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

by Marilyn Yalom

  I have always pitied Eloise. She had a heart made for love, but Abelard has ever seemed to me only a miserable creature who deserved his fate and who was a stranger as much to love as to virtue.6

  At this stage in his relationship with Julie, Saint-Preux can pride himself on the dissimilarities between his passion and Abélard’s, for he and Julie have not yet crossed the line between “virtue” and “vice”—they have not yet consummated their love. But they cross that line very quickly. Within a few letters, Julie writes to Claire, her friend, cousin, and confidante, that she is “ruined,” that she now lives in “disgrace” brought about by “that cruel creature” Saint-Preux, and that “vice” has corrupted her soul. Then she accuses herself as well.

  Without knowing what I was doing, I chose my own destruction. I forgot everything but love. Thus, one unguarded moment has ruined me forever. I have fallen into the abyss of shame from which a girl never returns, and if I live, it is only to be more wretched. [Part I, Letter XXIX]

  It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to swallow such passages. Today, most of us do not think of an unmarried woman as ruined if she goes to bed with a man. Indeed, in both France and the United States, we have come to accept nonmarital sex as a norm. This was not the case in eighteenth-century France (not to mention colonial America), nor would it be until the late twentieth century. The theme of the “fallen woman” would continue to be a constant in literature until the post–World War II period, when sexual fulfillment began to be accepted as a good in itself. How can we empathize with literary figures who define virtue and vice so narrowly? Did Rousseau, following the dictates of continental and British culture, believe that it was enough for a woman to remain chaste for her to be virtuous? No, he did not. Though he used the vocabulary of virtue so dear to his contemporaries, it took on a new meaning with his pen.

  Virtue, for both men and women, was a question of character. The “virtuous” person was imbued with a heightened sensibility that made him or her more compassionate than the ordinary lot of humankind. Virtue became synonymous with sensibility: you had to have the capacity to feel, and hence to suffer, in order to empathize with the misfortunes of others. Only the person who had experienced suffering could put himself or herself in the place of others in distress. Sensibility was a prerequisite for suffering, and suffering was a prerequisite for acts of charity. Here and elsewhere in Rousseau’s oeuvre, the heart was to be trusted over the head in creating a moral life.

  Virtue was also linked to a sense of awe before the wonders of nature and a rejection of socially constructed artifice. Like Rousseau himself, notorious for his plain attire and rustic manners, Saint-Preux rejected the witticisms and formalities of high culture in favor of simplicity and sincerity. All the characters in La nouvelle Héloïse, with the exception of Julie’s father, are supreme examples of virtuous individuals. They create an ideal community of generous souls ensconced in a bucolic setting, far from the corrupting influences of big cities like Paris and London.

  When reduced to the plot, La nouvelle Héloïse does not shine among works of fiction. For modern readers, it probably lacks the suspenseful turn of events and subplots featured in today’s best-sellers. It is long, too long, and sometimes frankly boring. What saves La nouvelle Héloïse, even in a condensed version, is its dithyrambic style. It is hard not to be carried away by its poetic language. Every page has a passage worth reading aloud. Try this one from Saint-Preux after he receives a letter from Julie.

  I lose my reason, my head strays in continual delirium, a devouring flame consumes me, my blood takes fire and boils over, a frenzy causes me to tremble. I imagine I see you, touch you, press you to my breast . . . adored object, enchanting girl, source of delight and voluptuousness, seeing you, how can one not see the angelic companions created for the blessed? [Part II, Letter XVI]

  And here is Saint-Preux after Julie has sent him her portrait.

  Oh my Julie! . . . Once more you enchant my eyes. [ . . . ] With what anguish the portrait reminded me of the times which are no more! Seeing it, I imagined I was seeing you again; I imagined I found those delightful moments again, the memory of which now creates my life’s unhappiness. [ . . . ] Gods! What torrents of passion my avid eyes absorb from this unexpected object! [Part II, XXII]

  What torrents of words Saint-Preux unleashes in describing his feelings for the incomparable Julie—his pupil, friend, mistress, and lifelong love! How can she resist such an emotional onslaught? She cannot.

