hours run by, immense, interminable, with nothing to fill them, nothing
that inspires her, nothing that amuses her, nothing that distracts her
even. The weary waste of time to come can be judged only by the barren
memory of time past and that holds out neither encouragement nor hope.
To be sure, she readily recognizes that the root of the trouble may
be within. A certain lady fails to please her, “but she shared this
misfortune with many others, for everything seems insupportable to me.
This may very well be because I am insupportable myself.” Whatever the
cause, the malady is always present and without cure. “I end because I am
sad with no reason for sadness except that I exist.”
It might be supposed that, drifting always in such a dead fog of ennui,
she might bore her correspondents, much more her readers among posterity.
She does often. She would very much oftener, if she were not after all a
Frenchwoman of the wittiest age of French social life, with the sparkle
of French vivacity at the end of her pen. Feeble as she was, world-weary
as she was, perhaps even in close connection with these conditions, she
had an indomitable nervous energy, which responded in the most surprising
way to social or spiritual stimulus. Horace Walpole speaks with admirable
justice of her “Herculean weakness.” She found life dull. Yet out of the
dulness she could weave the tissue of a correspondence with Voltaire
in which the balance of brilliancy is not always on one side. Could we
say more? She goes right to the fact in her letters, speaks vigorously,
without tautology, or circumlocution. “I care nothing for perfection
of style or even for finished politeness. I detest phrases and energy
delights me.” With what verve and petulance does she express the emotion
of the moment, grave or gay. “Quick, quick, quick, let me tell you about
the supper of yesterday which worried me so for fear I should be dull, or
crabbed, or embarrassed. Nothing of the sort. I never remember in all my
life being younger, or gayer, or merrier.”
She had the sheer salt of French wit, too, could tell a story inimitably,
or strike off a stinging epigram. It was she who created the well-known
phrase in regard to St. Denis’s long perambulation with his head off: “It
is the first step that costs”; she who said—untranslatably—of the verses
that showered on Voltaire’s grave, that the great author had become “_la
pâture des vers_”; she who remarked of one of her own friends that her
wit was like a fine instrument always a-tuning and never played on. Above
all, she could make inexhaustible mockery of her besetting evil. “Write
disagreeably, if you like,” she urges. “As the man said of the rack, it
will help me to pass an hour or two, at any rate.” And again, “I hear
nothings, I speak nothings, I take interest in nothing, and from nothing
to nothing I travel gently down the dull way which leads to becoming
nothing.”
Thus the roses strewn over the abyss make it only deeper and blacker and
more horrible. Others may take pleasure in her vivacity, may laugh at her
stories and applaud her wit. She takes no pleasure and finds the applause
and laughter utterly hollow. Man delights her not nor woman either. And
still those interminable hours drag along, unfilled and unfillable as the
sieves of the daughters of Danäus.
To be sure, when all these glittering analyses of nothing were written,
she was old, and blind, and sleepless, three things that are apt to dull
the quickest spirits. Before she was far past middle life her eyesight
failed her and she became the frail, exquisite, touching figure that
we see in her best-known portrait, sitting in a great straw-canopied
chair, her _tonneau_, she called it, with fine, earnest, sensitive
features, stretching out her hands in the groping gesture pathetically
characteristic of her affliction. And loss of sight to eyes so keen must
leave an appalling emptiness.
Also she was tormented by insomnia, to long, blind, empty days added
solitary nights, when the tossing of weary limbs doubles the tossing of
weary spirits. “One goes over and over in one’s mind everything that
worries and distresses one; I have a gnawing worm which sleeps no more
than I do; I reproach myself alone with all my troubles and it seems
clear that I have brought them all upon myself.” At two A.M. such things
do have a most intolerable clarity.
With afflictions like these, at seventy years old, it is perhaps not
wonderful that a lone woman should feel she had had enough of life.
