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

by Marilyn Yalom

  A libertine would seduce a woman by any means, take advantage of her youth or modest parentage, and then abandon her after “he had had his way with her.” Often she was left pregnant, which could reduce her to outcast status. This was not merely the stuff of literature; it was an old story in France, as in other European countries, but it seems to have garnered more print attention in the eighteenth century than at any other time. Seduction novels proliferated in France and England, to be imitated by pulp fiction for years to come, well into our own benighted era.

  Women were not always the victims of libertinage. They, too, knew how to play the game of seduction, both as gallant ladies and as coquettes. The eighteenth-century Encyclopédie distinguished between the two, reserving the greater opprobrium for the coquette who kept several lovers dangling at once. In contrast, the gallant lady, motivated by the desire to please and to be thought lovable, limited herself to one lover at a time. Regardless of the fine distinctions presented in encyclopedias and dictionaries, novels portrayed a messier reality. The important thing was not to be the one who got dumped—that could ruin anyone’s reputation, gallant lady, gallant man, base seducer, or frank coquette.

  The Goncourt brothers, in their classic study, The Woman of the Eighteenth Century, took the position that “woman equaled man, and may even have surpassed him, in that libertinage of gallant wickedness.”3 Given the Goncourts’ notorious misogyny, it is not surprising that they judged women to be equally as responsible as men, if not more so, for the century’s moral decadence. It is true that many aristocratic women took lovers after they were married and some even got away with giving birth to illegitimate children without unpleasant consequences for themselves. The same cannot be said for their children, often abandoned at church doors and raised under harsh conditions. The stories of unfortunate “love children” popularized in fiction had their roots in verifiable history, as we shall see in the following chapter on the life of Julie de Lespinasse.

  If we are to believe the novelists—and I suggest we do, to the extent that their characters mirror eighteenth-century social realities—love was in a state of constant warfare between claims of the heart and claims of the flesh. On the one side, the heart, the soul, the mind, sentiment, tenderness, and sensibility lined up to defend the rights of true love. On the other, sensuality, pleasure (plaisir), taste (goût), and above all voluptuousness (volupté) infiltrated upper-class life and often triumphed over authentic emotion. Only the hyphenated term amour-passion gave expression to both cravings. To this day, the French speak of amour-passion as a special category, the kind of love you would hope to experience at least once in a lifetime.

  Abbé Prévost’s novel, known popularly as Manon Lescaut (its full title can be found in the bibliography), brought an obsessive form of love-passion to the French in 1731 and to the rest of the world in Puccini’s late-nineteenth-century operatic version. Passion was still, in Prévost’s novel, an affair of love at first sight, as it had been in medieval romance, as it was for the Prince de Clèves, and as it would be for innumerable romantic heroes and heroines. Here is how Prévost’s hero, the seventeen-year-old Chevalier des Grieux, experienced the first sight of the woman who would constitute his love-passion: “I found myself enflamed all of a sudden to the point of rapture.”4 Though her background was modest, she had the beauty and manners of a woman well above her station. Discovering that she was being sent by her family to a convent to become a nun, Des Grieux was immediately transformed from a naïve adolescent to an active lover. He managed to dine alone with her that evening and experienced the full force of first-time love.

  I soon realized that I was less of a child than I had thought. My heart opened up to a thousand pleasurable emotions, of which I had not had the least idea. A gentle warmth spread through my veins. I was in a kind of transport, which for a time deprived me of the power of speech and found expression only through my eyes. Mademoiselle Manon Lescaut—for so she told me she was called—seemed well pleased with the effect of her charms.

  Before we know it, Des Grieux and Manon have fled from Amiens to Paris. Since they were both minors and would have needed their parents’ consent to marry, they skipped the projected nuptials and found themselves living as man and wife “without giving the matter a moment’s thought.” Des Grieux asserts that he would have been happy with Manon for his entire life if she had remained faithful to him. And here we arrive at the kernel of the story: a virtuous young man of noble extraction falls for a lower-class woman given to all the excesses of the century. Over and over again, her need for pleasure, amusement, and luxury will do them in. Manon brings into French literature la femme fatale, the direct ancestor of Carmen and a string of ill-famed women who ensnare ostensibly good, but weak, men and cause their ruin.

