never be forgotten. It is in them that a strong and intelligent royalty
finds its fulcrum, its natural authority, and its moral prestige. It is
the people who give their sweat and blood without a murmur. It is the
people who in times of peace and times of war, in cities and country
places and on battle-fields, utter enthusiastically and with all the
force of their robust lungs, the cry which sums up the unity of the
country, the cry of loyalty and patriotism: Long live the King! Reforms
are necessary. But it is not a Voltairean nobility and a magistracy
honeycombed by the spirit of rebellion which can cause order and liberty
to triumph. It is not a middle class which, after all, represents only
a feeble minority. No. It is the people taken as a whole, that is to
say the entire nation, which can be counted on for the work of true
progress. The sovereign reformers have always relied on the people, not
on the privileged classes. This is what is forgotten in the apartments
of Versailles. People busy themselves with the surface of society, not
with its depths. They think too much about the houses of the Faubourg
Saint Germain, about academies, salons, castles, palaces of justice, and
not enough about the garrets and thatched cabins, the devout and honest
masses who would be such a powerful rampart for majesty against the
invasions of a revolution half aristocratic, half middle class. There
would be the rejuvenescence and the future of the monarchy. The King
should appear, not merely to the ruling classes, but to the mass of his
subjects, as a protector, friend, and father. Louis XV. does not remember
often enough that of all classes of society in the eighteenth century,
the best, most worthy, most patriotic, is that of the poor, the humble,
the workmen, peasants, and laborers. Among them is found the basis of
honesty, industry, and piety, the compensation for the scandals of the
court and the city, beautiful souls under rude envelopes. There, if
royalty comprehended the situation, it would find the consolidation of
the throne and the welfare of the country.
VII
POLITICAL WOMEN
At Versailles, Paris, and throughout the realm, the women are playing
a part which constantly increases in importance. At Versailles they
dominate Louis XV. and his ministers; at Paris they are the recognized
arbiters of fashion, literature, and the arts. Throughout the realm
they avenge themselves for the Salic law. In 1770 Collé wrote in his
Memoirs: “The women have taken the upper hand so completely among the
French, they have subjugated the men so completely that they no longer
think or feel except in accordance with them.” Not all the influential
women are coquettish, light, superficial, the women of Marivaux. Some of
them are frivolous, but others are serious. There are religious women,
mothers in Israel, friends of the Jesuits, irreconcilable enemies of the
Encyclopædia—such women as the Princess de Marsan, who in association
with Madame de Talmont, Madame de Noailles, and the Duke de Nivernais,
directs what is called the devout party. There are philosophical women,
eaten up by the new fanaticism of irreligion, who plunge head foremost,
with all the enthusiasm and passion of their sex, into the abyss of
novel doctrines. There are scientific women, who assimilate with curious
facility the surface of the most arduous sciences, and manage a compass
as easily as a fan, who place dictionaries of natural history and
treatises on physics and chemistry in their boudoirs beside a little
altar dedicated to Benevolence or Friendship, and who no longer have
themselves painted as alluring goddesses on clouds, but as grave and
meditative muses sitting in a laboratory amidst squares and telescopes.
There are political women, pupils of Rousseau, admirers of the _Contrat
Social_, who dream of being the Egerias of future Numas, of changing
their armchairs into tribunes, and their salons into clubs, who ardently
praise the parliamentary system of the other side of the Channel, and
declaim like good citizenesses—the word begins to be in fashion—against
the excesses and turpitudes of the absolute régime. They want to pass
for energetic women (energy is another word becoming acclimated in the
language of high society). They pose as patricians of ancient Rome,
impassioned for liberty. Grave accents proceed from their delicate
mouths. Eloquent protests against despotism issue from the depths of
boudoirs hung with satin. These liberal great ladies, a new type in
French society, make Gustavus III. of Sweden the confidant of their
wrath against Louis XV. Read the letters of the habitual correspondents
of the Swedish monarch, Mesdames d’Egmont, de La Marck, de Croy, de
Boufflers, de Mesmes, de Luxembourg, and see with what vigor of thought
and vehemence of style these ladies express themselves.[12]
The beautiful and spiritual Countess d’Egmont, as grave as her father,
Marshal de Richelieu, is frivolous, a charming woman, fated to an early
death, whose melancholy and whose sufferings inspire such interest, how
violent, bitter, indignant, is her language concerning the Du Barry’s
aged lover! “How can one endure,” she writes to Gustavus, “that he who
has enjoyed the celestial happiness of being passionately adored, and who
would still be so if he had left us the least illusion, should please
himself by destroying every one of them and look on such a change with
coolness?” Again she writes to the King of Sweden, June 27, 1771: “Sire,
they say you have asked for a portrait of Madame Du Barry. They even
go so far as to say that you have written to her. I have denied it at
all events; but it has been maintained against me so positively that I
entreat you to authorize me to deny it again.... No, that could not be.”
