that the maids in the kitchen were her sole society. Pepys was proud
of her, proud of his house, proud of his hospitality, which enlarged
as riches came. He took her about with him often to the houses of his
friends. Now and again they made a journey together with great peace of
mind and curious content. Also, few weeks passed that he did not bring
some one home with him, for dancing, or music, or general merriment,
and in all these doings Mrs. Pepys’s share was greater or less. I think
we can easily surmise her hand in that royal and triumphant festivity,
the mere narrative of which breeds joy as well as laughter in any
well-tempered disposition. “We fell to dancing, and continued, only
with intermission for a good supper, till two in the morning, the music
being Greeting, and another most excellent violin, and theorbo, the
best in town. And so with mighty mirth, and pleased with their dancing
of jigs afterwards several of them, and among others, Betty Turner,
who did it mighty prettily; and, lastly, W. Batelier’s ‘Blackmore and
Blackmore Mad’; and then to a country-dance again, and so broke up with
extraordinary pleasure, as being one of the days and nights of my life
spent with the greatest content; and that which I can but hope to repeat
again a few times in my whole life. This done, we parted, the strangers
home, and I did lodge my cozen Pepys and his wife in our blue chamber.
My cozen Turner, her sister, and The., in our best chamber; Bab., Betty,
and Betty Turner in our own chamber; and myself and my wife in the maid’s
bed, which is very good. Our maids in the coachman’s bed; the coachman
with the boy in his settle-bed, and Tom where he uses to lie. And so I
did, to my great content, lodge at once in my house, with the greatest
ease, fifteen, and eight of them strangers of quality.” And surely Mrs.
Pepys was the queen of the feast, even though her name is but once
mentioned.
Moreover, she had the social instinct, and gave her husband advice as to
his conduct in the world, which he himself recognizes as excellent, and
resolves to follow it. “I told all this day’s passages, and she to give
me very good and rational advice how to behave myself to my Lord and his
family, by slighting everybody but my Lord and Lady, and not to seem to
have the least society or fellowship with them, which I am resolved to
do, knowing that it is my high carriage that must do me good there, and
to appear in good clothes and garbe.”
In one of Pepys’s diversions, which meant more to him than any except,
perhaps, music, Mrs. Pepys was allowed to share to a considerable extent,
and that was theatre-going. It would seem that she entered into it almost
as heartily as did her husband and with quite as intelligent criticism.
In one of his delightful spells of conscience-ache, he reproaches himself
for going to a play alone, after swearing to his wife that he would go no
more without her. But he sometimes permits her to go alone and very often
enjoys her company and her enthusiasm. Occasionally she differs from him
without shaking his judgment. But they agree entirely in their delight
in Massinger’s “_Bondman_” and as entirely in their contempt for “_A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_.”
When one considers the frailties that resulted from Pepys’s social
relations, one is tempted to ask how Mrs. Pepys was affected in this
regard. So far as we can judge, it was not an age of very nice morality,
at any rate among the upper classes. Wives as fair and as respectable as
Pepys’s seem to have entertained the addresses of lovers more or less
numerous. But I think we may assume that the lady we are concerned with
was all that a wife should be. Pepys himself was undoubtedly of that
opinion and he was an acute and a by no means partial judge. He does,
indeed, have tempestuous bursts of jealousy. There was a certain dancing
master, Pembleton by name, who caused a great deal of uneasiness.
It is pretty evident that Mrs. Pepys coquetted with him, perhaps
intentionally, and drove her husband at times to the verge of frenzy,
perhaps intentionally. It “do so trouble me that I know not at this very
minute that I now write this almost what either I write or am doing.” But
it blows over with the clear admission that the parties had been nothing
more than indiscreet.
Also, I divine a little malice in that pleasant incident of later date,
when Mrs. Pepys appears with a couple of fine lace pinners, at first
causing infinite disquiet by the suspicion that they were a present and
then dispelling this disagreeable state of mind by another hardly less
disagreeable. “On the contrary, I find she hath bought them for me to pay
for them, without my knowledge.”
