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

by Marilyn Yalom

  Whereas in real life Constant eventually broke away from Madame de Staël and went on to a distinguished career as a politician and writer, Adolphe finds his freedom only when Ellénore dies. It’s the oldest ploy in fiction: kill off the woman. But as he realizes retrospectively, his freedom does not bring him happiness. “How heavily it weighed on me, that freedom for which I had longed so much! . . . I was indeed free; I was no longer loved; I was a stranger to everyone.”

  Adolphe will always be a stranger adrift in the world because his own core is hollow. His attachment to a mother figure from whom he cannot escape, even after her death, begs a psychological interpretation. There are some men who, for want of satisfactory mothering, never grow up, or grow up very late in life. A surrogate mother, like Madame de Warens for Rousseau, like Madame de Staël for Constant, may help repair early maternal loss, but not without painful struggle. The filial nature of the erotic relationship with a substitute mother is fraught with classic ambivalence: the young man comes to resent the older woman’s authority and protectiveness while simultaneously craving it. Can one truly love the mother in another woman? This is the question animating the greatest novel of sublimated maternal love: The Red and the Black by Stendhal.

  In 1976, I published an article on Stendhalian love.2 It was a strictly Freudian interpretation of how Stendhal’s unconscious Oedipal struggle filtered into his novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. At that time in my life, I was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, due largely to the life I shared with my husband, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom. The following discussion is based mainly on that article, amended by latter-day feminist insights.

  In Stendhal’s autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, the fifty-two-year-old writer recalled his passionate childhood love for his mother and concurrent intense hatred for his father.

  I wanted to cover my mother with kisses, and without any clothes on. She loved me passionately and often kissed me; I returned her kisses with such fervor that she was often forced to go away. I abhorred my father when he came to interrupt our kisses. I always wanted to kiss her bosom. Please be kind enough to remember that I lost her in childhood when I was barely seven.3

  With an intuitive comprehension of the psychology of love that antedated Freud’s clinical observations, Stendhal understood that this original love for his mother served as the prototype for later love experiences: “When I loved her at about the age of six in 1789, I showed exactly the same characteristics as in 1828 when I was in love with Alberthe de Rubempré. My way of pursuing happiness was basically unchanged.” He was, however, not fully aware of the essentially triangular nature of his feelings, which always included a father figure.

  Triangular love permeates both The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, with a triad consisting of the hero (the author’s alter ego), the woman he loves, and another man, either the husband or the father of the beloved woman. The adult Stendhal had often found himself in the position of the terzo incomodo (the third wheel). What sweet revenge to transfer that unflattering role to a fictive husband or father figure!

  In The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel’s original family configuration resembles that of Stendhal after the age of seven: mother deceased, father despised, mutual incomprehension between father and son. Barely nineteen and with the pretty-boy face of youth, Julien seeks both father and mother substitutes at the home of the mayor of Verrières. The mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, is hardly a likable character, but he does have the advantage of a charming wife. Freud might say that Rênal becomes the “injured third party,” an opponent who satisfies the hero’s psychological need to take a woman away from a patriarchal male, as in the primal family scene.

  Let me backtrack and lay out the bare outline of the novel. Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter with brutal peasant ways, is taken under the wing of a retired surgeon who had served under Napoleon. Napoleon’s fall and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy make it necessary for Julien to hide his Napoleonic sympathies, especially after he becomes the protégé of the village priest, Chélan. With Chélan’s instruction, Julien learns to read, write, and speak Latin, and becomes a local prodigy capable of reciting from memory any part of the New Testament in Latin.

  Such impressive, if limited, erudition earns him a place as tutor in the home of Monsieur de Rênal. Before long, Julien seduces Madame de Rênal, a mother in her thirties. No doubt Stendhal was influenced by La nouvelle Héloïse, as he himself acknowledged in many ways throughout the novel; yet The Red and the Black strikes an entirely new note in literature. Julien is an original type, lucidly aware of his own failings and cynically conscious of the hypocritical society in which he must make his way. He also demonstrates genuine passion and generosity: what began as willful seduction on his part turns into a great reciprocal love.