And November 26, 1771: “I ask again for an answer about Madame Du Barry’s
portrait. Deign to give me your word of honor that you have not and never
will have it, for I am greatly pressed to offer you mine.” Madame de
Boufflers wrote such sentences as these to Gustavus: “Absolute power is
a mortal disease, which by insensibly corrupting the moral qualities,
ends by destroying states.... The actions of sovereigns are submitted
to the censure of the universe.... France is ruined if the present
administration lasts.”
The Countess de La Marck draws this picture of society in a letter to the
King of Sweden: “Our young women are bursting with wit; as for reason,
it is hardly mentioned. They are all initiated into State secrets, they
meddle with everything, and make love by way of pastime.... Certain
bureaus of wit where people mock at God and religion, and consider
those who believe imbeciles, such, in short, Sire, is a sketch of our
situation. No more emulation, no more principles; even to the theatres
everything is going wrong. We still have one or two sculptors and three
or four painters. The jeweller’s trade prospers of course; but it will
soon come to a standstill, for no one buys anything now but brilliants;
to be sure, they do not pay for them. In a word, we are as low down as we
can get, and shall be lucky if no one attacks us, for I do not know what
would become of us.”
The impulse is given. Henceforward the women will be in opposition to
power. It is the current; one must go with it. The principal salons of
Paris are so many clubs hostile to the King. Politics invades everything.
Besenval says: “Assemblies of society and pleasure have become petty
States-General, where the women, transformed into legislators, lay
down maxims on public law and settle principles with the audacity and
assurance imparted by the wish to dominate and make themselves observed,
a desire heightened still further by the importance of the matter and its
celebrity....” It must not be believed, however, that the majority of
these eloquent stateswomen, descanting at random on the respective rights
of the throne and the magistracy, on absolute power and liberty, renounce
on that account the ways and habitudes of coquetry, of what is called
love. Suspect these women, serious only in appearance. Politics is the
pretext. The gist of the business is gallantry.
VIII
LOVE
Of all loves, the rarest in high society under the reign of Louis XV. is
conjugal love. Well-bred married couples are on the footing of polite
and courteous strangers with each other. The husband calls his wife
Madame. The wife calls her husband Monsieur. They live in the same house,
but have separate apartments and do not visit each other without being
previously announced. Never do they ride in the same carriage. Never are
they met in the same salon. A husband who should follow his wife would
be treated as a jealous provincial. A woman who should have the singular
idea of being in love with her husband would be thought ridiculous.
Such a passion in good society would be indecorous. Conjugal love is
altogether out of fashion. Baron de Besenval considers that though
morals may suffer from this, society is an infinite gainer, adding that,
“freed from the embarrassment and chill always caused by the presence of
husbands, there is extreme liberty,” and that “the coquetry of men and
women maintains its vivacity and daily supplies piquant adventures.”
Piquant adventures are what is specially sought for. Passion, people care
little about; what they are looking for is pleasure. Listen to a great
lady saying, in 1764, to young Lauzun, the future Lovelace, whose erotic
education is not yet quite finished: “Believe me, little cousin, to be
romantic doesn’t succeed nowadays; it makes you ridiculous, and then it
is all up with you. I have had a great fancy for you, my child; it is not
my fault if you have taken it for a grand passion and persuaded yourself
that it would never end. What does it matter to you, if this fancy is
over, whether I take one for somebody else or remain without a lover? You
have many advantages for pleasing women; use them for that purpose, and
rest assured that the loss of one can always be repaired by another,—that
is the way to be happy and amiable.”[13] Such was fashionable morality.
