that she was love-blinded or without keen insight into folly and
weakness. She was a careful observer of the facts of human nature, and
could say with Pepys, whom she resembles in some points, not in others,
“I confess that I am in all things curious.” Indeed, she herself remarks
of one who had died in a rather unusual manner, “I perfectly understand
your desire to see her. I should like to have been there myself. I love
everything that is out of the common.” And a sympathetic acquaintance
writes, after Madame de Sévigné’s own death: “You appear to have the
taste of your late friend, who yearned for details and baptized them as
‘the style of friendship.’”
One who looked so closely into souls, and especially one who was a near
friend of La Rochefoucauld, could not escape some harsh conclusions,
could not avoid seeing that all is not love that speaks kindly, nor all
honor that pranks itself in stately phrase. Madame de Sévigné had her
moments when she lost faith in humanity, moments of despair, moments of
still more melancholy mocking. When she is most touched with the spirit
of her cynical associate, she writes, “We like so much to hear people
talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse
us.” And again, “The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out
of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.” One day,
when she was especially out of sorts, she let her quick wit amuse itself
imagining what it would be to take the roof off of too many households
that she knew and see inside the hate, the jealousy, the bickering, the
pettiness that are veiled so carefully under the decorous fashions of the
world.
Nevertheless, it would be wholly unjust to class her with La
Rochefoucauld or with any one who was a cynic by permanent habit of
thought. She observed men and women because she loved them. She knew
that their faults were her faults and that what was good in her was to
be found in them also. In no one is more obvious and unfailing the large
spirit of tolerance and charity so exquisitely expressed by old Fagon,
physician to King Louis the Fourteenth, “_Il faut beaucoup pardonner
à la nature_.” It is true that her native spirit of merriment cannot
resist a good joke, however it comes. “Friendship,” she says, “bids us
be indignant with those who speak against our friends; but it does not
forbid us to be amused when they speak wittily.” Yet she had always and
everywhere that deepest and most essential element of human kindness,
the faculty of putting herself in another’s place, and her sense of the
laughable in trivial misfortunes was not so keen as her ready and active
sympathy in great.
Therefore she was popular and widely beloved and largely sought after.
In her youth and even in her later maturity she was beautiful. Precisely
because her beauty was less of the features than of the expression, it
lasted longer than mere pink cheeks and delicate contours. Her soul
laughed in her eyes and her merry and fortunate thoughts spoke as much in
her gestures and the carriage of her body as in the quick grace of her
Parisian tongue. And though no human being was less vain, she no doubt
knew her charm, and prized it, and cultivated it in all due and proper
ways. “There is nothing so lovely as to be beautiful. Beauty is a gift of
God and we should cherish it as such.”
Delicious is the word her friends most often use of her. “Your letters
are delicious and so are you,” writes one of them. “She was delicious to
live with,” said another. And her son-in-law, with whom she had sharp
spats at times, yet declared that “delicious” was the true name for her
society.
The fact is, she loved to be with men and women, and therefore they
loved to be with her. Being flesh and blood, she sometimes tired of
the invitations and festivities that were thrust upon her. There were
receptions and entertainments without end, court functions and private
functions. “I wish with all my soul I were out of here where they
honor me too much. I am hungry for privation and silence.” And again,
when the courtesies rained as thickly as blossoms in May, and tired
nerves rebelled against late eating sauced with interminable chatter,
“When, when can I die of hunger and keep still?” Also, being a creature
of petulant wit, she could not fail occasionally to find average
humanity—that is, you and me—somewhat tedious.
Yet she makes the best, even of such tediousness, in her kindly, human
way, and turns it into gentle pleasantry. After all, she argues, it is
much better to mix with bad company than good. Why? Because when the
bad leaves you, you are not a bit sorry. But parting with those whose
society is delightful leaves you utterly at a loss how to resume the
common life of every day. Does not this last touch of hers recall many
a poignant minute of your own? This is what makes Madame de Sévigné
so charming, that in giving perfect expression to every shade of her
feeling she is finding immortal utterance for your feelings and for
mine. “Sometimes I am seized with the fancy to cry at a great ball, and
sometimes I give way to my fancy, without any one’s ever knowing it.”
