influential woman belong to the nobility? No. She is of very obscure
birth. What is her husband? One of the founders of the manufactory of
glass, a very rich but very ugly commoner, and so far as cleverness goes,
a nullity. It is pretended that one of the lady’s friends, returning
to her one day after a rather long absence, said to her in speaking
of her recollections: “But what has become of that old gentleman
who always sat at the end of the table and never said anything to
anybody?”—“Ah!” responded Madame Geoffrin, “I know whom you mean....
He is dead.”—“Really! And who was he, then?”—“My husband.” Is Madame
Geoffrin literary? Not the least in the world. She is ignorance itself.
She does not even know how to spell. Apropos of instruction she says:
“I have got along so well without it that I have never felt the need
of it.” Very well! at the close of Louis XV.’s reign this commoner,
without youth,[24] beauty, talent, or education, this old woman who
would have passed unnoticed at another epoch, is one of the principal
authorities of France, one of the sovereigns of opinion. Her salon,
celebrated throughout Europe, may be considered one of the institutions
of the eighteenth century. The greatest nobles pay court to her. Even
crowned heads render her a real homage. When, in June, 1766, she
goes to visit her friend, I might almost say her protégé, Stanislas
Poniatowski, King of Poland, her visit is considered by all the courts
as a political event. The King receives her at Warsaw as a mother, with
all imaginable respect, joy, and tenderness! At Vienna the Empress Maria
Theresa overwhelms her with courteous attentions. A princess of the
blood would not receive a more flattering welcome. The Czarina Catherine
II. takes pleasure in writing affectionate letters to her, and values
this correspondence most highly. Why was this prodigious success, this
exceptional importance, accorded by France and foreign countries to a
woman who must herself have been astonished at playing such a part?
Why? Because Madame Geoffrin has had the talent to create by herself
a literary salon, because artists and authors have dined and supped
with her, because she is one of the stockholders of the Encyclopedia,
because she has probably contributed more than any other person to
the establishment of a real sympathy between the two aristocracies of
birth and talent. Such a vogue as hers is always susceptible of some
explanation. Madame Geoffrin understands better than any one else how to
manage the difficult, vain, irritable race of artists and men of letters;
she has, if not wit, at least a great deal of tact, finesse, cleverness,
blended with good-nature.[25] “Madame Geoffrin’s manners,” says Baron de
Gleichen, “may be compared to La Fontaine’s style. There is a good deal
of art in them, but this art is not apparent. Everything in her seems
very ordinary, and yet no one could equal her by trying to imitate her.
Everything in her house is well arranged, easy, commodious, useful, and
simple. Her bourgeois tone and common language impart a certain piquancy
to a discourse full of wisdom and good sense.” Horace Walpole is also an
admirer of this woman who excels in the art of holding a salon. He writes
to Lady Hervey, October 13, 1765: “Madame Geoffrin is a marvel of good
sense, good information, good advice, and timeliness. She has a way of
finding fault with you which charms me. Never in my life have I seen a
person who can so quickly seize the defects, vanities, and deceits of any
one, who explains them to one with such precision, nor who had the art of
convincing one so easily. I have never liked being corrected to my face.
Well! you cannot imagine what pleasure I find in it with her; I take her
both as confessor and director, and begin to believe that in the end I
shall become a reasonable creature, which I have never had any pretension
of being. The next time I see her I think I shall say: O common sense,
seat yourself there!... If she could give herself the trouble, I assure
you, Madame, she would govern me like a child.”
The rival salon to that of Madame Geoffrin is that of the Marquise Du
Deffand. Madame Du Deffand is as much a great lady as Madame Geoffrin
is a commoner. Madame Du Deffand is as learned as Madame Geoffrin is
ignorant. While one does not know how to spell, the other writes as
well as the most illustrious authors. Both are old at the time when
their salons exercise a preponderating influence at Paris. They are of
nearly the same age. Madame Geoffrin was born in 1699, Madame Du Deffand
in 1697, a year later than Madame de Sévigné, whose tradition she was
to continue and to repeat her glory. The Marquise Du Deffand is not
merely old; she is blind. Her eyes, once so beautiful, which had made,
people say, so many ravages, are extinct. But, lacking the eyes of the
body, she has those of the spirit, and with those she sees everything.
