How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

by Marilyn Yalom

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What would she have said?”

  “More likely, he’s sixty-eight and a pain in the ass.”

  We broke into laughter, and then I tried to correct myself.

  “I’m probably exaggerating. Maybe an American woman would say, ‘He’s still in good shape,’ but I don’t think she would use the English equivalent of what you said. ‘He’s sixty-eight and looks like a movie star.’ We Americans just don’t say such things about our husbands.”

  I’m still wondering why not.

  Diane Ackerman, in her lyrical book, A Natural History of Love, claims that American society is embarrassed by love. She writes: “We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush.”20 That verbal diffidence becomes even greater when we compare ourselves to the French.

  Here’s a vignette of another very attractive Parisian couple, where the man is more openly affectionate than his wife. Carl is a charming lawyer in his midfifties. His beautiful, strong-willed wife, also a lawyer, is not always easy. Simone sets the bar very high for everything from clothes and food to education and repartee, and comes down hard on Carl if he misses the mark. After one of her put-downs, Carl turned to me and said wistfully: “J’ai le malheur d’aimer ma femme.” (“I have the misfortune of loving my wife.”)

  This man—handsome, gallant, well-spoken, a connoisseur of art, and clearly still in love with his wife after some thirty years—comes right off the pages of a medieval romance. He is willing to put up with her imperious behavior because he loves her. Like a faithful knight, he honors love, despite its torments. And she, in turn, reciprocates that love, in her fashion.

  My youngest son once commented on Simone’s difference from the American women he knew. “Not just beautiful,” he said, “but more mysterious.” Indeed!

  Frenchwomen cultivate mystery. I was not surprised to read in a recent magazine dedicated to the subject of monogamy that French psychotherapists have very different views from their American counterparts as to whether couples should discuss with each other all aspects of their lives. A Parisian family therapist expressed horror at the thought, even in a counselor’s office. He is quoted as saying: “Mystery is an essential ingredient in maintaining interest in our partner over time. To keep my marriage enlivened, I must feel there’s always more to my wife than what I already know.”21 He portrayed a good marital relation as two intersecting circles that do not entirely overlap. “In France,” he said, “when we think about ‘the relationship,’ there’s rarely more than one-third of each circle that overlaps. Married people here are not only entitled to their privacy, they must have private lives to remain interesting and alluring to each other.”

  Call it “mystery” or “subterfuge” or “dishonesty,” but when it comes to love, French men and women have little regard for the tell-all ideal so popular among many Americans. They prefer to think of love as a game in which you do not show your hand.

  I have pondered this difference for the better part of a lifetime and garnered a few enduring insights by considering our respective national histories. The American ideal of love, with its own transformations over four hundred years, developed in a strange new world where spouses had to depend on each other as “yoke partners.” Far from settled communities, without parents or siblings to count on, husbands and wives were thrust together in a battle against the elements and other peoples. Romantic love did not become the major factor in American marriages until the early nineteenth century, and even then “the couple” quickly ceded primacy to “the family.” For a long time, American women have lived in a culture of what one author has called “strong mothers, weak wives.”22 Today, the needs of the married couple frequently take second place to the needs of the children, with romance between husband and wife often difficult to maintain. My French daughter-in-law remembers being shocked when she first came to the United States and heard one of her coworkers dismiss her husband as “incidental” to the primary relationship she had with her children.

  The French, on the other hand, with centuries of court culture behind them, have developed their ideas on love from the top downward. Kings and queens, lords and ladies, minstrels and writers eulogized, poeticized, and acted out love within a world of their peers. From the Middle Ages onward, erotic love was a privileged phenomenon, with standards and ideals that were shared by members of the same social circle. In time, what began in the enclosed atmosphere of provincial and royal courts would ripple out far beyond regional boundaries, and far beyond the age of the troubadours.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gallant Love

  La Princesse de Clèves

  AMBITION AND LOVE AFFAIRS WERE THE LIFE-BLOOD OF THE COURT, ABSORBING THE ATTENTION OF MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE.

  Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves, 1678

  “Carte du Pays de Tendre” (Map of the Land of Tenderness). Mlle de Scudéry, Clélie, 1654.

  From the twelfth century onward, fashionable courts throughout France promoted all the arts, including the art of love. Certainly Anglophiles, Italianophiles, and Germanophiles (or Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Greek, Russian, and Scandinavian aficionados) can point to their own glories during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but it is safe to say that the French cultural beacon illuminated the rest of Europe until the fall of the monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century.

  In matters of love, a new style called galanterie became the rage. Broadly defined as a set of refined manners directed toward the opposite sex, and narrowly defined as the art of pleasing the ladies, it would dominate polite society for at least three hundred years. Though its meaning would change over time, we still apply the word “gallant” to men when they demonstrate courtesy and charm.