Chamfort defined love as “the exchange of two fantasies and the contact
of two skins.” People take and leave each other in precisely the same
way. As Prince de Ligne said, one was happy _to have_, one was enchanted
_to have_ no longer.
Where is the time of profound passions, trembling avowals, of sighs and
tears and fond despairs? Where is the time of heroic loves with their
chivalrous respect, their long waiting, sublime devotion, eternal oaths,
their tried devotion and tender gratitude, their virtues of grandeur and
generosity? Look at the Cupid of the reign of Louis XV., the noisy,
insolent, victorious Cupid, who scoffs at the love of former times as a
malicious and ill-bred child mocks at an old man. Listen to him saying in
a gibing tone: “Your lovers were mere blockheads, who only knew how to
languish, say alas! and tell their troubles to the surrounding echoes.
For my part, I have suppressed the echoes.... My subjects do not say: I
am dying; nothing is half so much alive as they are. Languors, timidity,
sweet martyrdom, are out of the question; all that is tame, a platitude
of other days.... I don’t put my subjects to sleep; I wake them up; they
are so keen that they have no leisure to be tender; their glances are
desires; instead of sighing, they attack; they do not say: Be propitious
to me; they seize, and that is what is needed.”[14] Listen to Madame
d’Epinay, who speaks of modesty as a “beautiful virtue which one fastens
on with pins.” Listen to the century which boasts, like Crébillon the
younger, of “having arrived at the truth of things,” of having suppressed
what it calls “exaggerations, affectations, grimaces.” Do you see, in the
picture of _La Chemise Enlevée_, Fragonard’s little love who smilingly
carries off the decency of woman? Do you hear Buffon himself, the grave,
majestic Buffon, employing this materialistic language? “Why does love
create the happy estate of all creatures and the misery of man? It is
because only the physical side of this passion is good; because the
moral side is good for nothing.”[15]
Hence it is an understood thing, proclaimed by the great savants of
the century, that the prime essential is to suppress the moral part of
love. Love is no longer represented except under the image of a pretty
little naked god, flying about, and free. The enemies of constraint and
waiting form a sect called the _anti-ceremonious_. Another aphrodisiacal
corporation entitles itself the _Society of the Moment_. To choose the
moment well is the tactics, the supreme art. “How many liaisons begin
briskly by insolence in a carriage the coachman of which is particular
about taking the longest road, to play deaf and to make the horses go
slowly. The brutal style of gallantry ends by having principles, a sort
of philosophy and means of excusing itself.... It finds wits to decide
that a temerarious man has at bottom more deference for the woman than a
timid one and really respects her more by sparing her the long torment of
successive concessions.”[16] To the lover who remains on his knees too
long, the eighteenth century cries: “Get up, and take your mistress in
your arms.”
It is very perverted, very frivolous and guilty, this society of the
time of Louis XV. They are very immoral, these gay grand ladies, these
_patriciennes_ of libertinage, who love scandal for scandal’s sake, and
take a haughty pleasure in the loss of their reputation. Nevertheless, we
must do them the justice of admitting that for the most part they retain,
amid all their disorders, a quality lacking to many fashionable beauties
in democratic times,—disinterestedness. One asks of the grand ladies
of the eighteenth century, if not the virtues of the honest woman, at
least her qualities. In the high society of these times love is immoral,
indecent, full of effrontery, but still there is love. Doubtless it is
not the lofty, magnanimous, inspired love of the heroines of the great
Corneille or the tender Racine. It is not the ideal passion, purified by
the spirit of sacrifice, by the ardent flame of enthusiasm. No, it is
no longer that love. Nevertheless, it is still love, or, if it is so in
appearance only, at least it is not a vile traffic.
Let us add, in order to be fair, that towards the close of the reign
the level of sentiment begins to rise a little. The _Nouvelle-Héloise_
has created something new in the erotic manners of France; and if this
novelty is at times declamatory, one cannot avoid recognizing also that
it has a touch of spirituality.