Sitting, day and night, in that famous armchair which she calls her
tub, the witty blind woman is a power which must be reckoned with. Her
salon is an areopagus whose decrees are to be dreaded. To be admitted
there is a great distinction, a high favor. To cross its threshold
one must be a somebody, either in the book of heraldry or the golden
book of literature.[26] A procession of influential people, celebrated
persons, well-informed newsmongers, defiles there at all hours. It is a
centre of information which has the word of every enigma, the clue to
every intrigue, the earliest hint of all ideas. It is a salon at once
diplomatic and literary, political and diplomatic; it is the almost
official rendezvous of foreign diplomatists, who come hither to find
the daily materials for their correspondence with their governments. It
is there that all pressing questions in France and elsewhere in Europe
are treated in a remarkable manner by well-bred men who chat, who do
not argue, and who, seeking above all things to be agreeable, know how,
according to Boileau’s precept,—
“To pass from grave to gay, from lively to severe.”
The sarcastic dowager presides at all their interviews with a sort of
magistery. The prestige of her reputation, the verve and eloquence of
her speech, the superiority of her style and language, her rank, her
relations, her marvellous wit, so keen, so subtle, so piercing, make her
a woman whose domination is felt by the most recalcitrant. She has the
talent of making herself feared. Woe to him whose whims she takes it
into her head to ridicule. She is, as she has been called, the female
Voltaire, the high-priestess of irony. In her slim and nervous little
hands the sceptre of wit is like a ferule. She is often amiable, but a
trifle is enough to irritate, to embitter her, and then her redoubtable
armchair is like a tribune whence she launches invectives, whence
she discharges all the shafts of satire. Hers is the chief salon of
Paris. Her letters are models of style, marvels of precision, lucidity,
subtlety. No classic writer has a more irreproachable form. Madame de
Sévigné has personified the seventeenth century. Madame Du Deffand is
like the incarnation of the eighteenth. Voltaire himself, Voltaire, who
considers her as the arbiter of renown, is so afraid of her that, in
order to pay court to her, he tries to persuade her that he is blind
like herself. There is one man, however, who dares to brave the vengeful
thunderbolts of the Marquise Du Deffand, and who must have many reasons
to fear her, for he is a savant, an academician, a man of the world, and
a philosopher: D’Alembert. But that can be explained: D’Alembert is in
love with the enemy of the Marquise,—Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.
The two rivals had begun by being friends. They lived under the same
roof for ten years, from 1754 to 1764. The illegitimate child of the
Countess d’Albon, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, born in 1732, had many
trials to undergo. Poor, without any support, she had at first been
happy to accept a shelter with Madame Du Deffand. Pleasing, though not
pretty, intelligent, instructed, talking and writing well, concealing
a restless mind and an ardent imagination under an apparent calmness
and reserve, her inferior position, her species of social and literary
servitude, caused her at last keen suffering. The companion made her
_coup d’État_. She slyly installed in her little room a sort of intimate
circle reserved to certain initiates coming to spend a few moments there
in secret before the hour when the salon of the Marquise opened. But
some backbiter betrayed the secret. The blind old woman learned of the
conspiracy. Exasperated by such an act of rebellion, she pitilessly
banished Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The quarrel between these two
women has divided Parisian society into two camps, one defending the
Marquise, the other pitying her companion. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse
has not remained without resources. Her faithful adherents—D’Alembert,
Turgot, the Chevalier de Chastellux, the Abbé de Boismont, the Archbishop
of Aix—have clubbed together to assure her a modest but independent
position, and have hired an apartment for her in the rue de Bellechasse.
Her salon is not large, but it is animated by a flame of intelligence,
sympathy, and passion. The restricted and chosen circle which frequent
it find more charm there than in the great intellectual gatherings of a
Marquise Du Deffand or a Madame Geoffrin.