  It is too much, it is too much. Friend, you have conquered. I am not proof against so much love; my resistance is exhausted. . . .

  Yes, tender and generous lover, your Julie will be yours forever; she will love you always. I must, I will, I ought. I resign to you the empire which love has given you; it will be taken from you no more. [Part III, Letter XV]

  Saint-Preux’s spirits are revived, at least temporarily.

  We are reborn, my Julie. All the true sentiments of our hearts resume their courses. Nature has preserved our existence, and love restores us to life. Could you doubt it? Did you dare think you could take your heart away from me? No, I know it better than you do, that Heart which Heaven created for mine. I feel them joined in a common existence which they can lose only in death. [Part III, Letter XVI]

  Can you stand such hyperbolic language? It is likely that you are used to more reticent lovers. Living in an age of casual sex, serial commitments, and frequent divorce, we are all in danger of becoming as jaded as ancien régime aristocrats. Does the notion of undying love still have any meaning for us today? It does when brides and grooms vow to love each other forever, even if subsequent reality cuts short their vows. Who does not treasure the belief in a soul mate? Who does not wish to find someone to love, with the hope of being loved in return? If we still hold on to those hopes, it is partially due to La nouvelle Héloïse, which showed us what it felt to be alive at a time when the “divine union of virtue, love, and nature” captured the French imagination.

  The romance of Julie and Saint-Preux, however intense, is only one half of the story. The other half concerns Julie’s reluctant marriage to Monsieur de Wolmar and the family she creates with him. Julie and Saint-Preux do not end up marching down the aisle together. Yet her marriage to a man more than twice her age does not turn out to be unhappy. Quite the contrary! Julie discovers that life with a wise husband and two sons can be fulfilling, even without amour-passion. A different kind of love based on amitié (friendship) proves to be enduring. Wolmar is the antithesis of the stereotypical jealous husband; he has so much confidence in Julie that he even allows her to receive Saint-Preux as a part-time lodger in their country home after his return from a four-year voyage! Julie’s cousin, Claire, completes the idyllic foursome as they all pursue virtue in harmony with the bounties of nature.

  What are we to make of this unexpected turn of events? How does the second half of the book complement the first? Has Rousseau rejected his belief in fervent emotion as the source of virtue and felicity? To answer these questions about a novel with a thousand pages would require another book at least half that long, and, indeed, many such critical works have already been written. My advice is to read large chunks of La nouvelle Héloïse, if you can’t bear to read all of it. Only then can you decide whether it is merely a literary curiosity or whether its romantic transports and pragmatic solutions still have meaning for inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

  On the plane to Paris in September 2010, I read in a newspaper that Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos was still on the required list of readings for what the French call terminale—the last year of lycée studies. If ever there were a single example of the difference between French and American attitudes to education and sexuality, this is one! I can’t imagine any American high school allowing, much less requiring, the reading of a book like Les liaisons dangereuses in twelfth grade. We would have such an outcry from decency organizations as to make all previous protests seem like a whisp
er. No one in France thinks to critique this choice, but when I read it as a graduate student in my twenties, it struck me as the most subversive book I had ever read. It taught me the meaning of sexual perversity, albeit perversity with charm. As much as I condemned the leading characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, I was fascinated by them. And, I must admit, their machinations aroused me and filtered into my dreams. By then, I was a married woman with children and able to handle such erotic provocation.

  Les liaisons dangereuses is perhaps the most wickedly erotic book ever written. I defy anyone to read it without feeling the fires of lust. With Madame de Merteuil and Valmont engaged in a contest of seduction that ends catastrophically for everyone, this book has enjoyed a succès de scandale since it first appeared in print in 1782, and more recently in French and American films.