Crying or laughing, she went to balls and banquets, and enjoyed them, and
described them with the golden glow of her decorative imagination. “I
went to the marriage of Mademoiselle de Louvois. What shall I say about
it? Magnificence, gorgeousness, all France, garments loaded and slashed
with gold, jewels, a blaze of fires and flowers, a jam of coaches,
cries in the street, torches flaring, poor folk thrust back and run
over; in short, the usual whirlwind of nothing, questions not answered,
compliments not meant, civilities addressed to no one in particular,
everybody’s feet tangled up in everybody’s train.” And she went home
weary and resolved not to go again. And she went again—like all of us.
It will naturally be asked whether, in an age of too courtly morals, when
exact virtue was not always insisted upon, perhaps not even expected,
this gay young widow lived within the limits of propriety. It can only
be said that the keenest scandal-mongers of the time—and none were ever
keener—find no fault with her in this respect. She had passionate lovers
of all sorts, princes, generals, statesmen, poets. She laughed with
them all, picked the fine flower of their adoration, and went on her way
untouched, so far as it appears. What the passions were she knew well, as
is shown clearly enough in the wonderful sentence in which she compares
them to vipers, which may be bruised and crushed and torn and trampled,
and still they move; you may tear their hearts out, and still they move.
But for her own, she flourished in spite of them, not perhaps with white
innocence, but with royal self-possession.
And this self-possession was not wholly the outcome of coldness, nor
even of balanced sanity. A large amount of spiritual elevation entered
into it, a religious fervor which, if not always haunting, is rarely far
away. Madame de Sévigné took nice and constant counsel for the welfare
of her soul. With all her ample sense of the charm and solace of this
world, she was very much alive to the awful immanence of another. Time
flies, she says, “and I see it fly with horror, bringing me hideous
old age, disease, and death.” Again, “I find death so terrible, that I
hate life more because it brings me to it than because of the thorns
that strew the path.” She assuages the horror with devout practice. On
suitable occasions she resolves to withdraw from the world, pray and
fast much, and “practice boredom for the love of God.” She is a faithful
and constant reader of the fathers and the moralists. She listens to the
great sermons of Bossuet and Bordaloue, and profits, though her shrewd
wit is sometimes critical. Above all, she strives for a humble, earnest
attitude of submission to the will of God everywhere and always. Without
this, she thinks, life would be unbearable. The sense of His presence and
of His guidance, the solution of sin and suffering by His all-controlling
and all-loving will are never far from her. At moments she even rises to
something of the mystic’s joy.
Yet she was no mystic, but in this aspect of life also a sane and normal
woman, and it is delicious, because so human, to see how the pressure of
this world returns upon her and crowds out even God. How charming is her
naïve report of the verdict of a suggested confessor. “I have seen the
Abbé de la Vergne; we talked about my soul; he says that unless he can
lock me up, not stir a step from me, take me to and from church himself,
and neither let me read, speak, nor hear a single thing, he will have
nothing to do with me whatever.” The saints, the saints! She envies them,
of course. But they are so dowdy. The sinners are so much more agreeable.
And the ways of this world are pleasant, pleasant. Dark thoughts, dark
hours will intrude, will overcome us like a summer cloud, and then we get
out Pascal or Nicole and hurry to the altar. But who can live on this
level long? Yes, she is mean and low and base, she says. When she sees
people too happy it fills her with despair, which is not the fashion of a
beautiful soul. She is not a beautiful soul, calls herself a soul of mud.
How can any prayer, or any religion, or any God save her?
She has her moments, also, not of defiance, but of question whether it
is worth while to make one’s self unhappy. “You must love my weaknesses,
my faults,” she says. “For my part I put up with them well enough.”
After all, if she is lukewarm, and easy-going, and forgetful, so are
others, millions of others. Why should she suffer for it more than they?