  It is true that after his first night with Madame de Rênal, Julien pronounces those words that have troubled many readers: “My God! To be happy, to be loved, that’s all it is?”4 His main concern is whether he has lived up to expectations. “Did I play my role well?” Apparently he had played it well enough, for from that night forth Madame de Rênal loves him with the strength of a lioness defending her cub. She will prove herself daring and resourceful, playful and passionate, youthful and mature in responding to the needs of her ardent lover.

  Her only worry lies in their age disparity. “Alas, I’m too old for him; I’m ten years older than he.” Julien never consciously thinks about their age difference. He cannot get over the fact that he—a poor, unhappy, lowborn creature—could be loved by such a noble and beautiful woman. During the idyllic months when Madame de Rênal receives Julien in her bedroom late at night, his love for her and his confidence in himself grow exponentially. But like all paradises, this one, too, will be lost.

  An anonymous letter sent to Monsieur de Rênal by a jealous party forces Julien to leave the mayor’s home and enter a seminary in Besançon, where he is to train for the priesthood. Once again he finds a father figure, in the person of the austere seminary director, Abbé Pirard. However miserable he is among the seminarians, Julien manages to distinguish himself through his learning and apparent probity. Then, through Pirard’s good offices, he lands an unexpectedly fortunate position in Paris as private secretary to the Marquis de La Mole, a nobleman of great lineage and influence. Once again Julien has to prove himself the equal of those born to rank and fortune, and he does. After all, this is a novel. Where else do all our wishes come true?

  In Paris, Julien embarks upon another love affair, this time with the proud and beautiful Mathilde de La Mole, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Julien’s protector. While she is socially superior and initially treats him with disdain, she proves no match for Julien’s cunning and daring. Ultimately she finds herself pregnant and wants to marry him. Only a genius like Stendhal could have imagined the convoluted plot that ultimately satisfies Mathilde de La Mole. Here I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the pleasure of the first-time reader.

  Suffice it to say that Julien ultimately returns to Madame de Rênal with the realization that she is the only one he has truly loved. Why does he reject Mathilde de La Mole, a woman his own age, and fall back upon a married mother a decade older than himself? One can scarcely avoid the incestuous dimension of this love, so satisfying to the hero (and author). It is she, the mother-mistress, who corresponds most completely to his deepest needs, for she loves him naturally, spontaneously, totally, sexually, and maternally. Julien’s ultimate return to Madame de Rênal demonstrates the hero’s inability to transfer his love from the mother figure to a more suitable love object. The primary bond remains unsevered and proves stronger than any subsequent relationship.

  But Julien does not get off lightly. Union with the mother is tabooed. It implies an injured third party in the husband-father, and an accompanying sense of guilt, however unconscious. The father may be done in, as in Oedipus the King, but he is never done away with. He exists in the very i
dea of the judicial system that arrests and tries Julien for attempted murder. As the pace quickens, the reader is swept along breathlessly to the sensational end.

  Rousseau and Constant never knew their mothers. Stendhal lost his at the age of seven. Balzac’s mother sent him to a wet nurse in the country and barely visited during the four years he remained there. Then, when he returned to the family home in Tours, neither she nor her husband paid him much attention. If we are to believe his later memories, he was brought up in a cold, intimidating atmosphere that stunted his psychological growth for years to come. The fictive re-creation of a loveless childhood in his novel The Lily of the Valley is bathed in pathos. I would call it Dickensian if it weren’t for the fact that Balzac influenced Dickens, rather than vice versa. Both were masters in depicting monstrously egotistic adults and pitiful children.