Under other aspects of morality, Mrs. Pepys perhaps impresses us less
favorably. She would seem to have had faults of temper, faults of tongue,
to be at times inclined to deception, at times to violence. Here again
her age must be remembered, her age and her training. I imagine that in
some moral points she was more practical than her husband, less inclined
to hair-splitting nicety. I would give a good deal to know what she
thought of his precious business of vows, his fine distinctions as to
indulgence and abstinence, his forfeits, his pretexts and subterfuges.
When he made up for a vow broken in an extra visit to the theatre by
getting her to substitute one of her visits which she could not use, I
can see her soothing agreement, “Oh, yes, Sam, of course, why not?” And I
can see also the fine smile twitching the corners of her pretty mouth as
she watched the departing Phariseeism of those sturdy English shoulders.
What religion she had back of her morals—or immorals—we do not know.
Although, in the enthusiasm of first love, she announced that she had
a husband who would help her out of popery, she doubtless soon found
that there was not much spiritual comfort to be had from one who in
good fortune boasted of sharing the utter irreligion of Lord Sandwich
and, when things went wrong, dreaded abjectly that the Lord God would
punish him for his sins. Curious depths of inward experience suggest
themselves from the fact that Mrs. Pepys became a Catholic and received
the sacrament, without a single suspicion on the part of her watchful
inquisitor. Yet, after all, there may have been little spiritual
experience, but merely a deft confessor and an unresponsive world.
So it is hard to find out whether Mrs. Pepys loved God and it is equally
hard to find out what we are even more eager to know, whether she loved
her husband. In considering the point, we must remember first that the
world saw him quite other than we see him in the Diary. We see the lining
of his soul, somewhat spotted and patched and threadbare. The world at
large saw the outer tissue which was really imposing and magnificent. Not
only was he a useful, prosperous, successful public servant and man of
business, but he had more than the respect, the esteem and admiration, of
the best men of his time, as a scholar and a gentleman. Here, therefore,
was a husband to be proud of.
Pride does not make love, however. And we know well that folly and even
vice often hold a woman’s heart closer and longer than well-laundered
respectability. It would appear that Mr. Pepys might have combined all
the desired qualifications with peculiar success. Yet as to the result,
I repeat, we do not know. And it is strange that we do not. Every shade
of the husband’s varying feelings is revealed to us, but what the wife
felt he does not record, because, alas, he does not greatly care. Or,
rather, may we say that he assumed that she worshiped him? And may we not
go further and conclude that he was right in so assuming and that for
one word of real affection she was ready to lay all her whims and errors
and vagaries at his feet? Is not this attitude quite compatible with
understanding him completely?
His family she did not love, nor they her. The case is not unprecedented.
Very likely she tried her best. Very likely they tried their best. But
she was young and fashionable and quick-witted. They were old, some of
them, and all of them antique. Then they adored Sam, who was making the
family. Well, so did she. But she knew Sam and did not care to have his
Sunday attitudes and platitudes thrust upon her perpetually.
If they had only had children, how different it might all have been!
Pepys as a father would have furnished one more delight to the civilized
world. Mrs. Pepys as a mother would have come in for some bad half hours,
but she would have been more cherished and even more interesting. There
is little evidence that Pepys regretted his childless state, or that his
wife did. But we can guess how it was with her.
I have said that Pepys’s feelings towards his wife can be seen in minute
detail all through the Diary. The study of them is profoundly curious.
That he was an ardent lover before marriage is manifest from many casual
observations, notably from one of the most high-wrought and passionate
entries in the entire record. “But that which did please me beyond
anything in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes
down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did
wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly
been when in love with my wife.”
The calm daylight of matrimonial domesticity paled these raptures to a
very considerable extent. It has done so in other cases. The dull wear
of duns and debts, the friction of household management, an ill-cooked
dinner, an ill-dusted study—these things may not shatter the foundations
of love, but they do a little tarnish its fresh trim and new felicity.
Yet, though the husband is no longer made “almost sick” by the lover’s
rapturous longing, there are plenty of instances of a solid habit of
affection, growing firmer and more enduring with the passage of years.
When she is away on a visit, his heart is heavy for the absence of his
dear wife, all things seem melancholy without her, and he is filled with
satisfaction at her return. When she is ill, suddenly and violently ill,
his anxiety and distress prove to him his great love for her, though,
when the crisis is past, his incomparable candor adds, “God forgive me!