We practice salvation with the saints, she says, and damnation with the
children of this world. “We are not the devil’s,” she says, “because we
fear God and because at bottom we have a touch of religion. We are not
God’s, either, because His law is hard and we do not wish to do ourselves
a damage. This is the state of the lukewarm, and the great number of them
does not disturb me. I enter perfectly into their reasons. At the same
time God hates them and they ought to escape from their condition; but
this is precisely the difficulty.”
No one has portrayed more exquisitely than she the pitiful but human
lightness of common souls in face of these enormous questions. “My
saintly friend sometimes finds me as reasonable and serious as she would
have me. And then, a whiff of spring air, a ray of sunshine, sweeps away
all the reflections of the twilight gloom.” And it is she who framed the
advice, dangerous or precious according to the heart it falls on. “_Il
faut glisser sur les pensées et ne pas les approfondir._” It is sometimes
best to slip over thoughts and not go to the bottom of them.
So we have seen Madame de Sévigné to be in every respect a sweetly
rounded nature, one of the most so, one of the most sane, normal, human
women that have left the record of their souls for the careful study of
posterity. Well, in this pure and perfect crystal of balanced common
sense and judgment there was one most curious and interesting flaw, the
lady’s love for her daughter. Love for her daughter? you repeat. And is
not that the most sane and normal of all possible characteristics in a
woman?
It ought to be. But in Madame de Sévigné it certainly was not. She had
two children, a daughter and a son. The son much resembled her, with some
of her good qualities exaggerated into faults. He was gay and kindly;
but he was light-headed and careless. Such as he was, his mother loved
him with normal affection. She saw his weakness and tried to correct
it. But she enjoyed his society, retained his confidence, and could be
as merry with him as a summer’s day, witness her inimitable account of
his relating to her his comic parting from Ninon de l’Enclos. “He said
the maddest things in the world and so did I. It was a scene worthy of
Molière.” Then, when he keeps bad company, behaves indiscreetly, and is
generally reprehensible, she is aware of it at once and comments in no
uncertain terms. “I wish you could see how little merit or beauty it
takes to charm my son. His taste is beneath contempt.”
But the daughter, the daughter, Madame de Grignan, she is a paragon, a
miracle of nature, above admiration, and without defect. The bulk of
Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence is written to her, and what is much
worse, it is written about her, page after page of advice, of anxiety,
of adoration, until even dear lovers of the mother, like Fitzgerald,
feel that, in her own vivid phrase, they have had “an indigestion of
Grignans.”
But this feeling of boredom vanishes as soon as you see that you are
confronted with a psychological problem. For Madame de Sévigné’s
attitude, her language, are not that of a normal, not even of a
passionately affectionate, mother. Her feeling in this case is an
obsession, a real mania, like a girl’s or a grown woman’s genuine love
affair. She cannot be happy one moment away from the object of her
devotion. She thinks of her daily, nightly, dreams of her, in everything
is anxious to please her or sick to think she has not pleased her. She
seeks solitude because there she can dream more freely of this beloved
daughter of hers. And the chief charm of society is that some one may
inquire about Madame de Grignan’s health and venture a compliment which
the eager listener can set down and pass on. Like a lover of twenty, she
suggests that she and her beloved are looking at the moon at the same
time. “You alone,” she writes, in the ardor of her passion, “can make
the joy or the sorrow of my life. I know nothing but you, and beyond
you everything is nothing to me.” Over and over again she repeats that
she wishes she loved God as she loves this bit of herself, this thing
of mortal, but exquisite fragility. Now this is not quite the love of a
common sane and normal mother, is it?
And the daughter, did she deserve it? Some think not. She was beautiful.
And she was a scholar, a pupil of Descartes, a reader of philosophies and
critic of literature, who looked down a little on her mother’s naïve and
extremely personal judgments. She was a wit, also,—wrote what she thought
fine letters. They seem to us a little stilted, as the one she sent to
Moulceau after her mother’s death. And some say she was haughty, without
her mother’s broad sympathy, and even high-tempered and quarrelsome.