  Félix de Vandenesse, the young hero of Lily of the Valley, cries out in pain: “What physical or moral disgrace in me caused my mother’s coldness? . . . Sent to a wet nurse in the country, forgotten by my family for three years, when I returned to the paternal home, I counted for so little that people looked upon me with compassion.”5

  Unsure of himself and mistrustful of everyone, he spent eight years in a Catholic boarding school living the life of a pariah. It didn’t help that his father gave him only three francs a month for spending money, whereas the other boys could permit themselves toys and sweets and other marks of parental largesse. Even when he won the two most important school prizes, neither his mother nor his father came to the awards ceremony. At fifteen he was sent to live with a conservative family in Paris, while he attended the Lycée Charlemagne. There too he suffered from his parents’ indifference and frugality and was as miserable as before. Like most adolescents, he began to feel the stirrings of sexuality, but finding no outlet, he passed his twentieth year tormented by “repressed desires . . . I was still small, skinny, and pale . . . a child in my body and old in my thoughts.”

  It is necessary to keep Félix’s background in mind as we read the scene of his decisive encounter with a woman. When Félix returns to Tours, his mother still treats him as an “unnatural son,” but because political events have unseated Napoleon and brought about the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Félix is called upon to represent his royalist family at a ball given for Louis XVIII. Suddenly he has decent clothing. Suddenly he finds himself in the midst of elegant women with dazzling attire and sparkling diamonds. “Carried like a straw into this whirlpool,” he becomes unwell and takes refuge on a bench, where he slumps down like “a child ready to fall asleep while waiting for his mother.” At this moment, a woman sits down on the bench with her back to Félix. He is so overcome by her perfume and by the whiteness of her neck and shoulders that he does the unthinkable. Suddenly he takes to kissing her back “like a child who throws himself upon his mother’s breast.” The woman is, to say the least, astonished. She draws herself up with the “movement of a queen” and leaves the besotted young man to contemplate how ridiculously he has behaved.

  Henceforth Félix goes in search of the woman with the beautiful shoulders. Since this is a Balzac novel, he finds her immediately and almost by chance. Madame de Mortsauf lives with her older husband and two young children in the poetic Touraine countryside. She is as divinely beautiful from the front as she was from the back and corresponds exactly to Félix’s dream of an ethereal angel. And that is exactly what she will remain throughout the book, despite his need for a flesh-and-blood woman. Madame de Mortsauf, whom he privately addresses as Henriette, is given to maternity and to religion as others are given to sex, sports, or business affairs. She calls Félix her child and refers to herself as his mother. They talk together of love, but only on an airy plane where spirits commune with each other like angels. For the most part, Félix accepts the angelic contract she offers him, content to kiss her hand even when his body calls out for fuller pleasures. He tells himself: “I had no other ambition than that of loving Henriette.”

  It takes little effort for the reader to understand why Félix regresses to the state of a baby and experiences in his early twenties the love he was deprived of as a child. At the same time, he is not a baby, and adult demands refuse to be silenced: “I loved her with a double love that unleashed, one by one, the thousand arrows of desire.”

  Ultimately, after six years of platonic love, Félix succumbs to the seductive wiles of an energetic Englishwoman, Lady Dudley, who trails behind her a husband and two sons. By now Félix has attained a position in the world as private secretary to the king, Louis XVIII. He should be content with his lot as the acknowledged lover of a passionate woman while still retaining his filial ties to his chaste beloved. But of course he is not. As he explains to Henriette, “you soar victoriously above her, she is a woman of the earth, the daughter of fallen races, and you are the daughter of heaven, the adored angel.” He tells her that Lady Dudley knows “you have all of my heart and she has only my flesh. . . . For you the soul, for you my thoughts, for you, pure love, for you youth and old age; for her desires and pleasures of a fugitive passion.”

  Balzac has conveniently divided womanhood into the prototypes of the madonna and the whore, each satisfying a different part of his nature. That one of these figures is French and the other English allows him to praise the Frenchwoman excessively at the expense of her English counterpart. Rarely will you find pages so outrageously chauvinistic as those written to compare the love of a Frenchwoman with that of an Englishwoman. Balzac is not known for his moderation.