I did find that I was most desirous to take my rest than to ease her, but
there was nothing I could do to do her any good with.” When the world
goes wrong and life seems nothing but toil and trouble, he turns to her
and gets her to comfort him.
It is true that that relentless Diary has scenes as painful as they
are curious, scenes in which the estimable naval secretary and friend
of Newton and Evelyn comports himself after a fashion that would be
disgraceful in any station of life. There are outbursts of jealousy and
fits of temper, kickings of furniture and trinkets smashed in spite,
abuse, blows, and nose and ear pullings of intolerable indignity. The
fault is confessed and temporarily forgotten, “Last night I was very
angry, and do think I did give her as much cause to be angry with me.”
Then, some wretched trifle, an ill-timed visit, a shilling mis-spent, a
foolish fashion followed, sets all awry again. I do not know where in
literature to find a fiercer or more cutting scene of domestic infelicity
than that of the tearing of the old love letters. Mrs. Pepys had written
a remonstrance as to some phases of ill-treatment. “She now read it, and
it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the
retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in
English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was
vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it: when she
desired to be excused, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal took
her other bundle of papers from her.... I pulled them out one by one
and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to
do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it, but such was my passion
and trouble to see the letters of my love to her ... to be joyned with
a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been
found by anybody.”
Things like this, one would say, could never be forgotten. Yet they are.
“After winter comes summer,” says the “Imitation,” “after the night the
day, and after a storm a great calm.” Great calms came in the Pepys
family also. “I home, and to writing, and heare my boy play on the lute,
and a turne with my wife pleasantly in the garden by moonshine, my heart
being in great peace, and so home to supper and to bed.” Truly, life is
made up of delightful—and pitiful—contrasts.
The worst domestic troubles of the Pepyses were caused by the husband’s
extreme susceptibility to feminine charm. “A strange slavery that I stand
in to beauty,” he remarks, with that pleased amazement at himself which
makes him so attractive.
The detail of these infatuations—how they were mildly resisted at first,
and how they grew and developed to an extent hardly possible for such a
man in a less scandalous age, how they were indulged, and then repented,
and again indulged, and again repented—belongs to the history of Mr.
Pepys—and of human nature. Mrs. Pepys knew little of them, though she
divined much.
What does concern her is the very instructive fashion in which she
gradually gained power over her husband by his infidelities themselves.
She knew well that he loved her at heart. At any rate, she knew that he
was tied to her by bonds of habit and circumstance which a man of his
temperament could never shake off. Therefore, by the aid of jealousy
and tears and scenes she learned that she could in time mould him to
almost anything she wished. This experience begins with outsiders, with
Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Knipp. A little well-placed anger—certainly not
feigned—was found to accomplish wonders. “Which is pretty to see how my
wife is come to convention with me, that whatever I do give to anybody
else, I shall give her as much, which I am not much displeased with.”
By the time the crisis of the maid, Deb Willett, had arrived, Mrs.
Pepys had become past-mistress in the art of working on her husband’s
sensibilities. Note that I do not mean that this was a coldly deliberate
process; simply, that all the instinct of her outraged affection
concentrated itself on energetic means of overcoming this foolish and
recalcitrant male, and triumphed magnificently. Deb is wooed and forsaken
and wooed again and banished. The man’s will is bent, and bent, and bent,
till he comes right square down upon his knees: “Therefore I do, by the
grace of God, promise never to offend her more, and did this night begin
to pray to God upon my knees alone in my chamber, which God knows I
cannot yet do heartily; but I hope God will give me the grace more and
more every day to fear Him, and to be true to my poor wife.”
Even after this the symptoms recur, but milder, and in that pathetic
blank stop which ends the Diary because of failing sight, the phrase “my
amours to Deb are past,” seems to leave the wife victorious, we hope
permanently.
So, after we have known her for nine years in the closest intimacy, she
steps out from us into great night. A few months later, still a young
woman, she died; but she dies for us with the last line of her husband’s
imperishable record. In that record it may be said, in a certain sense,
that she is shown at the greatest possible disadvantage, as we may in
part realize, if we consider what a similar record would have been, kept
by herself. Yet even seen as her husband reports her, we feel that she
had, with much of a woman’s weakness, much also of a woman’s charm.