Unfortunately Madame du Deffand’s weariness began when she was young
and could see—too well. According to Mademoiselle Aïssé, after she and
her husband had parted, she asked him to come back to her, desiring to
reëstablish her position in the world. For six weeks things hobbled
along. Then she became bored till she could endure it no further, and she
made her state of mind so evident, not by ill-temper, but by all signs of
depression, that the husband departed, this time for good and all. But
who can depict her experiences better than herself? “I remember thinking
in my youth that no one was happy but madmen, drunkards, and lovers.” And
elsewhere she flings the facts at us like a glass of cold water in the
face. “I was born melancholy. My gayety comes only by fits and they are
growing rare enough.”
Those things which distract and divert most men and women, those great
passions and little pleasures which to some of us seem to fill every
cranny of life with business and delight, to her meant simply nothing. If
we review them in their larger categories, we shall see her lay her cold,
light finger on them and shrivel them up. It is not deliberate on her
part. She would be glad to enjoy as others do. But she has not the power.
“It is not my purpose to refuse happiness from anything. I leave open
every door that seems to lead to pleasure; and if I could, I would bar
those that let in sorrow and regret. But destiny or fortune has bereft me
of the keys that open and close the mansion of my soul.”
Nature, the calmest, the most soothing of spiritual consolations? She
has no place for it. As a scientific, intellectual pursuit, she blasts
it with her savage, untranslatable epigram on Buffon: _“Il ne s’occupe
que des bêtes; il faut l’être un peu soi-même pour se dévouer à une
telle occupation._” As for the emotional, imaginative aspects of the
natural world, she grudgingly confesses that she might enjoy them, if
circumstances were favorable: “I am not insensible to natural and rural
beauties, but one’s soul must be in a very gentle and peaceful mood to
get much pleasure from them.” Her friend, Horace Walpole, can hardly be
regarded as an ardent nature lover, he who wrote of general birdsong,
“It is very disagreeable that the nightingales should sing but half a
dozen songs, and the other beasts squall for two months together.” Yet to
Madame du Deffand it seemed that even Walpole’s delight in country life
was quite incomprehensible. “I cannot form any idea of the pleasures you
taste in solitude and of the charm you find in inanimate objects.”
But the more human interests did not please her any better. Thought,
learning, the long effort to understand the secret of life and the
springs of human action? Will this dissipate ennui? Not hers. It only
deadens it.
Politics? The movement of the world, wars, battles and sieges, deaths of
illustrious princes and of unknown thousands? They move not her. High and
mighty potencies seem to her perfectly trivial. “Let me whisper in your
ear that I make precious little account of kings; their protestations,
their retractations, their recriminations, their contradictions, I find
them of no more moment than the mixing of a breakfast for my cat.” But
if you think that at the other extreme she had any more sympathy with
the people, just then at the point of striving so mightily, you are
altogether mistaken. “From the Agrarian Law down to your monument, your
lanterns, and your black flag, the people, with its joy, its anger, its
applause, and its curses, is thoroughly odious to me.”
Then there is art, beauty of human creation, to some a resource so great
that it overcomes not only tedium but even misery and acute suffering.
To this lady with the dead heart beauty makes no appeal whatever. Her
blindness of course cut her off from beauty of the eye to which she
seldom if ever refers. But the ears of the blind are supposed to be
doubly keen and indeed hers were so. Yet to the nerves behind the ears
music was mainly a vexation. In one instance she does, indeed, find the
harp delightful. This was her idea of delight: “The thought that one gets
hold of nothing, that everything slips away and fails us, that one is
alone in the universe and fears to go out of it: this is what occupied me
during the music.” Do you wonder that she elsewhere writes, “To me music
is a noise more importunate than agreeable.”
With literature the case is little better. Madame du Deffand knew well
most of the French writers of her day and had little esteem for them
or their works. Of earlier authors she thought more, but not much. La
Fontaine occasionally made her smile. Corneille’s heroics enraptured
her—for a moment. A minor comedy gives her extreme pleasure, in fact
she weeps during the whole third act, and “they were not tears of
bitter anguish, but tears of tender emotion.” Her usual state of mind
is, however, better expressed in another passage: “Everything I read
bores me; history, because I am totally incurious; essays, because they
are half platitude and half affected originality; novels, because the
love-making seems sentimental and the study of passion makes me unhappy.”
