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

by Marilyn Yalom

  Ultimately, of course, Philippe saw the truth and a wedding date was set, but then another major obstacle occurred. Philippe was sent on a special mission by the Committee of Public Safety. While the lovers were separated, Elisabeth bombarded Robespierre with entreaties to bring Philippe home. She readily admitted: “I was having so much pain that I did not want to be a patriot any longer. I was inconsolable. . . . My health suffered considerably.” Lovesickness held on to its literal meaning.

  Finally Philippe was brought home long enough for the wedding to take place and long enough for Elisabeth to become pregnant. They would have barely a year of conjugal intimacy before Le Bas lost his life in the catastrophe of the ninth of Thermidor. Based on the revolutionary calendar, this date referred to the coup of July 27, 1794, when Robespierre and his close associates were brought down by their own excesses and their political enemies.

  In Elisabeth’s account, we witness revolutionary trauma invading the household. As soon as her husband was arrested, government officials came to close their apartment and take away all their personal papers. Le Bas went to face his destiny at the Hôtel de Ville. Elisabeth recorded his last, patriotically inspired words, intended for their son. “Nourish him with your own milk . . . inspire in him the love of his country; tell him that his father has died for her; adieu, my Elisabeth, adieu! . . . Live for our dear son; inspire him with noble sentiments, you are worthy of them. Adieu, Adieu!”

  She writes that she never saw Le Bas again. She does not say that he shot himself several hours later in the same room in which Maximilien was already gravely wounded and from which Augustin Robespierre threw himself out the window. Instead, she paints her own despair in the Duplay house.

  I went home distraught, almost crazy. Imagine what I felt when our dear infant stretched out his little arms to me. . . . From the ninth to the eleventh [of Thermidor] I remained on the floor. I no longer had strength nor consciousness.

  As Elisabeth lay unconscious on the floor, the mob carried Robespierre and the rest of his political clan past her house on their way to the guillotine. Shortly thereafter, members of the Committee of Public Safety came for Elisabeth and her baby. Judged guilty by association with her husband, she was incarcerated with her son in the Talarue Prison. Her life situation could not have been worse: “I had been a mother for five weeks; I was nursing my son; I was less than twenty-one years old; I had been deprived of almost everything.”

  The prison ordeal bred in Elisabeth a wild rage. When propositioned by government agents to marry one of the deputies and thus “abandon the infamous name” of her husband, she cried out, “Tell those monsters that the Widow Le Bas will never abandon that sacred name except on the scaffold.” Such defiance in the face of prolonged incarceration derived from an imperishable love for her dead husband and an intractable belief in the righteousness of his cause. Clinging to her married name, she emerged from prison after nine months as a force to be reckoned with. Until her death in 1859, she proclaimed republican principles and continued to cherish Le Bas’ memory.

  The Revolution had nourished and then destroyed her one great love; she clung to that memory in old age as to a life raft. For the rest of her days—a full sixty-five years—she would look back nostalgically to the period from the fall of 1792 to the summer of 1794 as the paradise from which she had been violently ejected.

  While Elisabeth Le Bas’ short memoir is virtually unknown, that of Madame Roland is the best-known eyewitness chronicle of the Revolution.3 She, too, was a political prisoner by virtue of her husband’s involvement in revolutionary politics. During her five-month incarceration, before she was sent to the guillotine, she wrote both a history of revolutionary events and her private memoirs. The latter interest us here because they touch upon love both inside and outside a long-standing marriage.

  Before her marriage, Marie-Jeanne Manon Phlipon was something of a bluestocking, dissatisfied with her lot as a woman. She wrote to a friend in 1776: “I am truly vexed to be a woman: I should have been born with a different soul or a different sex . . . then I could have chosen the republic of letters as my country.” Later, converted to the cult of domesticity by her passion for Rousseau, she followed the path of Julie in the second half of La nouvelle Héloïse by marrying a man twenty years her senior and giving herself unstintingly to wifehood and motherhood. Hers was a marriage of mutual esteem, nourished by shared values and goals. There was none of the passion we find in eighteenth-century novels or in the life of Julie de Lespinasse. Manon’s husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, was a distinguished lawyer who became minister of the interior from 1791 to 1793. In that role, he relied heavily on his highly literary wife, his secret aid in drafting many of his letters and circulars. In the eyes of the world, they formed an exemplary couple.