  Gone are the standards of virtue that aristocrats at least pretended to uphold in the past. Whenever money runs out, Manon runs into the arms of lovers more affluent than Des Grieux, returning to him afterward with expressions of love and remorse, which he—permanently enamored—always accepts. Like many men of Prévost’s generation, Des Grieux sees little harm in cheating at cards when it comes to providing Manon with the affluent lifestyle she craves. Worse yet, he too gets entangled in schemes that will defraud wealthy aristocrats of vast sums in exchange for Manon’s charms, twice landing them both in jail. The second time, Manon is deported to New Orleans with a band of other women convicts deemed fit only to populate that distant primitive colony. Des Grieux, still love-struck, follows after her.

  Does Manon, or Des Grieux for that matter, have any redeeming qualities? The author tries to make us believe that they do. Amour-passion, he tells us, was their undoing. Over and over and over again, Des Grieux attributes any wrongdoing to his fatal love for Manon: “I love her with so violent a passion that it has made me the most unhappy of men.” Love of this sort is its own justification. And while Manon is notoriously liberal with her favors, she too professes an undying love for Des Grieux. She explains at one point that the only faithfulness she values is that of the heart. At heart, Manon may not be evil, but she is clearly thoughtless, flighty, and amoral.

  There is little in the novel to convince us that Manon merits Des Grieux’s undying flame. He tries to endow her with the tragic dimension of a Racinian heroine like Phèdre, but she comes across more like the duplicitous character of Célimène in Le Misanthrope, without her wit and class. How can we understand Manon’s solid hold on Des Grieux?

  She undoubtedly knows how to manipulate him. After her third infidelity, he calls her a false-hearted girl, a cruel and fickle lover, a perfidious mistress, a deceiving slut. Yet, a few moments later, instead of walking out the door as planned, he responds to her tears by taking her in his arms, kissing her tenderly, and begging for forgiveness. He tries to convince himself: “She sins, but without malice . . . she is frivolous and imprudent, but she is straightforward and sincere.” Straightforward and sincere? Only if we see her through his biased eyes. He will confess to his father: “It is love, as you know, love alone—fatal passion!—that has caused my errors. . . . Love has made me too tender, too passionate, too faithful, and too ready, perhaps to indulge the desires of a mistress who is all enchantment. These are my crimes.”

  However criminal his actions, we are expected to believe that Des Grieux has an inner goodness. His enduring feelings for Manon, in spite of her failings, are presented as the mark of an exceptional person. You must have a martyr’s strength to submit to love-passion, often to the point of humiliation or even self-destruction. This emotion-driven love would find its ultimate voice later in the century in La nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The New Eloise) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But before we come to him, we must consider another ingenious novel, also published in the 1730s, that traces the amorous adventures and misadventures of a young man in search of love.

  Les égarements du coeur et de l’esprit (literally “the wanderings of the heart and mind” but translated as The Wayward Head and Hear
t), written by Crébillon fils, starts out by imitating initial aspects of Manon Lascaut. Like Des Grieux, the hero of Crébillon’s novel is a seventeen-year-old, completely unversed in the ways of the world. But this is all the two men have in common, for the Chevalier de Meilcour sets about seducing a fortyish woman, before, and even after, he falls in love with Hortense de Théville, a beauty his own age. This youthful lover quickly learns that the pursuit of women is a full-time affair, filled with lies and pitfalls he could never have anticipated. Where was the true love he had heard about from the past, “so respectful, so sincere, so delicate”? Instead, he saw before him sexual liaisons undertaken in the interest of passing pleasure rather than enduring attachment. The ease with which the two sexes became physically involved was described in these much-quoted lines:

