same guests; later it became a rendezvous for the revolutionary party. The Marquis de Condorcet was not only philosopher, savant, litterateur, a member of two academies, and among the profoundest thinkers of his time, but a man of the world, who inherited the tastes and habits of the old noblesse. His wife, whom he had married late in life, was Sophie de Grouchy, sister of the Marechal, and was noted for remarkable talents, as well as for surpassing beauty. Belonging by birth and associations to the aristocracy, and by her pronounced opinions to the radical side of the philosophic party, her salon was a center in which two worlds met. In its palmy days people were only speculating upon the borders of an abyss which had not yet opened visibly before them. The revolutionary spirit ran high, but had not passed the limits of reason and humanity. Mme. de Condorcet, who was deeply tinged with the new doctrines, presided with charming grace, and her youthful beauty lent an added fascination to the brilliancy of her intellect and the rather grave eloquence of her conversation. In her drawing room were gathered men of letters and women of talent, nobles and scientists, philosophers and BEAUX espritS. Turgot and Malesherbes represented its political side; Marmontel, the Abbe Morellet, and Suard lent it some of the wit and vivacity that shone in the old salons. Literature, science, and the arts were discussed here, and there was more or less reading, music, or recitation. But the tendency was towards serious conversation, and the tone was often controversial.
The character of Condorcet was a sincere and elevated one. “He loved much and he loved many people,” said Mlle. de Lespinasse. He aimed at enlightening and regenerating the world, not at overturning it; but, like many others, strong souls and true, he was led from practical truth in the pursuit of an ideal one. His wife, who shared his political opinions, united with them a fiery and independent spirit that was not content with theories. Her philosophic tastes led her to translate Adam Smith, and to write a fine analysis of the “Moral Sentiments.” But the sympathy of which she spoke so beautifully, and which gave so living a force to the philosophy it illuminated, if not directed by broad intelligence and impartial judgment, is often like the ignis fatuus that plays over the poisonous marsh and lures the unwary to destruction. For a brief day the magical influence of Mme. de Condorcet was felt more or less by all who came within her circle. She inspired the equable temper of her husband with her own enthusiasm, and urged him on to extreme measures from which his gentler soul would have recoiled. When at last he turned from those scenes of horror, choosing to be victim rather than oppressor, it was too late. Perhaps she recalled the days of her power with a pang of regret when her friends had fallen one by one at the scaffold, and her husband, hunted and deserted by those he tried to serve, had died by his own hand, in a lonely cell, to escape a sadder fate; while she was left, after her timely release from prison, to struggle alone in poverty and obscurity, for some years painting water-color portraits for bread. She was not yet thirty when the Revolution ended, and lived far into the present century; but though the illusions of her youth had been rudely shattered, she remained always devoted to her liberal principles and a broad humanity.
The woman, however, who most fitly represents the spirit of the Revolution, who was at once its inspiration, its heroine, and its victim, is Mme. Roland. It is not as the leader of a salon that she takes her place in the history of her time, but as one of the foremost and ablest leaders of a powerful political party. Born in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, she had neither the prestige of a name nor the distinction of an aristocratic lineage. Reared in seclusion, she was familiar with the great world by report only. Though brilliant, even eloquent in conversation when her interest was roused, her early training had added to her natural distaste for the spirit, as well as the accessories, of a social life that was inevitably more or less artificial. She would have felt cramped and caged in the conventional atmosphere of a drawing room in which the gravest problems were apt to be forgotten in the flash of an epigram or the turn of a bon mot. The strong and heroic outlines of her character were more clearly defined on the theater of the world. But at a time when the empire of the salon was waning, when vital interests and burning convictions had for the moment thrown into the shade all minor questions of form and convenance, she took up the scepter in a simpler fashion, and, disdaining the arts of a society of which she saw only the fatal and hopeless corruption, held her sway over the daring and ardent men who gathered about her by the unassisted force of her clear and vigorous intellect.