  But Manon had a secret. She had fallen in love with another man, François Buzot, a member of the extreme-left deputies. They wrote letters when one or the other was away from Paris, and Manon admitted in her memoirs that her liaison with him had become “intimate, inalterable” and “binding.” Elsewhere, without mentioning Buzot’s name, she wrote: “I cherish my husband as a sensitive daughter adores a virtuous father to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but I found the man who could be that lover . . .” What happened then? Manon tells us only that she confessed this love to her husband. One wonders: was she inspired by the confession in La Princesse de Clèves? Or by Wolmar’s acceptance of Julie’s prior passion for Saint-Preux in La nouvelle Héloïse? Those husbands were fictional paragons of understanding; hers was not. He “could not support the idea of the slightest change in his dominion; his imagination blackened, his jealousy irritated me, happiness fled far from us.”

  Although Madame Roland never named Buzot as the man responsible for the change in her marital relations, elsewhere she described him in terms more befitting a lover than a statesman. He was “sensitive, ardent, melancholic and lazy. . . . A passionate contemplator of nature . . . he seems to be made to taste and procure domestic happiness; he would forget the universe in the sweetness of private virtues with a heart worthy of his own.” That heart worthy of Buzot’s could only be hers. Madame Roland does not seem to have been troubled by the existence of Buzot’s wife, dismissed parenthetically as not being on the level of her spouse.

  The secret story of Madame Roland’s unconsummated love had created a breach between husband and wife that was still unreconciled at the time of his flight from Paris and Manon’s imprisonment. A memoir to perpetuate her husband’s glory would be one way of expunging the blemish on her marital record. As a disciple of Rousseau, Madame Roland would not deny the claims of the heart; she believed that she and Buzot, like Julie and Saint-Preux, would be united beyond the grave. In a final farewell she cried out to Buzot: “And you whom I dare not name! . . . who respected the barriers of virtue . . . will grieve to see me go before you to a place where we shall be free to love each other without crime.”

  Both Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland were born into the bourgeois milieu that prescribed chastity for unmarried women and monogamy for spouses. Parents were the final arbiters of marital choices, and husbands had dominion over their wives. As opposed to the aristocratic culture of the ancien régime, infidelity was not tolerated, especially for women. At the same time, the subversive voices of philosophers, political thinkers, dramatists, and novelists were beginning to shake up the system. Questions about authority, be it in government or family, were raised openly as never before.

  Rousseau, of course, led the critics of existing society by laying bare its vices, and by proposing a morality that issued from the heart. His elder contemporary and sometime adversary Voltaire attacked him for his trust in emotion, just as he attacked the German philosopher Leibniz in his satiric masterpiece, Candide (1759), for his optimistic belief in divine providence. Attacks against religion and traditional hierarchies were the order of the day, even if they had to be published in Amsterdam or London to avoid the French censor.r />
  One attack that succeeded on home ground was Beaumarchais’ phenomenally successful play The Marriage of Figaro (1784). Beaumarchais dared to question the right of aristocrats to command wealth, rank, and public office, while others had to use all their wits just to survive. The family servant, Figaro, vilifies his master, Count Almaviva, behind his back: “What have you done to have so much? You’ve hardly given yourself the trouble to be born.” Figaro’s fury had been aroused by the count’s attempts to sleep with the countess’s lady-in-waiting, Suzanne, whom Figaro wants to marry. Aided by Figaro and Suzanne, the countess turns the tables on her philandering husband: she disguises herself as Suzanne, seduces her own husband, and then, in a hilarious scene, exposes him publicly and forces him to retreat from his predatory plan.