VI
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
CHRONOLOGY
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal.
Born 1626.
Married Marquis de Sévigné 1644.
Husband died 1651.
Died 1696.
[Illustration: _Madame de Sévigné_]
VI
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
Merely as a literary figure, as a writer, Madame de Sévigné amply
justifies her claim to celebrity in the greatest age of French letters.
As a mistress of style she is the worthy contemporary of Molière,
Corneille, Pascal, and La Fontaine.
Yet she wrote only letters and wrote those letters as naturally as she
talked. Just before her came Balzac and Voiture, who wrote epistles,
after the fashion of Pliny and James Howell. Now, Madame de Sévigné knows
that she writes well and takes pride in it, just as Cicero did; but like
him, she knows that letters, to be of any interest, must be sincere, must
be written for matter, not manner. Hers flow from her heart direct, as
she says; they pour forth all the passion, the curiosity, the laughter
of the moment. Often she does not even reread them before sending. The
far-fetched felicities of a laborious writer fill her with disgust. Of
the style of one such she writes, “It is insupportable to me. I had
rather be coarse than be like her. She drives me to forget delicacy,
refinement, and politeness, for fear of falling into her juggler’s
tricks. Now isn’t it sad to become just a mere peasant?”
Peasant or not, she makes the whole wide world of the French seventeenth
century live in her letters, as does Saint-Simon, in his Memoirs,
somewhat later; and in Madame de Sévigné it lives more vividly, if in
Saint-Simon more profoundly. The great affairs of princes and their
petty humanness, the splendor of war and its hideous cruelty, intrigues
of courtiers, intrigues of lovers, new books, new plays, new prayers,
fashion, folly, tears, and laughter, all mingle in her pages and help us
understand to-day and to-morrow by their deep and startling similitude
with yesterday. As “human documents” these letters have rarely been
surpassed.
But the most interesting thing in her letters is her soul, and she
lays bare every fold and fibre of it, without the slightest bravado of
self-revelation, but also without any attempt at reserve or concealment.
She defies our minutest curiosity, because she could.
Above all, she was a healthy, normal temperament, with all the elements
delightfully blended, a rich, human creature of balance and sanity. She
knew well that life is of a mingled yarn, at its best not free from
bitterness. She knew well what passion is, what grief is. This is just
what makes her so rounded and so human. But, in most things, she held a
sure rein and kept her heart in reasonable harmony with her intelligence.
As a practical manager she was admirable. Her husband, who fortunately
died early, was a spendthrift. So was her son, and her daughter not much
better. But the wife and mother knew the excellent utility of money,
watched carefully her great estate, scolded her agents, spent largely
when she could, and when she could not, went without. She accuses herself
of avarice, as the avaricious never do. But we know that she was prudent,
and forethoughtful, and discreet.
I am sure, also, that she was perfect mistress of her household. But it
is a strange thing that a woman, writing a thousand of the frankest long
letters, should say scarcely a word about her servants. Could you imitate
her, madam? And do you not agree with me that it is an indication of
strong sense and native tact?
Let us trace further the charming many-sidedness of this beautifully
rounded character. She was a Parisian, a child of brick and mortar, her
ears well tuned to the hubbub of city streets, yet she loved the country,
not for hasty week-ends of dress and gossip, but for its real quiet and
solitude. She felt its melancholy. “In these woods reveries sometimes
fall upon me so black that I come out of them as if I had had a touch of
fever.” And when she rambles under the shade of melancholy boughs, with
Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, whose company one would not
have supposed exhilarating, their conversations are “so dismal that you
would think there was nothing else to do but bury us.” Yet the quick,
sweet reaction of her sunny temper shows in the very next sentence.
“Madame de La Fayette’s garden is the loveliest thing in the world. It is
all flowers, all sweetness.”
She herself assures her friends that they need not fear that country
solitude will bore her and make her morbid. “Except for pangs of
heart, against which I am too weak, there is nothing to pity me for.