No one now approves this remark of Buffon’s: “Man in desiring to base
himself on sentiment simply abuses his being and hollows out in his heart
a void which nothing is able to replenish.” The fashion has changed. The
affectation of passion has been substituted for that of indifference. The
man of sensibility, the lover to excess, makes his appearance in the
isle of Cythera. Sensibility is the watchword, the word which expresses
everything. In a gathering at the house of the Duchess de Chartres, the
Countess de Blot declares “that unless of superior virtue, a woman really
_sensitive_ could refuse nothing to the passion of Rousseau.” Irony,
scepticism, were once the rule, but now it is enthusiasm. Declarations of
love are either philosophic theses or tragic tirades. Every lover is an
actor who declaims his part with emphasis, with attitudes, inflections of
voices and attitudes studied beforehand. Henceforward the salon stage is
monopolized by comic lovers, practised Don Juans, virtuosos of sentiment.
“Before everything else they seek their own applause and are prouder to
make their exit content with themselves than content with the woman.
There are some who falsify their whole person, who paint their faces,
unpowder their hair, who deprive themselves of wine in order to grow
pale, and all in the hope of moving and affecting. There are even some
who for a decisive rendezvous put on despair as one would put on rouge;
they simulate the marks of half-dried tears on their cheeks with diluted
gum arabic.”[17] They boast of returning to nature, of admiring the
country, of being compassionate and humane. Formerly it was the negation
of love, now it is the parody of it.
IX
THE FAMOUS SALONS
The principal salons of Paris are celebrated throughout all Europe. They
lead the fashion. They are the arbiters of style. In them the women
are sovereigns, guiding conversation and consequently opinion. The old
style becomes the elegant interpreter of new ideas. What strikes one
first of all in fashionable life at the close of Louis XV.’s reign is
the increasing intimacy between the nobles and the men of letters. “The
haughty Maréchale de Luxembourg always chooses La Harpe as her cavalier;
he gives his arm so well, in fact. Not only does the plebeian enter the
salon if he has good manners, but he lords it there if he has talent.
The first place in conversation and even in public consideration is for
Voltaire, the son of a notary; for Rousseau, the son of a clockmaker; for
D’Alembert, a foundling picked up by a glazier.”[18] Walpole considers
that literature is taking up too much space in familiar conversation.
“Literature is an excellent amusement,” he writes, “when one has nothing
better to do; but in society it becomes pedantry, and is tiresome when
paraded in public. The authors one meets everywhere are worse than
their books, which is complimentary to neither. Usually the tone of
conversation is solemn and pedantic, and people hardly seem to be amused
unless they are disputing.” This judgment is a trifle severe. After
all, from the worldly point of view, it is still Paris which holds the
sceptre, and foreign princes on their travels esteem it an honor to enter
these salons whose prestige and brilliancy are universal.
The Maréchale de Luxembourg, whose first husband was the Duke de
Boufflers, the heroine of the famous chanson,—
“Quand Boufflers parut à la cour,
On crut voir la mère d’Amour;
Chacun s’empressait à lui plaire,
Et chacun l’avait à son tour,”[19]—
the Maréchale de Luxembourg settled down as she advanced in years.
“Aided by a great name, plenty of audacity, and especially by a fine
house, she has succeeded in making people forget her light conduct and
has established herself as sovereign arbiter of decorum, good taste, and
those forms which make up politeness. Her empire over young people of
both sexes is absolute. She restrains the giddiness of the young women,
forces them to a general coquetry, and obliges the young men to be
prudent and respectful; in fine, she maintains the sacred fire of French
urbanity; at her house the tradition of noble and easy manners which
all Europe comes to Paris to admire and strives in vain to imitate, is
strictly preserved. Never was a Roman censor more useful to the morals
of the republic than the Maréchale de Luxembourg has been to the charm
of society.”[20] By wit and authority, by making herself listened to,
and especially by making herself feared, the Maréchale has ended by
inspiring more than consideration; to wit, respect. She exerts over
the aristocratic, and even over the literary world, a redoubtable and
despotic domination. A presentation at court no longer suffices. One must
also be received by Madame the Maréchale de Luxembourg. Jean Jacques
Rousseau himself, the irascible, morose Jean Jacques, is fascinated,
as it were, by this veritably great lady. “Hardly had I seen her,” he
writes, “when I was subjugated. I found her charming, with that charm
which is proof against time, the one most calculated to act upon my
heart. I was expecting to find her conversation caustic and full of
epigrams. It is not that, but something much better. The conversation
of Madame de Luxembourg does not sparkle with wit. It has no sallies,
and strictly speaking no subtlety, but it has an exquisite delicacy
which never strikes and always pleases. Her flatteries are all the
more intoxicating the simpler they are. One would say they escape her
unawares, and that her heart overflows simply because it is over-full.”
