of future generations. Destroy my letters, he insisted, and do, do
moderate the tone of yours. And he cautioned, and he lectured, as a tutor
might lecture a moonstruck girl.
She did not like it, she resented it. The notes she writes so thickly are
of painful interest in their sore, hurt, pleading, protesting energy. “If
I were as unreasonable as you, you would never hear another word from me.
The letter I have just received is so offensive, so extravagant, that I
should throw it in the fire unanswered.” “Should throw,” you notice, not
“have thrown.” “It is impossible to judge more falsely than you judge
me.... You see yourself in everything I say about others and think I am
finding fault with you, when I find fault with any one.” “God is not more
incomprehensible than you; but if he is not more just, it is hardly worth
while believing in him.”
Yet she kissed the hand that chastened her, she turned like a child to
its tutor, for advice and comfort, with blind trust, blind confidence,
blind hope. He is a true physician for the soul, she says, and one who
needs no physician for his own. She only wishes that he might have had
control of her from childhood. How different she would have been! “You
would have formed my taste, my judgment, my discernment, you would have
taught me to know the world, to mistrust it, to despise it, to enjoy it;
you would not have bridled my imagination, or blighted my passions, or
chilled my soul; but you would have been like a skilful dancing-master,
who keeps the natural poise of health and vigor and adds to it finished
grace.”
So she loved for eleven years and died with this final illusion like the
cross in her hands and the sacred wafer at her lips. You think she was
pitiably infatuated. Perhaps she was. But it was an infatuation that not
only furnished the clue to her whole life, but in a manner sanctified it.
It is a curious thing that the two greatest women letter writers of
France, perhaps of the world, Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand,
should each have built the main fabric of their correspondence on an
exaggerated, not to say abnormal, affection. It is far more curious
that this affection should be with Madame de Sévigné the one flaw in a
singularly well-balanced character and with Madame du Deffand the most
marked symptom of health in a character otherwise erratic, distorted, and
unsound.
VIII
MADAME DE CHOISEUL
CHRONOLOGY
Louise Honorine Crozat du Châtel.
Born 1734.
Married Duc de Choiseul 1750.
Choiseul’s ministry 1758-1770.
Husband died 1785.
Died December 3, 1801.
[Illustration: _Madame de Choiseul_]
VIII
MADAME DE CHOISEUL
A portrait of Madame de Choiseul seems the natural complement to the
portrait of Madame du Deffand. The two were intimate friends, in spite
of a considerable difference in age; their lives were intertwined in
the closest fashion. At the same time, they present a marked contrast
in temperament, character, and habits of thought. Madame du Deffand’s
estimate of her younger friend, whom she playfully called “grandmamma,”
will serve well to set the note for a portrayal of the latter: “If there
is a perfect being in the world, ’tis she. She has mastered all her
passions. No one is at once so sensitive and so completely mistress of
herself. Everything is genuine in her, nothing artificial, yet everything
is under control.”
Elsewhere Madame du Deffand points out that if Madame de Choiseul was
perfect, she had everything to make her so, family, fortune, friends,
and social position. “I know no one who has been so continuously and
so completely fortunate as you.” In a sense this was exact. Madame de
Choiseul from birth filled a high position in the social life of the
French mid-eighteenth century. She married early a man of the greatest
distinction and charm, who came to occupy the most important political
offices, and for a time she was perhaps the leading lady of France, next
the queen—and the king’s mistress. But her life was not all roses, by
any means. Her husband was charming to others as well as to her. She had
no children. Politics brought her misery as well as fortune, since the
duke lost his office and was sent in disgrace and banishment from court.
Later he died and she was left alone to face the Revolution, which she
did with the splendid patience and courage shown by so many women of her
class. But this was long after Madame du Deffand had exchanged the ennui
of earth for the felicity of heaven.
During the time she held a leading social position, Madame de Choiseul
proved to be in every way fitted for it. She herself declares she has
no preference for such a life, complains that her hours are filled not
occupied, longs for solitude and quiet, and when they come, as a result
of political failure, accepts them with a sigh of genuine relief.