These celebrated salons which are the admiration of all Europe are very
attractive, very agreeable on the surface. But what contradictions, what
pettinesses, there are in this society of those privileged by birth, wit,
or fortune! What hours of discouragement, ennui, and chagrin are the lot
of all these people who are amusing themselves, or, better, who have the
hope, the pretension, of doing so! Madame Geoffrin herself, in spite of
her good health, her good sense, and good humor, contemplates at times
with inquietude, with alarm, the work of these Encyclopedists to whom she
renders continual services. She receives and protects them, she gives
large sums to these artisans of disorder, these demolishers of the throne
and the altar, and yet, by one of those inconsistencies so frequent in
the eighteenth century, she is at bottom a royalist and a devotee. The
friend, confidant, and counsellor of the most incredulous philosophers,
the most dangerous materialists, the woman whose largesses contribute
greatly to the publication of the Encyclopedia, goes to confession to
a Capuchin, is assiduous at Mass and Vespers, always in her seat at
the church of Saint Roch, and careful to have a priest brought to the
death-beds of her friends. At times a secret instinct warns this aged
woman, who likes repose and discriminating conservations, that her house,
apparently so reserved and tranquil, is the accursed laboratory where the
poisons which will inflict death on individuals and society are being
silently prepared under the light of a salon lamp, by a restricted and
chosen circle.
Madame Du Deffand herself has at times ephemeral inclinations toward
religion and piety. It happens to her at certain hours to aspire vaguely
to the devout estate, “the state,” she says, “which seems to her the
happiest in life.” She bitterly regrets that peace of heart given by
the faith, and which is such a force, such a consolation, in our valley
of tears. In spite of all her wit, she succumbs under the burden of
an incurable ennui, and her letters breathe sometimes the accents of
despair. In this worldly society, the sublimity of frivolity, she
expresses here and there, with sinister eloquence, thoughts which make
one shudder. Then her reflections, profound and full of anguish, are
as striking as the soliloquy of Hamlet. Her armchair, which she calls
her tub, she might also call her tomb. In it she is like a dead woman
who might have the sentiment of life. To the man who said: “Go lightly,
mortals, don’t bear on too hard,” to the superficial Voltaire, this poor
old woman, blind both morally and physically, addresses with doleful
anxiety questions concerning the terrible problems of human destiny.
She writes to him, April 1, 1769: “Tell me why, detesting life, I dread
death. Nothing indicates to me that all will not be at an end with me;
on the contrary, I perceive the dilapidation of my mind as well as that
of my body. All that is said for or against makes no impression on me.
I listen only to myself, and I find nothing but doubt and obscurity.
_Believe_; says one, _it is the safest_. But how can one believe what
one does not comprehend? What one does not comprehend may doubtless
exist; therefore I do not deny it; I am like one born deaf and blind.
He admits that there are sounds and colors; but does he know what he is
admitting? If it were enough not to deny, it would be all very well;
but that is not enough. How can one decide between a beginning and an
eternity, between the full and the empty? Not one of my senses can teach
me; what can one learn without them? Meanwhile, if I do not believe
what ought to be believed, I am threatened with being a thousand times
more unhappy after my death than I am during my life. On what shall one
decide, and is it possible to decide? I ask you, who have a character
so true, that you ought, by sympathy, to discover the truth, if it be
discoverable. I must have tidings of the other world and be told whether
we are destined to play a part there.”
To crown her misfortunes, Madame Du Deffand is at the same time a victim
to the tortures of both mind and heart. She who had never known real
love, falls into a sort of ecstatic passion when she is nearly seventy.
She conceives for a man twenty years younger than herself, and who fears
ridicule above all things, the caustic and witty Englishman, Horace
Walpole, a strange, vague, yet violent and exclusive affection which is
not friendship, which cannot be love. As if by the irony of fate, she
loves for the first time at an age when it is no longer permissible to
love for the last one.
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is possibly still more unhappy than Madame Du
Deffand. This demoiselle, apparently frivolous, loves like Sappho, like
the Portuguese nun, like the new Heloise. She is a type of hot-headed,
feverish, frenetic love. She loves to madness, to frenzy, a brilliant
officer who cares nothing for her,—M. de Guibert. She lives by this love
and she dies of it. Her poor body and her poor soul are as if enveloped
in a shirt of Nessus. One might call her a victim of the ancient
fatality. In her despair, in her agony, she writes to her insensible
lover: “Ah! how cruel men are! Tigers are kind in comparison to them. I
ought naturally to have devoted myself to hating; I have fulfilled my
destiny badly. I have loved much and hated little.... I have no longer
the strength to love; my soul fatigues, torments me; I am no longer
constant to anything.... I have a fever every day, and my doctor, who is
not the most skilful of men, tells me constantly that I am consumed with
chagrin, that my pulse and my respiration announce an active suffering,
and he always goes away saying, ‘We have no remedy for the soul.’” And
you, O philosophers, do you think you have any? Men of the Encyclopedia,
habitués of the celebrated salons, if you want to know what philosophy
is, and what religion, compare the death of one of your adepts with the
death of a Christian woman!