For a soul thus blasted by a dry wind from the barren places of this
world it would seem as if the thought of another might offer irresistible
attraction. It did, and Madame du Deffand is fascinating on the subject.
She would like, oh, she would like to practice religion with fervor. She
invites a confessor to dine, talks with him, and is quite encouraged. Why
should not grace work a miracle for her as well as for others? She reads
Saint François de Sales and finds a tender and winning spirit under his
“mystical nonsense.” She regrets that he is dead. “He would have bored
me considerably, but I should have loved him.” And in her long hours of
insomnia she reflects upon the delightful possibility of believing and
builds castles in Spain, or in heaven. “I should read sermons instead of
novels, the Bible instead of fables, the Lives of the Saints instead of
history, and I should be less bored, or no more, than with what I read
now ... at least I should have an object to which I could offer all my
sorrows and make the sacrifice of all my desires.”
But it is utterly futile, babble of children, dreams of white nuns bereft
of all converse with the heart of man. She was the pupil of Voltaire,
the mistress of the Regent, the friend of D’Alembert and Helvétius. To
be the friend of these celebrities and of God also would have been too
much. Therefore she believed in nothing whatever. Faith, she says, is a
devout belief in what one does not understand. We must leave it to those
who have it. I have it not. And what belief could overcome the colossal
wretchedness of having been born? “Everything that exists is wretched, an
angel, an oyster, perhaps even a grain of sand; nothingness, nothingness,
what better can we have to pray for?” She did not originate, but she
would gladly have accepted the bitter definition of life as “a nightmare
between two nothings.”
Thus, you see, she missed, as so many do, the one great privilege of
universal scepticism: universal hope. There are thousands who, like her,
proclaim that they have no belief in anything, yet, like her, appear to
have a most fervent belief in the devil and all his works.
It was natural that one isolated by blindness and unable to get pleasure
from the resources of her own soul should turn to society, should try
to draw life from constant contact with others who had more of it than
she. In none was this restless desire ever more intense than in Madame
du Deffand. She seeks people always, goes among them when she can, uses
every effort to make them come to her. Her chief dread of poverty is that
she may lose the means of attracting company. Even dull company seems to
her more tolerable than her own thoughts. And as I have already pointed
out, when she got among people, they enjoyed and admired her. She was
quick, vivacious, brilliant, gave no sign of being bored, if she was so.
Some of her words even make one suspect that she exaggerated her troubles
and found more in life to please her than she would willingly confess.
Hear what she says of a long projected and finally realized visit. “I
have been here five weeks and I can say, with entire truth, that I have
not been bored one single minute, have not had the smallest mishap or
annoyance.” Surely the most contented of us can seldom say as much.
But the general tone of her social experience is much better manifested
in one long passage, as remarkable for style as for self-revelation. “Men
and women alike seemed to me machines on springs, which went, came,
spoke, laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling.
Everybody played a part from habit merely. One woman shook with laughter,
another sneered at everything, another gabbled about everything. The
men’s performance was no better. And I myself was swallowed up in the
blackest of black thoughts. I reflected that I had passed my life in
illusions; that I had dug for myself all the pits I had fallen into;
that all my judgments had been false and rash, always too hasty; that I
had never known any one perfectly; that I had never been known by any
one either, and perhaps I did not know myself. One seeks everywhere for
something to lean on. One is charmed with the hope of having found it: it
turns out to be a dream which harsh facts scatter with a rude awakening.”
By this time it must be very clear that the lady’s worst tormentor was
herself. If she could have followed the wholesome advice of her exquisite
friend, Madame de Choiseul, she would have seen life differently. “Eat
little at night, open your windows, drive out often, and look for the
good in things and people.... You will no longer be sad, or bored, or
ill.” It was quite in vain. In such maladies the patient must minister
to himself, and this poor patient not only submitted to the black ennui
of to-day but doubled it, in fact gave it its chief significance, by
dreading the longer, blacker hours of many to-morrows.