  In the end, Balzac kills off Henriette, as so many French authors have done to heroines before and after him, but not before delivering a whopping surprise in her final death agony. I leave that for you to discover. And in the very last pages of the book, in a letter written to Félix by a certain Nathalie, we see that Balzac is capable of critiquing his own creation. However heartfelt his identification with the young Félix, however idealistic his portrayal of the angelic mother, Balzac turns the tables on his hero and takes him to task for his refusal to grow up. Nathalie, to whom Félix has turned for affection, writes him that he can “taste happiness only with dead women.” She is not about to step into the perilous space left empty by Henriette and Lady Dudley. For the moment, Félix de Vandenesse is left stranded in a loveless no-man’s-land, still craving the woman who will bring together his yearning for the mother and his physical need for a mistress-wife. I say “for the moment” because Félix will reappear in nine other novels, all part of the capacious oeuvre Balzac called The Human Comedy.

  Is it possible for any living woman today to identify with these mother figures created to fill the psychological needs of men with incestuous longings? As a woman and a mother, I feel no sisterhood with either the mindlessly passionate Ellénore or the saintly Henriette. Only Madame de Rênal comes across as the reflection of a real person, someone whose hesitations and anxieties, transports and fleeting happiness, concerns for her greater age and fear of losing her lover, and simultaneous worries about her children and husband all ring true. More than any other male author, Stendhal endowed women with a credible female psyche. Perhaps he could do this because he carried within him vestigial memories of a loving mother and was not merely prey to unrealistic fantasies of a mother he had never known.

  Any lovers who have a double-digit age disparity between them would do well to read The Red and the Black. I recommended it several years ago to a young man in his twenties who had come from Brussels to study in Paris soon after his mother’s death. He was lodging with his French aunt—his mother’s younger sister—and her husband in the Latin Quarter while attending the Sorbonne. At the request of his aunt, I met with him to discuss the possibilities of literary studies in the United States. During the course of our conversation over a glass of wine in a café near the Panthéon, his mood changed from cautious to confiding. He let me know that he and his aunt were on intimate terms. Since she was over fifty, I wondered how that made him feel. “It’s a prob
lem for her, but not for me.” And how did he feel about the uncle? “Now that’s a problem.” He felt guilty receiving bed and board at his uncle’s expense and wondered how long he could possibly stay with them. At the end of our conversation, he promised me he would read The Red and the Black.

  His aunt had put him in her grown son’s room. She took him with her to various social events, called him “my adoptive son,” and spared no effort to help him in his career. He eventually became a journalist and returned to his home country. Within a year of his departure, his aunt developed cancer and rapidly met a premature death. When I visited her mournful husband, he told me that he had not been blind to the affair. “David came along just when she needed him.” Their own son had recently moved away and she had keenly felt his absence. “At least she had a little pleasure before she disappeared.” It was strange for me to sit in that familiar apartment, where I had come to offer my condolences and where every piece of furniture and bibelot spoke to the dead woman’s presence. It was stranger still to hear her husband speak dispassionately, almost nostalgically, about his wife’s affair with a man half her age. I can’t imagine this scene taking place in my American homeland, or anywhere else but in France.

  The motif of the young man in love with an older woman, and vice versa, is quintessentially French. It does not appear significantly in German, English, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, or American literature, though surely—if Freud is correct—boys from these countries are also subject to the same Oedipal evolution. So what is there in French culture that gets added on to a person’s psychological development to create this socio-erotic pattern? Here are a few of my musings on that question.

  1. The French eroticize everything, including the relation of mother and son. Most French mothers have no trouble caressing their children, boys and girls, and words like mon chéri and ma chérie fall from their lips even when the children are adults. I have seen French boys of twelve and fourteen cuddling up to their mothers in ways that would be unthinkable to most American boys of that age. Some of us remember the film Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart), in which a mother sleeps with her adolescent son and nothing terrible happens to either of them. Once again, a film that could have been made only in France!