But all agree that for the manifold uses of society she had a singular
aptness and charm. She was married when she was fifteen, and at eighteen
went as ambassadress to Rome, where she made herself beloved by every
one. She was not perhaps regularly beautiful, but her little figure had a
fairylike grace and lightness, and her simple, dainty speech and manners
doubled the attraction of her figure. “A Venus in little,” _Vénus en
abrégé_, Voltaire calls her. Horace Walpole, who to be sure loved all
the friends of Madame du Deffand, says of the duchess: “Oh, it is the
gentlest, amiable, civil, little creature that ever came out of a fairy
egg! So just in its phrases and thoughts, so attentive and good-natured!”
Elsewhere he is even more enthusiastic: “She has more sense and more
virtues than almost any human being,” and another brief touch gives a
climax quite unusual with the cynic of Strawberry Hill: “The most perfect
being I know of either sex.”
Nor was this grace and perfection of the tame order which effaces
itself and merely warms others till they sparkle and flame. The lady
had a fairy’s vivacity as well as a fairy’s daintiness. It is true,
social embarrassment sometimes overcame her—most winningly. She had,
says Walpole further, “a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which
the court has not cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the
most interesting sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn
and propriety of expression.” She herself gives a charming account of a
social crisis in which she was utterly at a loss what to do or say and
could only stammeringly repeat the words of others, “Yes, Madam, no,
Madam,—I think, that is, I believe—oh, yes, I am sure I agree with you
entirely.”
But she had wit of her own, spirit of her own, courage of her own, and
could find words in plenty when occasion really called for them. Madame
du Deffand has preserved many of her clever sayings, as the comment on
two gentlemen equally amiable, but different. “One is charming for the
manner that he has and the other for the manner that he has not.”
The lasting evidence for us, however, of Madame de Choiseul’s vivacity
is her letters. They exist in no such number as Madame du Deffand’s or
Madame de Sévigné’s, but they yield to neither in ease, in variety,
in grace and swiftness of expression. These qualities are equally
manifest in her long description of the busy day of a prime minister’s
wife,—the scores of petitioners, the hurry from one function to another,
the tedious necessity of being something to everybody while nobody is
anything to you,—and in little touches of the most pregnant and delicate
simplicity. “What is there to say in the country when you are alone
and it rains? We were alone and it was raining. This suggested talk of
ourselves and, after all, what is there that we know so much about?” or
again, “To love and to please is to be always young.” She could and did
write French as perfect as Voltaire’s. But she did not hesitate a moment
to twist grammar or syntax, when some unusual turn of thought required
it. “I propose to speak my own tongue before that of my nation,” she
says, “and it is often the irregularity of our thought that causes the
irregularity of our expressions.”
But it was neither her beauty nor her wit that made the duchess so much
admired and beloved. It was her sympathy and tenderness, her faculty of
entering into the joys and sorrows of others and her pleasure in doing
so, that drew all hearts to her. “She had the art of listening and of
making others shine,” says a memoir writer of her own day. This is a
social quality by no means contemptible. But the quality of sympathetic
comprehension served for much more than social purposes. “I cannot
bear the idea of suffering, even for persons indifferent to me,” she
writes. This did not mean, however, that she fled suffering, but that
she endeavored to alleviate it, by every means in her power. Where the
suffering was mental or imaginary, she soothed and diverted it by sound
counsel and gentle rallying, if necessary. Where it was physical, she
gave her time and thought and strength to substantial relief.
Her dependents, her servants, the poor in all the region round, adored
her. She gave them money, she gave them food, she gave them the sunshine
of her presence and her cheerfulness. A servant whose work had been
about the house was offered a better position outside. He refused it.
“But why,” urged the duchess, “why? Your pay will be better, your hours
shorter, your work lighter.” “Yes, madam, but I shall not be near you.”
After the Revolution, when she had lost everything and was living in a
garret, there came one day a knock at the door. She opened it to a rather
prosperous-looking mechanic, and inquired what he wanted. “Madam, when
I was a poor peasant, working on the roads, you asked me what I desired
most in the world. I said, a cart and an ass to draw it. You gave them to
me and I have made a comfortable fortune. Now it is all yours.”