So you set her down as a cold, barren, dead old woman, and think you have
heard enough of her. But there is more and of singular interest. She
had noble and beautiful and winning qualities. For one thing, she was
frank, straightforward, and sincere. Indeed, it was the excess of these
fine traits that caused her troubles. She would have no illusion, no
deception, no sham, nothing but the truth. It was the exaggerated fear of
accepting pleasant falsehoods which led her to believe that necessarily
everything pleasant must be a falsehood. But her honesty draws you to
her, even while her misery repels.
Then, curiously enough, though the case is not unprecedented, her very
pessimism and failure to find any good in the world resulted from
an inherent idealism, from too high expectations of men and things.
Her imagination was so keen that it discounted every pleasure before
it came, with resultant disappointment. Her natural instinct was to
trust, often unwisely. Then, when she was deceived, she mistrusted and
suspected—unwisely also. Primarily she was a dreamer, a hoper, as she
herself phrases it in her vivid language, “a listen-if-it rains, a
visionary, who watches the clouds and sees lovely things there that fade
even as one beholds them.” And vast dreams dispelled left a darker and a
sadder emptiness.
So with people. She demanded perfection, and would take nothing less.
Men and women thus tempered go starved and discontented in this far
from perfect world. “I pass in review everybody I know and everybody I
have known; I do not see one of them without a fault, and I find myself
worse than any of them.” But, good heavens, what son or daughter of
Adam can endure such a test as that? Yet some are extreme good company,
nevertheless.
In other words, her bitter judgments were founded on an over-exacting
standard and did not exclude pity or tenderness. Though too impatient to
be of great help to others and too critical to be tolerant towards them,
she was capable of keen and passionate sympathy, and she held kindness to
be a great and most estimable virtue. With the candor which is one of her
chief charms she confesses, “I renew every day the resolution to be kind
and loving myself. How much progress I make I do not know.”
And following this clue, if we probe still deeper, we come across a
curious fact in Madame du Deffand’s temperament, which seems to explain
many things. Under all her misery, all her discontent, all her boredom,
she was aching for love. Perhaps she was incapable of it. Perhaps her
keen vision, and her deep mistrust, and her lofty demands on human
nature made it impossible for her to give or to receive the passionate
affection which might have filled her life. But after careful study it is
impossible to resist the conclusion that she more than most women felt
the deep need of all women, that the right home, and the right husband,
and the right children might have given her the satisfaction she could
not get from books, or thought, or art, or nature.
She herself recognized this, with lucidity as well as pathos. She
repeats often that she loves nothing, less often that some inborn
flaw, some unconquerable twist or imperfection, makes her incapable of
loving anything. But far more often still does she cry out for love
and tenderness. “Friendship is almost a mania with me; I was born for
nothing else.” “I love nothing and that is the true cause of my ennui.”
When she was dying, she saw her secretary, Wiart, who had long served
her, in tears. “You love me, then?” she murmured, and so her last words
expressed at once the doubt and the longing of her life.
Of her earlier attempts to satisfy this natural instinct three, at least,
are well known to us and none was perfectly successful. For years she
lived in the most intimate relations with Hénault, a man of the highest
position and character; but he was not of a nature to feel ardor or
inspire it. Their mutual attitude was one of respectful esteem, largely
tempered with keen-sighted criticism. Again, Madame du Deffand took into
her protection a young orphan relative, Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse,
hoping to find a comfort for her age. But the older lady was exacting,
the younger restless, and they quarreled and parted by the fault of
both—or of neither. Finally, there was Madame de Choiseul, with whom
it was not easy to quarrel. Madame du Deffand adored her, called her
“grandmamma,” though she was many years the younger, declared over and
over again that her love was all she wanted, all her hope and comfort in
life. Yet in one of her moments of desperate petulance she could write
of even Madame de Choiseul: “She shows a good deal of friendship; and
as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is perfectly natural
that we should exchange the tenderest expressions in the world.” Truly, a
strange, subtle, and difficult temper, and one ill-fitted to separate the
evil from the good in the tangled yarn of human life.