  You told a woman that she was pretty three times; . . . The first time she would certainly believe you; she would thank you the second; and not uncommonly reward you the third.5

  The young chevalier has everything to learn and little to offer other than his prepossessing appearance and noble name. But others—the fortyish Madame de Lursay, the femme galante Madame de Senanges, and the libertine Comte de Versac—are eager to instruct him. They take him on a romp through salons, dining rooms, boudoirs, carriages, parks, and the opera, as Meilcour attempts to discover the meaning of such words as pleasure, passion, heart, and, of course, love itself. (The Flammarion 1985 French edition of this work provides an “Index to the Vocabulary of Love” with one hundred entries and over a thousand references!) Suffice it to say that The Wayward Head and Heart offers an ironic portrayal of love à la française.

  Meilcour’s ignorance of the rules of seduction and his maladroit behavior occasion many moments of comic ridicule. He does not understand that he, as a man, must make the first declaration of love, even when Madame de Lursay gives him ample opportunity to do so. Half-reclining on her sofa, ready to be seduced, she is confronted with a tongue-tied suitor experiencing the most horrible fright of his life. The only words he can utter concern the type of decorative sewing she has taken up. “ ‘Are you tying bows, Madame?’ I asked in a trembling voice. At this witty and interesting question Madame de Lursay stared at me in astonishment.” Meilcour has several other comic experiences before he learns how to take advantage of the situation. During his apprenticeship, he is always surprised by his volatile emotions in response to a society that keeps moving faster than his apprehension of it, like a constantly changing kaleidoscope.

  That society, modeled on the pleasure-driven Regency period, hastened the shift toward libertinage that became one of the two main erotic currents of the century. Versac, the spokesman for libertinage, advises Meilcour to seek gratification of the senses without concern for sentiment. Indeed, at one point Versac makes an important distinction between the “heart” and “taste.” He dismisses the former as “novelists’ jargon” and defines the latter as an intense friendship that resembles love in its pleasures without its “silly” refinements. Though Versac’s arguments will have lasting influence on Meilcour’s impressionable character, there is an unresolved contradiction in the novel, as there was in eighteenth-century society. Sentiment, feeling, emotion never disappear. They inflame the hearts of the young and continue to erupt throughout life as long as one is not thoroughly jaded. And despite Versac’s low regard for the heart, the society in which he plots his seductions never dismisses its importance.

  Sentimental love remains the major justification for giving in to desire. Madame de Lursay explains to Meilcour that she might mistake desire for love if she were younger, but at her age, she could only yield to a lover’s entreaties, without self-reproach, if she believed herself loved. “I will not surrender myself except to true feeling.” When Meilcour finally succeeds in bedding Madame de Lursay, he convinces himself that what he feels for her is more than desire. He says to himself: “The work of my senses appeared to me [to be] the work of my heart.” The verb “appeared” is the operative word here. It reflects the discrepancy between Meilcour’s experience of sensual pleasure and his quest for true love.

  Although the book ends at this point, we are led to believe that Meilcour will continue his erotic career beyond his affair with Madame de Lursay. How do we know? We know from the interjections of an older version of Meilcour, who comments from time to time on the adventures of his younger self. Like Manon Lescaut, The Wayward Head and Heart is a memoir-novel told from the point of view of an older, chastened, narrator. Yet however cynical he has become in later life, this middle-aged Meilcour has not forgotten the feeling of what it was like to be young, naïve, and hungry for love.

  The Wayward Head and Heart has been credited with (or accused of) inaugurating the novel of libertinage in France. It also bears numerous hallmarks of the sentimental novel popular at this time in both France and England. The most famous English novels of this genre, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1741) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747–1748), would be widely imitated in France, not only for their amorous content but also for their epistolary form—that is, a novel written entirely in letters. Prévost, who had lived in England, translated Clarissa into French in 1751, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau appropriated the letter-novel style in his one long work of fiction, La nouvelle Héloïse (1761).