  Galanterie, galant, galante, Le Vert Galant, fêtes galantes, Le Mercure Galant, les Indes galantes, annales galantes, lettres galantes, les muses galantes—these terms proliferated among the upper classes. Men were expected to exercise gallantry with the same ease required of them in the saddle. To show no interest in the fair sex was as much a flaw among noblemen of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as it had been among the troubadours of an earlier period, the main difference being that gallantry did not promise lifetime loyalty. Courtly love in the Middle Ages had required devotion to only one lady, who was usually married and of higher status than the knight. Gallantry could be spread around: men usually courted women of their own rank, but could also reach out to women above and beneath them, as long as everyone understood that lovers of unequal status were not likely to marry.

  Gallantry started at the highest level, at the level of kingship. Unlike the cuckold depicted in medieval literature, the king, rather than the queen, was entitled to bedmates beyond the royal spouse. While she ostensibly devoted her intimate parts solely to the purpose of producing heirs, he could receive other women in his bedchamber or find his way to numerous assignations where receptive women would meet him with open limbs. In time, royal mistresses rivaled legitimate queens in their opulence and influence.

  The great Renaissance king François I (1494–1547) installed his official mistress (maîtresse en titre), Anne, Duchesse d’Étampes, in the royal castle of Fontainebleau. He pursued his love affairs—with her and with others—not only at Fontainebleau but also at the Palais du Louvre and châteaux in the Loire Valley, which became gardens of pleasure for the king and his courtiers.

  His successors, most notably Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIV, and Louis XV, were famous for their amatory exploits with numerous women, starting with their official mistresses. You could say that French kings enjoyed a form of regal polygamy. Even if a woman was reluctant to grant sexual favors, as was the case of the teenaged Gabrielle d’Estrées when approached by the “old” Henri IV (he was thirty-seven), it took little to persuade her that it was in her interest, and the interest of her family, to submit to the king’s desires. Here’s how he addressed her on April 19, 1593, in
one of his many love letters: “Sleep well, my sweet love, so you’ll be fresh and fleshy when you arrive.”1

  Among the more than fifty mistresses attributed to Henri IV, Henriette d’Entragues, who replaced Gabrielle after she died in childbirth, was arguably the most impertinent. She seems to have been able to do and say pretty much what she pleased with the king, including telling him to his face that he smelled like carrion. Henri IV kept Henriette on as his leading mistress even after he brought Marie de Médicis to Paris as his queen. During the ten years of their marriage (1600–1610), which produced six royal children, the queen had to put up with the king’s voracious extramarital appetite. He came to be known as Le Vert Galant (the dashing gallant), a name that appears to this day on the marquee of a famous restaurant in Paris, not far from the statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf.

  Right till the end of his life, Henri IV was in and out of bed with a wide assortment of women—those he professed to love and others he simply wanted to seduce. His very last love was a teenager stolen away from his friend, the soldier and diplomat François de Bassompierre. Here is how Bassompierre recounted the affair in his memoirs.

  Bassompierre could boast of several mistresses. In October 1608, when he was twenty-nine, he was offered the possibility of marriage with the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Connétable de Montmorency. It would be an advantageous union for Bassompierre, and besides, the young woman was extremely beautiful. But in January 1609, the king saw her and, as he confessed to Bassompierre, fell “not only in love with Mademoiselle de Montmorency, but furiously and outrageously so. If you marry her and she loves you, I shall hate you.”2

  The king conceived another scenario: she would be the “consolation” of his old age. (He was fifty-six at the time and destined to die in little more than a year.) He would marry her off to his nephew, the Prince de Condé—a man who “loves hunting a hundred thousand times more than the ladies.” The prince would receive 100,000 francs a year “to pass the time” while the young woman was in attendance on the king. He tried to make Bassompierre believe that he wanted nothing more from her than her affection. As a reward to Bassompierre for his loss, the king offered to arrange his marriage with another highly ranked woman and to make him a duke and peer of the realm. For Mademoiselle de Montmorency and Bassompierre, there was no choice but to acquiesce. However, the story did not end as Henri IV had planned. The marriage with the Prince de Condé took place on May 17, 1609, but shortly thereafter the couple stole off to Brussels, much to the king’s chagrin.

  It is clear from this example that sexual intrigue was as much a part of court life as political stratagem. Whom you slept with and whom you married were not just private affairs. They concerned relatives, friends, priests, even the king and queen, as members of the nobility jockeyed with each other for royal favor. In a society where whole families could be made or undone by a felicitous marriage or an ill-advised liaison, love was the least of many considerations to be taken into account by a young person experiencing his or her first pangs of passion.

  No one has better described the amatory hotbed of the French court than Madame de La Fayette in her novel La Princesse de Clèves. She writes: “There were countless interests at stake, countless different factions, and women played such a central part in them that love was always entangled with politics and politics with love.”3

  Published anonymously in 1678, La Princesse de Clèves became an instant best-seller in France, to be followed the next year by a popular translation into English. Controversy over the book erupted in both countries. Who was this person—who were these “wits of France”—responsible for revealing the erotic commerce of the French court?4

  While Madame de La Fayette never confessed to having written this work (or others that were subsequently attributed to her), there is little doubt today that she was the author. Perhaps she did collaborate with some of the men in her intellectual circle, most notably her intimate friend, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, whose cynical Maximes had already attracted a wide readership. Anonymous publication, in and of itself, points to a woman’s hand, since it was not considered seemly in the seventeenth century (as in the eighteenth and nineteenth) for a woman to publish under her own name.