  Some women in real life went further: they expected equality with men and even dominance over them. Think of the social and political power that Madame du Barry and Madame de Pompadour exercised as official mistresses of the king. Think of Madame du Deffand, Madame Geoffrin, and Julie de Lespinasse, who showcased philosophers, scientists, authors, and artists in their prestigious salons and pulled strings throughout society to advance their favorites. Think of Olympe de Gouges, who issued her own proclamations in favor of women’s rights during the Revolution and ended up on the guillotine. Several notable women, like Sophie de Condorcet, the wife of the mathematician and statesman Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, and Marie-Anne Lavoisier, the wife of the famous chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, enjoyed happy companionate marriages, before their husbands were destroyed by the Revolution.

  Madame Roland came close to this ideal of companionate felicity. For most of her marriage, she seems to have been a good wife and mother and a helpmeet to her husband in every way. Following the code of conduct advocated by Rousseau, she practiced the virtues of simplicity, economy, and breast-feeding. A return to breast-feeding, as opposed to the common practice of sending babies out to wet nurses, was one of the fundamental changes considered necessary for the regeneration of society.4 Philippe Le Bas maintained that position when he asked Elisabeth during their courtship if she intended to breast-feed her babies and, right before his death, when he reminded her to nurse their son with her own milk.

  Republican love was supposed to take into account the greater society and become part of the general good. It was expected to go hand in hand with virtue, which meant refraining from sex until marriage and remaining monogamous within marriage. It also meant producing children for the nation and nursing them with the mother’s milk. Gone were the excesses of gallantry, with its seductive retinue of affairs, mistresses, and lovers. Republican lovers and spouses were equated with good citizens, taught to sacrifice their personal desires for the well-being of their families and their country. But as we saw in the case of Madame Roland, the heart’s reasons were not always politically correct.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Yearning for the Mother

  Constant, Stendhal, and Balzac

  THE COUNTESS ENVELOPED ME IN NOURISHING PROTECTION, IN THE WHITE DRAPERIES OF AN ENTIRELY MATERNAL LOVE.

  Balzac, The Lily of the Valley, 1835

  Title page of Stendhal’s De l’amour (On Love), 1822. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale.

  The sexual initiation of a young man by an older woman is what the French call a “sentimental education.” The roots of this tradition reach back to the Middle Ages, when courtly love privileged the attachment of a young knight to a high-born lady, and to the Renaissance, when no less a personage than King Henri II took as his official mistress Diane de Poitiers, a woman twenty years his senior. And, as we have seen in The Wayward Head and Heart, the adolescent protagonist made his sexual debut with his mother’s friend when he was seventeen and she was around forty.

  But it was not until Rousseau’s Confessions, published posthumously in 1782 and 1790, that the maternal component of such liaisons was laid bare. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had lost his mother in childbirth and was raised in Geneva by his unstable watchmaker father. Then, when Rousseau was ten, his father simply decamped and Rousseau found himself both motherless and fatherless. He received minimal schooling and underwent two apprenticeships before taking off from Switzerland on his own at the age of sixteen. Wandering about France, he found a benevolent protectress in Louise de Warens, a woman twelve years his senior, who had left her husband and settled in the Savoy region of France. She sheltered Rousseau on and off for twelve years. When she suggested that it was time for his sexual initiation, he was a reluctant lover. Yet, once Maman (Mommy) had made up her mind, he could not refuse. Afterward, he was grateful for this further proof of her love: “I became her work, totally; her child, totally, and even more than if she had been my true mother.”

  Similar liaisons became the theme of countless eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. For ambitious young men, sleeping with an older married woman was a rite of passage that launched them, not only into sexuality but also into society and professional opportunities. The following examples, taken from life and literature, explore this particular socio-erotic variation on love.

  Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant lost his mother in childbirth and thereafter yearned for a mother substitute. He found one in a number of women, including the amazing Isabelle de Charrière, twenty-seven years his senior, and the even more amazing Germaine de Staël, only one year older than he was but already a wife, a mother, and a formidable cultural force when he first met her in 1794. The story of their stormy relation over a period of fifteen years has inspired numerous biographies and fictionalized accounts, and none better than Constant’s own compact novel, Adolphe.