  In Les liaisons dangereuses, two young people, Cécile de Volanges and her music tutor, the Chevalier Danceny, experience the intense delights of first-time love. Modeled on Julie and Saint-Preux, they communicate their timid declarations and high ideals in carefully hidden letters. Their budding love is a world apart from the proprieties that would separate them on the grounds that Danceny lacks sufficient fortune. Though he is of noble birth like Cécile, her family rejects him, just as Julie’s family had rejected Saint-Preux. If this were a sentimental novel in the mode of Richardson’s Pamela, true love would win out in the end. But this is no ordinary novel. Instead, Laclos undermines the novel of sentiment; he reverses every feeling held sacred by the author of La nouvelle Héloïse and demonstrates how easily lovers can betray their own ideals when led astray by determined seducers.

  And what seducers! The Marquise de Merteuil and her former paramour, the Vicomte de Valmont, are utterly enticing, diabolically clever, and pragmatically evil. As representatives of ancien régime decadence, they live only for sensual pleasure, moving from one lover to the next with little concern for the person who has been left behind. As long as they are the ones who do the abandoning, their self-esteem will remain intact. Valmont can also boast publicly about his conquests, whereas Madame de Merteuil must keep hers hidden. Even as a widow, she must feign chastity if she is to be received in the best circles. Not so for Valmont. The more women he is known to have seduced, the higher his stock. This difference between the sexes features prominently as the plot unwinds.

  At the beginning of the book, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, once lovers, remain friends who share a common agenda: to indulge their erotic appetites through successive affairs but never to fall in love. Both think of these affairs as conquests and, following the military vocabulary that informs their speech, they must always be the ones who decide when to invade, when to withdraw, and when to seek revenge. Madame de Merteuil’s desire for revenge sets the plot in motion. She enlists Valmont to seduce the young Cécile, who has been promised by her family to the Comte de Gercourt, one of the Marquise’s former lovers. Because Gercourt had left Madame de Merteuil for another mistress, she will not be satisfied until he finds himself with a thoroughly debauched bride.

  But Valmont has his own program. When he receives his orders from the Marquise to seduce Cécile, he is already in pursuit of Madame de Tourvel, the notoriously chaste wife of a provincial dignitary. Valmont has built his much-envied reputation on the basis of multiple conquests, and he has no intention of flubbing this one. Handsome, endowed with title and fortune, he represents the consummate libertine seducer. The three female characters incarnate various aspects of womanhood. Cécile is a sensuous ingénue, ready to be plucked. Madame de Tourvel is a repressed sentimentalist, also ready to be plucked. Madame de Merteuil is a perverse feminist, in her words to Valmont, “born to avenge my sex and to dominate yours.”7

  Compared to the sublimely virtuous characters in La nouvelle Héloïse, the main figures in Les liaisons dangereuses are either perpetrators of vice or their victims. The perpetrators—Valmont and Merteuil—are ingeniously cruel, she even more than he. The victims—Cécile, Danceny, and Tourvel—are trusting and gullible. Two of them end up dead, one retires to a convent, another becomes a knight of Malta, and one lives on with disfiguring smallpox and the loss of an eye. You will have to read the book to find out who gets what. Believe me, once you start to read it, you’ll be transfixed till the end.

  Yes, I cannot deny it—Les liaisons dangereuses is a more compelling work than La nouvelle Héloïse. As in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which offers better material for the Inferno than for the Paradiso, Laclos’ depiction of evil has an irresistible demonic appeal. In addition, the epistolary style he borrowed from Richardson and Rousseau turns out to be the perfect medium for conveying the relentless progress of Merteuil and Valmont’s infernal strategies. Not a single word is wasted. Everything proceeds with machinelike efficiency. Whatever goodness existed in the fledgling love between Cécile and Danceny, and in Madame de Tourvel’s tender feelings for Valmont, and even in Valmont’s attentions to Madame de Tourvel, will be swept away by gallantry run amok. Laclos’ contemporary, the writer Nicolas Chamfort, succinctly expressed this dissolute and solely materialistic aspect of gallantry in one of his most famous epigrams: “Love, as it exists in society, is only the contact of two epidermises.”