If she was thus kind to those who were nothing to her personally, it may
well be supposed that she was devoted to her friends. She had many of
them and never felt that she had enough. Like all persons of such ample
affection, she had her disappointments, with resulting cynicism, and once
wrote: “It is well to love even a dog when you have the opportunity,
for fear you should find nothing else worth loving.” But in general,
though she was far from indiscriminate in her choice, she loved widely,
and she repeats again and again that love is the only thing that makes
life worth living, that love is life. When the bitter saying of Madame
de Staël is reported to her, that she was always glad to make new
acquaintances because she felt sure they could not be worse than those
she had already, Madame de Choiseul rebels with the utmost indignation,
declaring that she is not dissatisfied with any of her acquaintance
and that she is enchanted with her friends. It seems, also, that her
friendship was to a singular degree sympathetic and self-forgetful. So
many of us see our friends’ lives from the point of view of our own and
enter into their interests chiefly so far as they are identical with
ours. But this lady has one beautiful and perfect word on the subject: “I
have always had the vanity of those I love, that is my fashion of loving.”
One of her friendships we can study in minute detail and we find it to be
without fault or flaw, that for Madame du Deffand. One friend was young,
rich, beautiful, popular, driven in the rush and hurry of the great
world. The other was old, feeble, blind, forlorn. Yet the friendship was
as genuine and heartfelt on one side as on the other. Madame de Choiseul
had the discernment to see Madame du Deffand’s fine qualities, her clear
head, her tender heart, her magnificent sincerity; but she cherished
her, as love does cherish, not from a mathematical calculation of fine
qualities, but simply because it does and must. I love you, she repeats,
I love you. I think of you daily, hourly. Tell me everything, as I tell
you everything. Let there be no secrets and no shadows between us.
Nor was it by any means an untested friendship. Madame du Deffand had
nothing to do but think of trouble, she was critically sensitive, knew
her own weaknesses, and could not believe that anybody loved her.
Often she intimates her complaints, her dissatisfaction, her jealousy.
Madame de Choiseul is sometimes forced to treat her like the child she
calls her. There are moments when a frank, outspoken word is necessary.
But it is spoken with careful tenderness. “You think I love you from
complaisance and ask you to visit me from politeness. I don’t. I love
you because I love you. I will not say because you are lovable; for
your fears, your doubts, your absurd hesitations annoy me too much
for compliments. I don’t care about doing you justice. I want to do
justice to myself. I love you because you love me, because I have my
own interests at heart, and because I am absolutely sure of you.... I
want to see you, because I love you, right or wrong.” And she did love
her, in spite of all criticism and difficulty, with patient tenderness,
thoughtful devotion, and infinite solicitude, till the very end.
Another friendship, of a somewhat different character, but of almost
equal interest, is that for the Abbé Barthélemy, the clever, brilliant,
sensitive scholar who was dependent upon the duchess’s bounty during
a great part of his life. Here again, in the Abbé’s enthusiastic
descriptions and comments, we see the thoughtful kindness, the unselfish
devotion, the unobtrusive sympathy, which Madame de Choiseul lavished on
those whom she had taken into her heart.
Sometimes this tenderness got her into difficulties. She added a child,
apt and skilled in music, to her household, and made a pet of him. As
he grew older, the boy fell in love with her, and she did not know what
to do about it. Her pathetic account of her attempts to reason with
him should be read in the original to be appreciated: “He could eat
nothing, he could attend to nothing, and one day I found him seated at
the clavichord, his heart overflowing in pitiful sighs. I called him, ‘my
sweet child,’ to pet him and comfort him a little. Then his heart failed
him and his tears flowed abundantly. Through a thousand sobs I could
make out that he reproached me for calling him ‘my sweet child,’ when I
didn’t love him and wouldn’t let him love me.... My courage broke too, I
cried as much as he did, and to hide my tears I ran to find Monsieur de
Choiseul and told him the whole story.”
Some gossips attempted to see in this pretty incident a suggestion,
or at any rate a parallel, to the adventures of the page, Cherubino,
in Beaumarchais’s “Marriage of Figaro,” written at a later date.