Another superior woman whose salon is an aristocratic and intellectual
centre of the first order, firstly at Paris and Versailles and afterwards
at Chanteloup, is the clever and virtuous Duchess de Choiseul, wife
of the celebrated minister. “At a time when each coterie has its
philosopher, who is as it were its director, Madame de Choiseul thinks
for herself. Neither the irony of Voltaire nor the declamations of
Rousseau disturb her sound sense and correct intelligence. She judges
men and things sanely without permitting herself to be carried away by
fashion or prejudice. One always finds in her an instructive taste for
the grand and the beautiful. Hers is a noble nature, lovable at first
sight, and in which one discovers every day some motive for loving it
more.”[21]
The Duchess de Choiseul will never be Rousseau’s dupe. “He
preaches a good morality,” she writes concerning the author of the
_Nouvelle-Héloise_, “a morality which we were acquainted with, for
that matter, because there is but one; but he has drawn suspicious and
dangerous conclusions from it, or has put us in a position to do so
by the way in which he has presented them. Always suspect metaphysics
applied to simple things; happily for us, nothing is more simple than
morality, and what is truest in this matter is what is nearest to us.
_Do nothing to another that you would not have him do to you._ Everybody
knows that, every one understands that.... There is no need of fine
dissertations on moral good and evil, the origin of passions, prejudices,
manners, etc., and the rest of that fine rigmarole with which these
gentlemen fill the journals, the shops, and our libraries, in order to
teach us what virtue is.”
The Duchess de Choiseul considers Rousseau equally dangerous as a
moralist and as a political publicist. “I admit,” she adds, “that errors
must necessarily creep into prejudices, as abuses do into laws; but
to wish to destroy everything in order to correct them is as if one
wanted to cut off a man’s head to rid him of a few white hairs.... The
employment of wit at the expense of public order is one of the greatest
villainies.... That sort of crime is a seed, it is positively the bad
grain of the Gospel. A true citizen would serve his country as best he
could by his wit and talents, but would not go to writing about the
social compact so as to make us suspect the legitimacy of governments and
overwhelm us with the weight of chains which we had not felt as yet.”
Madame de Choiseul thus concludes this fine letter of July 17, 1766: “I
have always been suspicious of this Rousseau, with his singular systems,
his extraordinary accoutrement, and his chair of eloquence resting on the
roofs of houses. He has always seemed to me a charlatan of virtue.”
The Duchess de Choiseul is a type as venerable as sympathetic. If one
suffers at beholding a Madame de Boufflers, the _idol_ of the Temple,
doing the honors of Prince de Conti’s house, conjointly with Mademoiselle
Auguste, the danseuse of the Opera, or a Maréchale de Mirepoix sitting
on the front seat of Madame de Pompadour’s carriage, and afterwards on
that of Madame Du Barry, one is happy at meeting a woman worthy of her
rank and fortune, a woman who, everywhere and always, gives the example
of what is good, beautiful, and true. There is such purity in her whole
existence, such virtuous and simple grace in her pleasing person, such a
great mind in her little body.[22] “The Duchess of Choiseul is not very
pretty,” writes Horace Walpole, “but has fine eyes, and is a little model
in waxwork, which not being allowed to speak for some time as incapable,
has a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which the Court has not
cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the most interesting
sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn and propriety of
expression. Oh! it is the gentlest, amiable, civil little creature that
ever came out of a fairy egg.”
The salons of the Maréchale de Luxembourg and the Duchess de Choiseul
are above all aristocratic circles. From the literary point of view,
the three principal salons of Paris are those of Madame Geoffrin, the
Marquise Du Deffand, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The first is
situated in the rue Saint-Honoré, the second in the rue Saint-Dominique,
in a small house belonging to the Convent of Saint Joseph,[23] the third
in the rue de Bellechasse.