  And yet, hidden within Les liaisons dangereuses, one finds whispers of Valmont’s love for Madame de Tourvel and even that of the Marquise de Merteuil for Valmont. Ironically, it is this tender love—this love engaging the heart as well as the body—that dares not say its name. Madame de Merteuil spots true love in Valmont’s letters about Madame de Tourvel, and, motivated by jealousy, she forces him to live up to his reputation as a coldhearted seducer. So true love, though still capable of sprouting within a hostile environment, is ultimately crushed by sadistic libertinage.

  Having consciously avoided the word “sadistic” up till now, I have intentionally used it here to imply that at least one of the perpetrators—Madame de Merteuil—gets pleasure out of inflicting pain on others. The word “sadism,” meaning a sexual perversion characterized by the enjoyment of cruelty to others, derives specifically from the work of the Marquis de Sade. His novel Justine, published in 1791 at the height of the French Revolution, and others that appeared despite his many years in prison and the madhouse, carry the libertinage of Crébillon fils and Laclos to new depths of horror. Sade’s heroines are submitted to verbal abuse, physical torture, rape, and other repugnant forms of violence. His fictional libertines lack guilt and remorse and do not get their just desserts. What, you may be asking, does any of this have to do with love? It’s a good question, one that I pondered when asked by a French friend if I intended to address Sade in this book. My friend insisted that I must do so since Sade understood the link between love and evil better than any other thinker. To admit that I can’t bear to read Sade, that he makes me sick, and that I don’t intend to inflict him on my readers may speak to intellectual cowardice. So be it.

  I’ve heard enough personal stories in my life to know that some people, mostly men, get their sexual highs by manipulating, abusing, or beating up on women. Here is one told to me not long ago by a Frenchwoman.

  Dominique is a lively lady nearing sixty, well bred, nice looking, divorced, and the mother of two ravishing daughters. Since her divorce, she has worked part-time in a fine jewelry store, where her taste and warmth are much appreciated. I’ve never met a person who seemed happier.

  Yet, as I learned recently, Dominique lived a secret horror for almost thirty years. Her husband was a sadistic pervert. He could make love only by humiliating her, insulting her, making her cry, then taking her violently.

  On top of that, she discovered fairly early in the marriage that he was bedding anyone else he could lay his hands on, mostly young women working in the company he directed, women wanting to get ahead professionally in return for sexual favors.

  Why did Dominique stay in the marriage so long? Her answer: because of the children. She got some satisfaction by taking a lover,
who helped restore confidence in herself as a sexual being. Then, with the aid of a psy (that’s the French term for a shrink), she ultimately asked for a divorce, at which point her husband ran off with someone the age of their daughters. Dominique still has nightmares about her husband’s sadistic practices, but in the daytime she leads a very active life. No, she is no longer with her former lover, who was offered a job in another country. She would like to find someone else, just a decent man who has normal sexual needs. Still, she considers herself lucky to be rid of a husband who was, in her words, “right out of a novel by the Marquis de Sade.”

  To schematize the period stretching from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the end of the century, I have tried to show how the French repackaged love in two competing brands: libertinage and sentimentalism. The first brand exaggerated the immoral aspects of gallantry, spreading sexual license from the nobility to the middle and lower classes, and to women as well as to men. The fictions of Prévost, Crébillon fils, and Laclos bore witness to the corrosive presence of libertinage in ancien régime France. The second brand of love accentuated feeling. Sentiment, emotion, tenderness, passion—these were the hallmarks of a true lover. With Rousseau leading the charge, sentimentalism spread its empire among the entire reading public, starting with the bourgeoisie and extending upward to the nobility and downward to the lower classes. Lawyers and administrators, the wives of merchants and doctors, unmarried governesses and shop girls—all professed devotion to sentimental love.