  La Princesse de Clèves is one of the first “psychological” novels ever written, and, in my opinion, it has no equal among seventeenth-century works of fiction. As I explain later, it played a significant role in my life, so much so that I felt personally offended when President Sarkozy, in 2009, dismissed the book as irrelevant to the education of French students. Had I not been five thousand miles away, I would have joined the French protesters who took turns reading it in public as an act of political opposition. As President Sarkozy’s popularity declined among the French, sales of La Princesse de Clèves soared.

  This relatively short work has had a multitude of fans worldwide for good reasons. It is a love story, albeit a thwarted one, between a young married noblewoman and her equally noble suitor. It is a marital drama quite unlike any other that had been written until then. It is a story that sometimes strains the reader’s credulity, with overheard conversations and lost letters, but redeems itself as a convincing portrayal of the sentiments felt by women and men as they fall heedlessly in and out of love.

  Madame de La Fayette set her novel in the sixteenth century during the reign of Henri II, specifically during the years 1558 and 1559. In this respect, it is a “historical” novel based on real personages and events. Only the Princess de Clèves herself is entirely fictitious and her story, as it intertwines with the lives of others, is a roman in every sense of the word. The seventeenth-century novel still bore the hallmarks of medieval romance in its central preoccupation with the efforts of valorous men to win the hearts of high-born ladies, usually married to someone else. Looking back a hundred years to the time when Diane de Poitiers, the renowned mistress of King Henri II, overshadowed his queen, Catherine de Médicis, the author had found the perfect setting for her tale of nascent love within a web of court intrigue. Yet the shift backward in time fooled no one: La Princesse de Clèves held a mirror to the court of Madame de La Fayette’s own king, Louis XIV. Behind the formal hierarchy and stiff etiquette of court events, there lay a hidden world of secret assignations where men and women abandoned their social roles along with their clothes and wigs. There, the young and the old expressed their inner longing for reciprocal love and reciprocal pleasure.

  Even Louis XIV had been known to follow his heart in his youthful love for Mademoiselle de Mancini, jeopardizing his projected marriage with Maria Theresa of Spain. Though he was persuaded to make the political marriage, his subsequent libidinous history included a long list of royal favorites, including his first official mistress, Louise de La Vallière, with whom he had two surviving children. Even more influential were Madame de Montespan, who bore him no less than seven children, and Madame de Maintenon, the governess of these illegitimate children, whom he secretly married during the winter of 1684–1685 after his relations with Madame de Montespan had come to an end and after Maria Theresa had died. Maria Theresa had been a loving wife for more than two decades, accepting her husband’s mistresses with astonishing grace. Louis is known to have said upon her death: “This is the first chagrin she has ever caused me.”

  As we have seen, there was a long tradition in France that allowed, even expected, French kings to take sexual partners in addition to their wives. The king was allowed “two bodies”—one considered “divine” that extended in an unbroken line from king to king; the other “human,” all too human. No one but censorious priests objected to the king’s sexual exploits. The number of his liaisons attested to his virility. This attitude has persisted in France long after the demise of the monarchy, spilling over onto presidents, whose extramarital involvements were publicly known and never detrimental to their careers.

  The future Madame de La Fayette became well versed in the bedroom ploys of the French elite when she was maid of honor to Louis
XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria. Then, through her marriage to the Comte de La Fayette in 1655, she had continued familiarity with court life, although she and he also lived at his far-distant estate in Auvergne. At the time of her marriage, she was twenty-one and no longer a “young” bride, since it was common for noblewomen to be married off in their late teens, before they had any chance of becoming corrupted by would-be seducers. And like most women of her class, she was married to an older man. Arranged marriages among the nobility, like those of Madame de La Fayette in real life and the Princess de Clèves in fiction, were the norm well into the early twentieth century. Parents sought unions for their sons and daughters in the interest of fortune, title, and family connections. One did not expect to marry for love.

  So, in the novel, when the future Princess de Clèves, barely sixteen, is offered the Prince de Clèves as a suitable match, she does not find him unacceptable, even though she does not love him. For one thing, she has never felt those delicious internal stirrings that the French aptly call troubles. She has lived a protected life under the guidance of her widowed mother, Madame de Chartres, a woman of known distinction and virtue. Madame de Chartres had not only sought to cultivate her daughter’s wit and beauty—the two qualities considered necessary for a marriageable woman—she had also tried to make her “virtuous.” Female virtue consisted mainly in shunning the practices that led to sexual entanglements. Madame de Chartres warned her daughter of love’s dangers, however attractive they were made to appear: she spoke to her of “men’s insincerity, of their deceptions and infidelity, of the disastrous effects of love affairs on conjugal life,” and she argued convincingly for “the only thing that can ensure a woman’s happiness,” namely, reciprocal love between husband and wife.

  The young woman’s first appearance at court produced a sensation. The Prince de Clèves was struck by her beauty and modest behavior, and fell in love with her on the spot. This was the classic coup de foudre, love at first sight, that enters through the eyes and travels immediately to the heart and other unmentioned organs.