  Even allowing for English influence, Rousseau must be granted the lion’s share of credit for launching the cult of sensibility in France, a cult that championed nature above culture, emotion above reason, and spontaneous love above all the contrivances of gallantry. His novel, La nouvelle Héloïse, offered an idealized romance between Julie, a young woman of noble birth, and Saint-Preux, her love-struck tutor, who was unacceptable to her family because he lacked both title and fortune. Their story became an unprecedented best-seller in its day, and made Rousseau the darling of countless readers, the young and the old, aristocrats and bourgeois, and even literate members of the working class. In the course of forty years, from 1761 to 1800, La nouvelle Héloïse was published in seventy-two separate editions, and those who could not afford to buy the book could rent parts of it from bookstores for twelve sous per half hour! So jealous were Rousseau’s fellow authors that some, like Voltaire, parodied the book and tried to make its author a laughingstock. All to no avail: Rousseau’s admirers won the day. His one novel eclipsed all those that had previously depicted sentimental love, and in time it would be seen as the forerunner to the early nineteenth-century movement known as romanticism.

  Today Rousseau’s literary reputation rests more on his posthumously published memoirs than on La nouvelle Héloïse. We recognize in his Confessions the ancestor of all the self-revealing autobiographies that have proliferated for the past 250 years. As for Émile, his treatise on education, today’s critics have faulted him primarily for his treatment of women, who were, according to Rousseau, created solely to serve the needs of men and children. You can imagine how that sticks in the craw of feminists, like me.

  But La nouvelle Héloïse is ambiguous enough to provoke differing interpretations of how men and women should interact. We shall have to judge for ourselves as we examine it. Then, by comparing Rousseau’s novel with Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses, we shall see two very different faces of eighteenth-century love, one sentimentally sacred, the other perversely profane.

  Among the letters that were saved from my time at Wellesley College, there is one from my sophomore year dated October 29, 1951, written to my future husband, Irvin Yalom, then a premed student in Washington, D.C. In those days, a train ride from Boston to Washington took eight hours or more, so Irv and I, sweethearts since high school, saw each other only on holidays and during the summer. That Sunday night in the autumn of 1951, as I was reading La nouvelle Héloïse for a course on French romanticism, I was inspired to translate for Irv a passage from one of Saint-Preux’s letters to Julie, which seemed applicable to our situation.

  When I have pleasure, I don’t know how to enjoy it alone, and I call you to share it with me.
Ah, if you knew how terrible my torment is when we are separated, you should certainly prefer your position to mine. Think, think, Julie, that we are already seeing years lost to pleasure. Think that they will never come back. And that the years of the future, when age will have calmed our first fires, shall never be the same as those of today.

  Hmm. I won’t check over my translation with the original to see how I would have done it differently today. What matters is that Rousseau’s words expressed my very feelings. Two centuries after Rousseau had captivated an astonishing number of readers, I became one of those women who embraced Julie and Saint-Preux as kindred spirits. Like them, I felt a thwarted desire to share my pleasures with my soul mate, and I suffered from the sense that our best years were passing us by. Such is the intensity of youthful love.

  What made La nouvelle Héloïse such an unparalleled success? Why did women in particular become its devotees? Rousseau told his contemporaries that true love was pure and ennobling. He managed to infuse a jaded society with his own fierce belief in the virtue of feeling. His vision of love was irresistible, especially to women, because it validated the rights of the heart. He authorized men and women to express themselves in heated declarations that imitated his own ecstatic style, and to cry tears of joy at every opportunity.

  First, a word about the title. You’ve already met Héloïse in the prologue to this book. The reference to her love affair with Abélard would have been recognized by any eighteenth-century French man or woman with a smattering of education. Even today, a novel titled Bélard et Louise (2010) about a university professor and one of his students recalls the medieval couple for a French audience. Saint-Preux acknowledged the parallel of his situation and Abélard’s in one of his early letters to Julie, while at the same time dissociating himself from the man he called a “vile seducer.”