But all these flaws were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed,
pretty to observe how, being the keenest sighted of women, she
occasionally sees things that she will not see. Thus, she writes of
her daughter’s boasted style, “It is perfect. All you have to do is to
keep it as it is and not try to improve it.” Or of her attitude towards
herself. “Somebody said the other day that, with all the tender affection
you have for me, you don’t get as much out of my society as you might,
that you do not appreciate what I am worth, even as regards you.”
For the most part, however, it is a sweet, warm tempest of praise, an
indigestion of praise, touchingly at variance with the chilly judgment
of those who looked on. Madame de Grignan has not only the choicest of
intellects, but the tenderest of hearts. She has a stoical, old Roman
virtue which the vulgar may mistake for indifference; but underneath
she is so surprisingly sensitive that every precaution is necessary to
guard her too delicate nerves from intolerable shock. She thinks loftily,
she speaks wittily, and her letters are the quintessence of everything
finished and exquisite, so different from the hasty and careless scrawls
of this scribbling mother, though, to be sure, good judges have found
ours, also, not unworthy of commendation. And some, who do not believe
that a love that takes us out of ourselves is the best worth having
of all things in this loveless world, may think such a degree of
self-deception puerile. It is a little unusual, at any rate.
Such a love, in a universe of cross accidents and unforeseen
contingencies, is always shot through and through with misery. This
woman, so poised and tempered in all that concerned herself and the
common course of life, dwelt in a cloud of anxiety for what concerned the
welfare of her precious daughter. It was worry, worry from morning till
night. In far Provence, where the treasure and her husband and children
lived, what disasters might not occur, while the sun was shining and
wit sparkling in jovial Paris? With the lovely inconsistency of love,
the mother declares at one moment that her passion is all joy and the
delight of it far, far outweighs the care and trouble, at the next that
life is only wretchedness for those who have a great devotion. “The mind
should be at peace,” she says; “but the heart debauches it perpetually.
Mine is filled full with my daughter.” She frets over great things and
little, Madame de Grignan’s children, Madame de Grignan’s debts, Madame
de Grignan’s lawsuits, above all over Madame de Grignan’s health. The
daughter was, apparently, one of those persons who are never ill and
never well. And the doting mother, at five hundred miles distance, is
always suggesting drugs, draughts, plasters, poultices, doctors, doctor’s
devices, and devices of the devil.
Also, in the rare intervals when they were together, she suggested to the
same effect, and in consequence such sojourns were not happy. I know few
things more tragic than this vast affection, longing, longing to be with
its object, and when they did meet, thwarted, hampered, blighted by that
fatal inadequacy of human contact which makes love’s fine fruition a joy
not of this transitory world. We have, of course, little record of things
actually done or said while the lover and the beloved were together. But
we have the piteous cry of the bereaved one when they had felt themselves
compelled to part. “Was it a crime for me to be anxious about your
health? I saw you perishing before my eyes, and I was not permitted to
shed a tear. I was killing you, they said, I was murdering you. I must
keep still, if I suffocated. I never knew a more ingenious and cruel
torment.” Or again, “In God’s name, child, let us try another visit to
reëstablish our reputation. We must be more reasonable, at least you
must, and not give them occasion to say, ‘You simply kill one another.’”
With what a strangling clutch does she tear at her heart, in the effort
to make those adjustments of human passion which can never be perfectly
made by flesh and blood. “You speak like one who is even further from me
than I thought, who has wholly forgotten me, who no longer understands
the measure of my attachment, nor the tenderness of my heart, who knows
no longer the devotion I have for her, nor that natural weakness and
bent to tears which have been an object of mocking to your philosophic
firmness.”
But it makes no difference. In spite of presence, or absence, or
indifference, the old wound keeps still and always fresh and bleeding.