Then, after all these attempts at love and failures, came a most singular
adventure. Madame du Deffand, at seventy, fell in love with a man of
fifty. This world-worn, life-wearied, pale, frail, dusty heart was
suddenly set beating by another as cold, as disillusioned, if not as
bored as hers, that of Horace Walpole, a bachelor, a dilettante, and an
Englishman. And this old woman’s love was no mere fancy, no indifferent
whim, lightly caught and blown off like a feather. It was a real,
intense, absorbing, overwhelming passion, like that of a girl of twenty
or a woman of forty. “Everybody loves after his own manner; I have only
one way of loving, infinitely, or not at all.” “The thought of you enters
into everything I think and everything I do.” This is the tone, not for
an hour, or a day, but over and over and over, for eleven years. Let us
note some of the special phases of such an unusual experience.
To begin with, how about Walpole himself? He was not infatuated. He never
could have been, and certainly not at fifty, for an aged Frenchwoman.
He kept a cool head and saw with perfect clearness the foibles of
his ardent correspondent. At the same time, his bearing in a rather
difficult situation is on the whole loyal and manly. He defended his
aged friend against criticism and mockery and it is from him that we get
the finest appreciation of her good qualities, her noble sincerity, her
unconquerable vivacity, her social charm.
But if he sees her as we see her, assuredly she does not see him as we
see him, or never, never admits that she does. Without accepting all of
Macaulay’s severe judgment, it is difficult to place Walpole on a very
heroic plane. He was kindly, he was gentle, he was generous where it
cost him little, he was mildly loyal to his friends. But he was vain,
superficial, snobbish while pretending to democracy, incapable of great
devotion and of self-forgetfulness. The Walpole that Madame du Deffand
loved was, however, far different from this. He had the virtues of French
and English combined and the vices of no race. As an author, he is in the
same class with Voltaire, his letters are like Voltaire’s for style, and
far above for matter. “For style they have had no model and cannot be
imitated. They are the sublime of abundance and of naturalness.” If you
know Walpole, what do you think of that? And his character is as sublime
as his letters. He is perhaps a little godlike for perfect friendship,
or is she wrong about this? But in the early stages of her passion she
proclaims the lover’s idea from which she never swerves. “If others saw
as clearly as I do, you would be placed first, not only in England, but
in the universe; this is not flattery; wit, talent, and the perfection of
kindness have never been united as they are in you.” What a marvellous
light is thrown on the woman’s character, as we have studied it, by such
a sentence as that!
So she plays, in letter after letter, on the whole compass of the
tenderest, most self-abandoning affection. With him in London and herself
in Paris, and several days of delaying post between them, she writes
incessantly, begging for good news, bad news, any news. His plans,
she must know every detail of his plans, what he does, where he goes,
whom he sees. His health. Let but the gout touch him and she is in
misery. She showers remedies, like a quack doctor, or an aged nurse. Her
distress is everywhere made plain to us by the vivid touches of her quick
imagination. “I am like a child hanging out of a window by a cord and
every instant on the brink of falling.”
The best remedy for the anxiety of absence would certainly be presence
and she seems to live only in the passionate hope of those rare and
hurried visits which brought her beloved to her. Yet even so, she is
most characteristically afraid that when he does come he will be bored.
He shall see only whom he wishes when he wishes, provided he gives long
hours to seeing her. He comes, she is in Paradise, sits talking with him
till two in the morning, and he gets a long letter from her before he
rises the next day.
Then he is gone again and she is in pain again. The memory of past
pleasure only makes the pang of separation keener. She is old, old,
hardly a particle of life left in her, and she cannot hope to live to see
him ever any more.
A passion like this, full as it is of tragedy and pathos, will at times
tempt sarcasm. The sincerity and fine intelligence of Madame du Deffand
make it impossible for a sympathetic reader even to smile at her. But
Walpole was by nature abnormally sensitive to ridicule, as he himself
confesses. To be praised as if he were a god and loved as if he were
an opera tenor by an old lady of seventy, whom he knew to be living in
closest intimacy with the most critical and mocking wits of the world,
placed a man of his temper in an exceedingly difficult position. Beware
of romance, he cautioned mildly. But she laughed at him. Romance! at her
age! She had never been romantic, had all her life stripped the veil
of sentimental illusion from the cold bones of reality. Romance! Her
feelings were nothing but common, daylight friendship. In which she was
quite wrong, for nothing about her was or could be common or of every day.