  Madame de Staël (1766–1817) was, without a doubt, the most impressive woman of her generation. As the only child of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s Swiss-born finance minister, and his influential wife, Suzanne, Germaine Necker was brought up to take her place both at the French court and among France’s most brilliant thinkers. With her dowry of 650,000 pounds, she made a prestigious marriage to the Swedish ambassador, Baron de Staël-Holstein, though she never learned to love him. Never mind: marriage was the gateway to freedom and to her many lovers, starting with the Abbé de Talleyrand, who would become the most cynically immoral and politically successful ecclesiastic of his age. By the time she encountered Constant, she had already been madly in love several times, and her passionate affair with the Vicomte de Narbonne had produced a son, whom she passed off as her husband’s. She had also been actively involved in revolutionary politics as the salon leader of a moderate group that argued for a constitutional monarchy and tried, unsuccessfully, to save the king and queen from the guillotine.

  Constant shared Madame de Staël’s liberal views and would become not only her lover but also her political protégé after the Revolution. Under her tutelage, he was appointed to the twenty-member Tribunate, a position he held for three years until Napoleon dismissed him. Napoleon lost no opportunity to inflict pain upon Madame de Staël. It was not in his nature to tolerate a brilliant, articulate woman who supported liberal causes. By 1803 Napoleon ordered her exile to Switzerland, and it was there at her Château de Coppet that she and Constant played out their tempestuous drama. Constant depended on her for almost everything. Without a career, without a family of his own, he lived under her wing. Moreover, Constant was the father of Germaine’s last child, Albertine, born on 1797, again passed off as her husband’s. But life at Coppet was a torment for both of them. Constant noted in a diarylike text called Amélie et Germaine on January 6, 1803: “For a long time now, I have felt no love for Germaine. . . . A great intellectual rapport draws us together. But can this last? My heart, my imagination, and above all my senses crave love.”

  From his diary entries, we know that Constant had frequent recourse to prostitutes. We also know that he and Germaine quarreled incessantly, sometimes until three or four in the morning. Words like “torture,” “fury,” and “anguish” explode on every page of his private writing. He could no lon
ger tolerate her dominating nature but vacillated in his desire to break away. She knew he no longer loved her, yet she could not let him go. At times he wanted to marry her, but she refused on the grounds that such a marriage would be beneath her station and compromise her children’s future. It was a nightmare for both of them.

  This is the “maternal” nightmare that Constant activates in his novel. Adolphe, Constant’s fictional alter ego, becomes entangled with Ellénore, a woman of Polish origin who is ten years his senior. She leaves her aristocratic protector, with whom she has had two children, for a man in his twenties with no position. What began in sensual delight soon metamorphosed into a prolonged battle between Adolphe’s fluctuating commitment and Ellénore’s impassioned tenacity. The echoes of Constant’s tumultuous relationship with Madame de Staël reverberate throughout the novel.

  The scene became stormy. We broke out in mutual recriminations. . . . There are things which for a long time are left unsaid, but once they are said, one never stops repeating them. . . . Had I loved her as she loved me, she would have been calmer. . . . A senseless rage took hold of us; all circumspection was abandoned, all delicacy forgotten. It was as if the Furies were urging us on against each other.1

  Despite their mutual recriminations and Adolphe’s waning love for Ellénore, he follows her to Poland, where she, unexpectedly, has regained her inheritance. His father tries to dissuade him: “So what do you expect to do? She is ten years older than you; you are twenty-six; you will look after her for ten more years; she will be old; you will have reached the middle of your life, without having started anything, without having completed anything that satisfies you.” His father’s warnings are to no avail.

  Isolated in his mistress’s Polish retreat, the narrator becomes increasingly dejected and bitter. Whatever love he had felt at the beginning of their liaison dissolves into mere pity and a sense of duty. She, however, never loses her passion for him. The emotional disparity between them results in endless rows.