Still, still the longing heart cries out for what it needs, even if it
can never obtain it. “How is it that my whole life turns on one sole
thought and everything else appears to me to be nothing?” Only God can
comfort her. “Everything must be given up for God, and I will do it, and
will only wonder at His ways, who, when all things seem as if they should
be well with us, opens great gulfs which swallow the whole good of life,
a separation which wounds my heart every hour of the day and far more
hours of the night than sense or reason would.”
Thus, you see, this sweet and noble lady, whose robust strength it seems
as if we might all envy, also carried her burden of spiritual grief.
Assuredly she is the more charming for it. As she herself said: “In
the midst of all my moralizing, I keep a good share of the frailty of
humanity.” Thank God, she did!
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
CHRONOLOGY
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond.
Born 1697.
Married Marquis du Deffand August 2, 1718.
Friendship with Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse 1754-1764.
Met Horace Walpole 1765.
Died October 24, 1780.
[Illustration: _Madame du Deffand_]
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
We know her intimately through her multitude of letters, but we know her
only as a blind, infirm old woman, dependent on the kindness of others
for amusement, if not for support, and ready to depart at any time from
the well-worn and tedious spectacle of flavorless existence, if it had
not been for her utter uncertainty as to the world that lay beyond.
She had been very young, however, very young and very gay, as traditions
tell us. Born into the most dissipated period of French social life, the
regency of the first half of the eighteenth century, she was conspicuous
for her charm and wit as well as for the irregularity of her conduct. She
is said to have been loved by the regent himself. In any case, she was
most intimate with him and with his favorites, and turned that intimacy
to advantage by securing a pension which was of solid value to her in
later life. She fascinated others besides the wicked. The great preacher,
Massillon, was summoned by her friends to convert her in early youth.
He talked with her very freely, but would make no comment except that
she was charming, and when asked to prescribe for her case would suggest
nothing but a five-cent catechism.
She was married for convenience, but most inconveniently to her and her
husband both. Either he was too fast for her, or too slow, at any rate
he was too dull. She left him, and returned to him, and left him again,
and was adrift in the wide world.
It is important to note that with Madame du Deffand, as with some other
French women, extreme freedom of living is quite compatible not only with
great refinement of taste, but with a singular delicacy and sensitiveness
of moral perception. She has an occasional coarseness of speech belonging
to her age, but few people have been more alive to fine shades of
affection, of devotion, of spiritual tact.
Nevertheless, her early life must be remembered, if we would understand
her later. She herself says, “Oh, I should not want to be young again on
condition of being brought up as I was, living with the people I lived
with, and having the sort of mind and character I have.” Dissipation,
even less innocent than hers, disorders life, strips it of illusion,
takes away utterly and forever the charm of simple things.
With Madame du Deffand, at any rate, there was no illusion left, and in
her gray old age the charm of simple things was gone and of complex also.
If she could have detailed her chill philosophy to Rosalind, that child
of dawn would have cried out even more than to the curious Jacques, “I
had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.”
To this disillusioned lady the men and women of the age she lived in were
either cynics or pedants, they were bold without force and licentious
without merriment, they had little talent and a vast deal of presumption.
But as far as her thought and her reading and her knowledge went, the
men and women of other times were little better. Most were either fools
or knaves and the few who were not were so painfully conscious of it that
living with them was more of a burden than with the others. She has words
more bitterly acrid than even La Rochefoucauld’s to designate the folly
and emptiness and wickedness of life. “I do not know why Diogenes went
looking for a man: nothing could happen to him worse than finding one.”
And she sums it up in one terrible sentence. “For my part, I confess that
I have but one fixed thought, one feeling, one misfortune, one regret,
that ever I was born.”
As a general thing, however, her complaint is less violent than this
and what impresses her in life is not so much its actual evil and
misery as its intolerable ennui. I must ask the reader’s pardon for
using the French word, which is, perhaps, by this time almost English.
No equivalent exactly fits it. “Melancholy” suggests somewhat more of
abstract reflection and “boredom” more of irritation with external
circumstances. Both these are sometimes applicable, but one cannot get
along without “ennui” in discussing Madame du Deffand.