It would be interesting to trace the career of the thoughtful and precocious child known as Manon or Marie Phlipon, who sat in her father’s studio with the burin of an engraver in one hand and a book in the other, eagerly absorbing the revolutionary theories which were to prove so fatal to her, but it is not the purpose here to dwell upon the details of her life. In the solitude of a prison cell and under the shadow of the scaffold she told her own story. She has introduced us to the simple scenes of her childhood, the modest home on the Quai de l’Horloge, the wise and tender mother, the weak and unstable father. We are made familiar with the tiny recess in which she studies, reads, and makes extracts from the books which are such strange companions for her years. We seem to see the grave little face as it lights with emotion over the inspiring pages of Fenelon or the chivalrous heroes of Tasso, and sympathize with the fascination that leads the child of nine years to carry her Plutarch to mass instead of her prayer book. She portrays for us her convent life with its dreams, its exaltations, its romantic friendships, and its ardent enthusiasms. We have vivid pictures of the calm and sympathetic Sophie Cannet, to whom she unburdens all her hopes and aspirations and sorrows; of the lively sister Henriette, who years afterward, in the generous hope of saving her early friend, proposed to exchange clothes and take her place in the cells of Sainte-Pelagie. In the long and commonplace procession of suitors that files before us, one only touches her heart. La Blancherie has a literary and philosophic turn, and the young girl’s imagination drapes him in its own glowing colors. The opposition of her father separates them, but absence only lends fuel to this virgin flame. One day she learns that his views are mercenary, that he is neither true nor disinterested, and the charm is broken. She met him afterward in the Luxembourg gardens with a feather in his hat, and the last illusion vanished.
There is an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully sketched. She sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies, the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that make so beautiful a background for youthful loves and hopes. Perhaps we could wish sometimes that she were a little less frank. We miss a touch of delicacy in this nature that was so strong and self-poised. We are sorry that she dismissed La Blancherie quite so theatrically. There is a trace too much of consciousness in her fine self-analysis, perhaps a little vanity, and we half suspect that her unchildlike penetration and precocity of motive was sometimes the reflection of an afterthought. But it is to be remembered that, even in childhood, she had lived in such close companionship with the heroes and moralists of the past that their sentiments had become her own. She doubtless posed a little to herself, as well as to the world, but her frankness was a part of that uncompromising truthfulness which scorned disguises of any sort, and led her to paint faults and virtues alike.
Family sorrows–the death of the mother whom she adored, and the unworthiness of her father–combined to change the current of her free and happy life, and to deepen a natural vein of melancholy. In her loneliness of soul the convent seemed to offer itself as the sole haven of peace and rest. The child, who loved Fenelon, and dreamed over the lives of the saints, had in her much of the stuff out of which mystics and fanatics are made. Her ardent soul was raised to ecstasy by the stately ceremonial of the Church; her imagination was captivated by its majestic music, its mystery, its solemnity, and she was wont to spend hours in rapt meditation. But her strong fund of good sense, her firm reason fortified by wide and solid reading, together with her habits of close observation and analysis, saved her from falling a victim to her own emotional needs, or to chimeras of any sort. She had drawn her mental nourishment too long from Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, the English philosophers, and classic historians, to become permanently a prey to exaggerated sensibilities, though it was the same temperament fired by a sense of human inequality and wrong, that swept her at last along the road that led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage of reason.
It may be noted here that though Mme. Roland had lost her belief in ecclesiastical systems, and, as she said, continued to go to mass only for the “edification of her neighbors and the good order of society,” there was always in her nature a strong undercurrent of religious feeling. Her faith had not survived the full illumination of her reason, but her trust in immortality never seriously wavered. The Invocation that was among her last written words is the prayer of a soul that is conscious of its divine origin and destiny. She retained, too, the firm moral basis that was laid in her early teachings, and which saved her from the worst errors of her time. She might be shaken by the storms of passion, but one feels that she could never be swept from her moorings.
Tall and finely developed, with dark brown hair; a large mouth whose beauty lay in a smile of singular sweetness; dark, serious eyes with a changeful expression which no artist could catch; a fresh complexion that responded to every emotion of a passionate soul; a deep, well-modulated voice; manners gentle, modest, reserved, sometimes timid with the consciousness that she was not readily taken at her true value–such was the PERSONNELLE of the woman who calmly weighed the possibilities of a life which had no longer a pleasant outlook in any direction, and, after much hesitation, became the wife of a grave, studious, austere man of good family and moderate fortune, but many years her senior.
It was this marriage, into which she entered with all seriousness, and a devotion that was none the less sincere because it was of the intellect rather than the heart, that gave the final tinge to a character that was already laid on solid foundations. Strong, clear-sighted, earnest, and gifted, her later experience had accented a slightly ascetic quality which had been deepened also by her study of antique models. Her tastes were grave and severe. But they had a lighter side. As a