I am naturally happy and get on with everything and am amused with
everything.” So, if the song of a nightingale could fill her eyes with
tears, in another instant, like the merry Phædria, she could “laugh at
shaking of the leaves light.” It is she who invented that exquisite
spring phrase, “the singing woods,” she who calls herself “lonely as a
violet, easy to be hid,” she who knows the love of mute insensate things,
“I understand better than any one in the world the sort of attachment one
has for inanimate objects.” How fresh and charming is the picture of her
wading in the morning dew up to her knees to take an eager survey of her
open-air possessions.
With that other joy of solitude, books, she is as engaging and as frank
as with the natural world. It would be absurd to think of her as a
pedant, or a blue-stocking. Any call of the normal feminine pursuits of
life found her quickly and readily responsive, her best books cast into a
corner, forgotten. Yet she did love them. “When I step into this library,
I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” She can pass long hours
wholly absorbed in new authors, or old ones. Her comments on the great
French literature that was springing up about her are always fresh,
shrewd, and suggestive. Of Racine’s religious plays she says, “Racine has
outdone himself; he loves God as he loved his mistresses; he enters into
sacred things as he did into profane.” La Fontaine she prized as one born
under the same planet. He was gay like her, tender like her, loved the
birds and flowers like her, and like her, kept his tears in the closest
contact with his laughter. I feel a certain yearning in the words with
which she socially condemns the wayward poet. “You can only thank God for
such a man and pray to have nothing to do with him.”
But novels, novels! Assuredly no one ever loved them more than Madame
de Sévigné, those interminable ten-volume romances of chivalry and
sentiment which she pored over, as later generations pored over
Richardson, or Scott, or Dumas, or Victor Hugo. No one has ever expressed
more vivaciously than she the fascination we feel in these books, even
when our cooler judgment laughs at them: “The style of La Calprenède
is wretched in a thousand places: the swelling romantic phrases, the
ill-assorted words, I feel them all. I admit that such language is
detestable, and all the time the book holds me like glue. The beauty of
the sentiments, the violence of the passions, the great scale of the
incidents, and the miraculous success of the hero’s redoubtable sword—it
sweeps me away as if I were a girl again.”
Yet though she could make such rich and ample use of the resources of
nature and books in solitude, she was the last person in the world to
shrink from human society. As a friend she was exquisite. She practised
friendship widely, yet discreetly, as one of the most delicious arts of
life. “I am nice in my friendships and it is a business in which I am
sufficiently expert.” She recognized those whom she felt to be akin to
her, even when she knew them but by hearsay, and she mourns over the
death of a friend’s friend because she loved her, though, she says, “only
by reverberation.”
She had friends of both sexes and all kinds. She was devoted alike
to the magnificent Fouquet, the gay, volatile, and malicious Bussy,
the brilliant, ardent Retz, the cynical La Rochefoucauld, the wise
and quiet scholar, Corbinelli. It is difficult to say whether she
loved most the grave, thoughtful, sentimental Madame de La Fayette, or
Madame de Coulanges with whom she could play the lightest, daintiest
sort of epistolary battledore and shuttlecock. So souls were honest
and right-minded and of stuff to knit loyally with hers, they were all
acceptable to her.
For she was beautifully, nobly, femininely loyal in all these different
friendships. Perhaps the best known of her letters are those in which
she relates the trial of Fouquet on charges of maladministration in his
great financial office. With what passionate eagerness does she narrate
every detail from day to day, the judges’ malevolence (as she views it),
the varying testimony, the gradual approach of doom, and above all, the
lofty, admirable bearing of the accused! With what indignant grief does
she resent and resist—in spirit—the conviction and the punishment. And
in lesser troubles she has the same firm fidelity. Contagious illness,
what is that in a matter of friendship? “I feel about infections as you
do about precipices, there are people with whom I have no fear of them.”
Disagreements, controversies, quarrels?—
“To be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”—
“In our family,” she says, of one such, “we do not lose affection. The
bonds may stretch, but they never break.” And again, when she is hurt
by coldness and indifference, she protests, “Ah, how easy it really is
to live with me! A little gentleness, a little social impulse, a little
confidence, even superficial, will lead me such a long way. I do believe
that no one is more responsive than I in the daily intercourse of life.”