X
THE PHILOSOPHERS
Where is the time when La Bruyère wrote: “A man born Christian and
French finds himself constrained in satire. The great subjects are
forbidden him.” Where is the time when the advocate Barbier put this
sentence in his journal: “I think one ought to employ himself honorably,
without meddling in State affairs over which he has neither power nor
authority.” Prudence, reserve, respect for authority, fear of weakening
the foundations of the social edifice,—the philosophers have changed all
that. The salons have become academies in which people incessantly talk
of religion and politics, for the sake of attacking the Church and even
royalty. In 1762 Bachaumont calls attention to a deluge of pamphlets,
brochures, and political dissertations, “a rage to argue on matters
of finance and government.” Horace Walpole affirms in 1765, that “the
atheists who engross conversation inveigh as loudly against kings as
against priests.... They do nothing but preach, and their avowed doctrine
is atheism.... Even Voltaire does not satisfy them. One of their
devotees said of him: ‘He is bigoted, he is a deist.’”
The philosophers are the heroes of the day. Their doctrines have not as
yet penetrated the masses of the people. But in the aristocracy, the
wealthy commoners, the world of letters, the superior magistracy, the
world of finance, they take the arrogant tone of masters. One meets
them in all the academies, the houses of all the great nobles, at every
fête, every elegant supper. Certain prelates of the upper clergy even
are accused of fraternizing with them. Now that the fops are out of
fashion, the men in vogue are the philosophers. A philosopher with all
his subversive ideas appears as indispensable to a well-kept salon as a
chandelier with all its candles. Philosophy, before becoming the supreme
danger, is a pastime, a diversion, an elegancy. The fire which is to
burn the edifice shows itself at first under the aspect of an evening
illumination, an amusing Bengal light. The great nobles play with loaded
guns without suspecting that they are about to go off. They are like
workmen who, undertaking works of demolition, should delude themselves
and naïvely imagine that they are building. Strange types, these
revolutionists in lace jabots, with their fashionable blasphemies, their
cups of gold or crystal full of an intoxicating but poisonous beverage,
these effeminate philosophers who, with such a charming smile and eyes
so soft, utter in refined and pleasing tones the most impious remarks in
the very manner in which one would recite an idyl or a madrigal! Curious
repasts, these suppers, where “one is at table amidst a delicate luxury,
among smiling and well-dressed women, with learned and agreeable men,
in a society where intelligence is prompt and intercourse safe. After
the second course there is an explosion of animation, sallies flash out,
wits flame or sparkle. At dessert could one avoid making witticisms on
the gravest subjects? With coffee arises the question of the immortality
of the soul and the existence of God.”[27] Scepticism is regarded as a
thing pertaining to good society. People make a pleasure, a glory of it.
The old-time aristocratic stiffness changes into persiflage or irony
concerning sacred things. The revolution still wears ruffles. Before
putting on the carmagnole it drapes itself in silk and velvet. It will
end with red caps; it begins with red-heeled slippers.
In all this there are many oddities, many inconsistencies. Let Walpole
describe it for us. “By what I said of their religious or rather
irreligious opinions, you must not conclude their people of quality
atheists,—at least, not the men. Happily for them, poor souls! they are
not capable of going so far into thinking. They assent to a great deal,
because it is the fashion, and because they don’t know how to contradict.
They are ashamed to defend the Roman Catholic religion, because it is
quite exploded; but I am convinced they believe it in their hearts.”[28]
The philosophers themselves recoil before the consequences and the
application of their doctrines. Diderot, in his _Projet d’instruction
publique pour la Russie_, recognizes that “atheism, adapted to a small
number of thinkers, cannot be suitable for a society.” He, the pretended
destroyer of religions and tyrannies, he who, in an access of savage
fury, wrote this outrageous distich,—
“_Et ma main ourdirait les entrailles du prêtre,_
_A défaut de cordon pour étrangler les rois._”—[29]
he professes a naïve adoration for the Empress Catherine II., goes to
Russia to pay her homage, and receives from her northern majesty a heap
of compliments and presents. Voltaire exclaims in a candid moment: “The
wretch,”—it is the patriarch of Ferney’s appellation for the Catholic
religion,—“the wretch is good for the rabble great and small.”