Such slander was utterly unfounded. It is not the least of Madame de
Choiseul’s charms that in an age when to have only one lover at a time
was virtue and to have many was hardly vice, she is absolutely above the
suspicion of having had any lovers at all. No doubt she knew that she
was charming and liked to be admired. Madame du Deffand was perfectly
right in reproaching Walpole for the singular lack of tact implied in
his compliment to the duchess’s virtue. “Why did you tell her that a man
would never think of falling in love with her? No woman under forty
likes to be praised in that fashion.” But she herself declares that she
was something of a prude and the testimony of many besides Walpole proves
conclusively that she was not the opposite.
Moreover, she had the best of guarantees against waywardness of the
affections, a profound, enduring, and self-forgetful love for her
husband. Walpole cynically suggests that this love was too obtrusive
to be sincere. In Walpole’s world such obtrusiveness may not have been
fashionable. “My grandmamma has the ridiculous foible of being in love,”
says Madame du Deffand. Some may not find it so ridiculous. At any rate,
to the duchess her husband was the most important figure in the world and
the obvious delight with which she welcomes political banishment because
it means solitude and seclusion with him is as charming as it is pathetic.
Pathetic, because she did not get the same devotion in return. The duke
loved her, respected her, admired her. His serious words about her are
worthy of him and her both: “Her virtues, her attractions, her love for
me and mine for her, have brought to our union a happiness far beyond
the gifts of fortune.” But, though a prime minister, the duke was not
always serious, in fact too seldom. He was a brilliant, versatile, gay,
and amorous Frenchman, and while he loved his wife, which was a merit,
he loved many other ladies, which was less so. “He does not mean to go
without anything,” writes the duchess to Madame du Deffand, in a moment
of unusual frankness. “He lets no pleasure escape him. He is right
in thinking that pleasure is a legitimate end, but not every one is
satisfied with pleasures that come as easily as his. Some of us cannot
get them for merely stooping to pick them up.”
Yet, with all his weaknesses, it cannot be said that the passionate
lover had chosen a wholly unworthy object, and even if she had, the
breadth, the intensity, the nobility of her passion would have gone far
to justify it. How tactful she is, with all her longing for affection!
She does not intrude her feelings at the wrong place or time. She thinks
more of giving than of getting. How exquisitely tender are the gleams
we see, often through others, of the devotion which showed itself in a
hundred little forms of the desire to please. “Your grandmamma is at the
clavichord,” writes Barthélemy, with playful exaggeration, “and will
remain there till dinner time. She will go at it again at seven and
play till eleven. She has been doing this for two months, with infinite
pleasure. Her sole object is to get so she can play to the duke without
nervousness. To accomplish that result will take her about fourteen years
longer, and she will be perfectly satisfied if at fifty she can play two
or three pieces without a slip.”
Her own words are even more significant. “I want to grow young again, and
pretty, if I could. At any rate, I should like to make your grandpapa
think I am both one and the other, and as he has little here to compare
me with, I may be able to deceive him.” Again, in as charming a bit of
self-revelation as it would be easy to find, she writes to Madame du
Deffand, with a lover’s passionate urgency: “Tell me, dear grandchild,
did your grandpapa come back again Wednesday, after he had put me into
the carriage? Did he speak of me? What did he say and how did he say it?
I can’t help thinking that he grows a little less ashamed of me, and it
is a great point gained when we no longer mortify those whom we would
have love us.—You must admit that your grandpapa is the best of men;
but that is not all, I assure you he is the greatest man the age has
produced.”
If he was not, at least she did her best to make him so. While he was
minister, she pulled every wire a loving woman can pull honestly, even
stooping to court and caress Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of the
king. When he was disgraced, she cherished his friends and fought his
enemies, minimized his faults and blazoned his virtues, believed in him
so intensely that she made others believe who were much more ready to
doubt. After his death, she sold her possessions and lived in poverty to
pay his debts and clear his memory. When she was urged to flee during the
Revolution, she said she could not, or those debts would never be paid,
and when she was imprisoned and in danger of the guillotine, her plea for
release was still that she had a task to do on earth that was not done.