I read in Bachaumont, under date of April 23, 1769: “It is known from
various letters which M. Voltaire has written in this region, that this
great poet has renewed this year the edifying spectacle of the last one,
and has again received his Easter Communion with much devotion, but in a
less public manner; he has alleged certain inconveniences which oblige
him to keep his bed, and receive Communion in his own house.
“It is claimed that M. Voltaire, piqued by the complaints of the Bishop
of Belley, lamenting over his incredulity and his continued obstinacy in
spreading libels against religion, determined to verify this Catholic
action, and that he had recourse to notaries to receive at this moment
his profession of faith, which he has sent to Monseigneur. However it
may be with regard to this circumstance, about which people differ, it
is evident in several letters to his friends how much he is attached
to religion, what respect he has for it, and with what humility he has
hastened to satisfy the obligations of Catholicity.”
Is Bachaumont altogether serious when he thus expresses himself? I could
not answer for it. It is certain, at all events, that Voltaire built a
Catholic church at his own expense, close beside his château, and that on
the portal of it he had sculptured this inscription, more haughty than
evangelic: _Deo erexit Voltaire_.
Such contradictions exasperate Horace Walpole’s common sense. “Atheism,”
he writes, “is a pitiable mess, although all the cooks of France exert
themselves to invent new sauces for it. As to the soul, perhaps they
have none on the continent, but I think we have such things in England.
I think that Shakespeare, for example, had several for his part. As to
what concerns the Jews, although they don’t eat pork, I like them,
because they are better Christians than Voltaire.”[30] Walpole, the
phlegmatic Englishman, so moderate, courteous, liberal, so accustomed to
the civil manners of his country, Walpole, the friend of the Marquise
Du Deffand, the wit, the man of fashion, the frequenter of salons,
could not accustom himself to the philosophers of France. He found them
ill-bred, pretentious, tiresome. He accuses them of “having taken up
gravity, thinking it was philosophy and English, and so have acquired
nothing in the room of their natural levity and cheerfulness.... They are
contemptuous and reserved, instead of being ridiculously, consequently
pardonably, impertinent.”[31] What has become of the old French gaiety?
For the nation it is no longer anything but a souvenir of its youth.
“Laughing is as much out of fashion as pantins or bilboquets. Good folks,
they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down
first; and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the
demolition. They think me profane for having any belief left. But this
is not my only crime: I have told them, and am undone by it, that they
have taken from us to admire the two dullest things we had, Whist and
Richardson.[32]... There was no soul in Paris but philosophers, whom I
wished in heaven, though they do not wish themselves so. They are so
overbearing and underbred.... I sometimes go to Baron d’Olbach’s; but
I have left off his dinners, as there was no bearing the authors, and
philosophers, and savants, of which he has a pigeon-house full. They soon
turned my head with a new system of antediluvian deluges, which they have
invented to prove the eternity of matter.”[33]
All this philosophic and scientific flurry bewildered and bored the witty
Englishman. These endless blasphemies made him love religion. “Don’t be
astonished,” he writes, “if I become a thorough Jesuit.” These gilded
salons resplendent with lights, these perfumed boudoirs filled with
flowers, where marchionesses and duchesses, powdered, glittering, covered
with precious stones, and great nobles in velvet coats with iridescent
reflections, give themselves up to senseless invectives against the
Christ, make him wish to turn his back upon them all and betake himself
to tranquil meditation in the depths of some cloister, far from the
philosophers. “When I get too tired of their madness,” he says again, “I
retire to the Chartreuse,[34] where I am tempted to prefer Lesueur to
all the painters I know.” This Carthusian convent he always revisited
with emotion on each of his journeys. In 1739 he had said: “One finds
there every convenience which melancholy, meditation, or despair could
desire. And yet, one is pleased there.” But in 1771 the impression is not
so vivid. He writes, July 9: “I have not half the pleasure in visiting
the churches and convents that I formerly felt. The consciousness that
the vision is dispelled, the lack of the fervor so necessary in all
that is religious, gives these places the aspect of theatres doomed to
destruction. The monks trot from one side to the other as if they had not
much longer to stay there, and what once appeared to me a sacred twilight
is now only dirt and shadows.”