She was set free and continued her efforts till her death.
It will be asked if this charming personage had no faults. Of course she
had. She realized them herself, and so did others. It was even maintained
that her very faultlessness was an imperfection and that she overcame
nature so completely as to be not quite human enough. The Abbé Barthélemy
himself, loyal and devoted as he was, and protesting that he is a monster
of ingratitude, whispers gently to Madame du Deffand that his patroness
had serious defects, to be sure chiefly injurious to herself, which
resulted from her very excess of virtue, sympathy, and self-control.
Elsewhere he murmurs that she is so busy with everybody it is sometimes
hard to realize that she cares for anybody, and again that she thinks so
much of friends who are absent that those who are present get very little
attention.
Madame du Deffand, who was lonely, sensitive, and jealous, is much
more free in her criticism. Persons overflowing with sympathy and
kindness, like Madame de Choiseul, are always exposed to the charge of
insincerity and the older friend expresses this, in the early days of
their acquaintance, with the utmost bitterness. “She makes a great show
of friendship. And as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is
perfectly natural that we should say the tenderest things possible to one
another.”
The passage of years wholly corrected this misapprehension. The blind,
forlorn, love-thirsty dreamer came to know that there was no love in the
world more loyal, more tender, more self-forgetful than that of this
wonderful lady who might have had princes at her feet. Yet the solitary
heart is not contented, can never be contented. Soothing, petting,
rallying may calm it for the moment. It will never be still. “You cannot
let go in your letters. You always say just what you want to say.” She
writes grumblingly to Walpole of the duchess: “She wants to be perfect.
That is her defect.” And again, “It is vexatious that she is an angel. I
had rather she were a woman.” The sum total of the complaint recurs again
and again in a phrase which Madame de Choiseul had most unfortunately
invented herself. “You know you love me, but you do not feel it.”
Yet, after all, the lady was not so fatally angelic as to lose every
appeal to frail humanity. It stung her to be dependent. It stung her to
ask a favor of an enemy. It stung her to have any one ask a favor for
her. With what wholesome vigor does she lash Madame du Deffand, who had
innocently spoken a kind word for her friend to the wife of her friend’s
chief political antagonist. “This is something I will not allow. This
is something you absolutely must make right, and in the presence of the
very persons who were witnesses to a piece of cajolery so unfitting under
existing circumstances and so utterly foreign to my character.” And she
adds, “the Abbé, who is all for gentle methods, will try to smooth this
over. But, for my part, though I am sorry to hurt you, I don’t retract a
word, because I have said what I feel.”
Also, she was capable of good honest hatred, when she thought there was
occasion for it, and right in the family too. Her husband had a sister,
Madame de Grammont, a big haughty Juno, if the duchess was a little
Venus, and between the two there was no friendship. The duke hearkened
to the sister much more than the wife liked. In short, they were jealous
of each other and though they finally patched up an armed truce which
age developed into a reconciliation, they never regarded each other with
much cordiality. How vividly human is Madame de Choiseul’s account of her
conduct when the duke had an attack of illness. “Though I hate Madame de
Grammont, I sent her word, because I should wish her to do the same to
me. What happened? She never thanked me, she never even answered me, but
wrote to the duke to complain that he had not written and thus got me
into trouble.”
So, you see, she knew the bitter emotions of life as well as the sweet,
and was by no means exempt from any aspect of human frailty. Yet,
although her soul was wide-open to emotions of all sorts, and though
she herself passionately repeated that feeling was the only good of
existence, was the whole of existence, she had, beside her emotions,
an intellectual life singularly subtle, plastic, and varied, and full
of interest to the curious student. She was apt to condemn reason as
misleading, deceptive, and of little worth, but in demonstrating the
point she indulged herself in reasoning of a highly elaborate and
ingenious order. In fact, she was a child of the eighteenth century, and
could not wholly escape its abstract tendencies. Speaking of her own
letters, when a friend wanted to collect them for publication, she said,
“to me they seem to be the writing of a _raisonneuse_.”