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

by Marilyn Yalom

  In an attempt to cure him of despair, Octave’s friend, Desgenais, offers a brutal critique of love. His anti-romantic tract at the beginning of the book reaches back to eighteenth-century libertines (Versac in The Wayward Head and Heart, Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons) and coincides with the pessimistic worldview of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Desgenais chides Octave for believing in love “such as novelists and poets represent it.” To search for perfect love in real life is folly. One must accept love as it is, whether it comes in the form of an unfaithful courtesan or a faithful bourgeoise. If you are loved, “what does the rest matter?” For a time, Octave tries to follow this policy, but ultimately it leaves him more disheartened than ever.

  It is at this point that the widowed Brigitte Pierson—Sand’s literary surrogate—comes into his life. Unsurprisingly, Octave finds her in the country far from the depravities of Paris. Who among the romantics is not one of Rousseau’s descendants? Octave is twenty, Madame Pierson is thirty. Sound familiar? We are once again in the domain of the young man in love with an older maternal woman, all the more meaningful because Octave has been motherless since childhood and has just lost his father. Despite her prolonged resistance, Brigitte eventually succumbs to Octave’s entreaties, and they experience a period of sublime happiness.

  Eternal angel of happy nights, who will convey your silence? O kiss! Mysterious draught which lips pour into each other like thirsty wine-cups. Drunkenness of the senses, oh voluptuousness! . . . Love, oh, principle of the world! Precious flame which all of nature, like an anxious vestal virgin, incessantly watches over in the temple of God!

  Musset offers Sand a love gift in this rapturous hymn and especially in Octave’s words that extol the benefits of remembered passion: “He can die without complaining: he has possessed the woman he loved.”

  Unfortunately, Octave has the same character flaw as Musset: he is prone to jealousy, even when there is no cause. Much of the book describes his jealous bouts based on nothing more than his imagination, which has become permanently darkened by the memory of his earlier false mistress. Musset knew all too well how an overly suspicious nature can undermine love.

  As an author wanting to elevate an altar to Sand, he gave her fictive counterpart more moral perfection than Sand actually possessed. And that’s just the trouble with Brigitte Pierson: she is too perfect, too idealized. She sacrifices herself over and over again to Octave’s frenzied moods and feverish imagination. Musset did not spare himself in the portrait of his alter ego: in Octave we see the workings of a mentally unstable man, riven by jealousy, whose life becomes an ongoing nightmare for himself and for the woman who loves him.

  Eventually Brigitte is forced to concede: “You are no longer the man I loved.” His constant suspicion, moodiness, and rages have worn her out. Though she has done her best to give him the maternal attentions he needed, she can no longer endure the quarreling and suffering. “Yes, when you make me suffer, I no longer see my lover in you. You are nothing more than a sick child.” These might have been Sand’s very words to Musset.

  Sand’s love life did not end with Musset. Thanks to the efforts of the lawyer Michel de Bourges, who succeeded Musset in her bed, she was able to obtain a legal separation from her husband after thirteen years of marriage. Separation of bed and board was the only recourse open to an unhappily married man or woman, since divorce was prohibited. If truth be told, Casimir was no worse than most husbands and had even proved himself remarkably accommodating in accepting his wife’s independent lifestyle. Never mind, the court granted Sand the separation she had requested, as well as sole possession of Nohant, with the stipulation that she pay her husband an annual stipend of 3,800 francs. As for the children, she assumed responsibility for their support, while granting their father visiting rights. Had she not been so famous and had the lawyer Michel de Bourges not been in her camp, it is unlikely that the trial would have ended so favorably for Sand. In January 1836, the court’s decision included the judges’ expression of contempt for a husband who “permits his wife to live alone,” implying that a man who abandons his marital authority deserves what he gets.8

  In 1838, Sand began her world-famous affair with Chopin, which lasted till 1847. In 1850, she entered into an even longer relationship with her son’s friend, the engraver Alexandre Manceau, who became her secretary and live-in companion until his death in 1865. From the time she regained sole possession of Nohant, she was constantly surrounded by a bevy of remarkable friends, including Chopin, Delacroix, Liszt, his volatile mistress Marie d’Agoult, the singer Pauline Viardot, and her beloved Flaubert. She died in 1876 at the age of seventy-two. I can think of no other Frenchwoman who was more productive as a writer, nor more fully realized in her personal life. Though her marriage was not a success, she was a mother and grandmother devoted to her offspring—especially during the second half of her life when she was less prone to travel.

  Sand acquired countless fans in France and abroad. In England she was admired by many of the Victorians, including William Thackeray, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who paid her two visits in Paris and honored her in a sonnet as a “large-brained woman and a large-hearted man.” In Russia, she was read by everyone who could read. Along with Hugo, she was the predominant French influence on an entire generation of Russian writers, including Dostoevsky, who idolized her; Turgenev, who became one of her intimate friends; and Herzen, who cited her in his diary with the prediction that in the future “the wife will be freed from slavery.” In the United States, she found allies in the transcendental writer Margaret Fuller, whose life ended dramatically when she drowned with her baby after her return from Europe; Walt Whitman, who published a newspaper article about Sand; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for whom Sand wrote an admiring essay.

  I won’t enter into the causes of Sand’s decline in popularity during the first half of the twentieth century; they are too numerous and too complex to be considered here. But Sand’s fans in France never completely disappeared. Consider the case of Georges Lubin, whose devotion to her lasted the better part of his lifetime. Around the age of forty, he retired from his work as a banker and dedicated himself exclusively to Sand scholarship. His wife was wont to say that they lived together in a ménage à trois with George Sand. Certainly their apartment, filled with various Sand mementoes, attested to her presence. What intrigued me the most when I visited them in the early 1980s was the large file cabinet with a card for every day in Sand’s life. If I remember correctly, they were white for Paris, green for Nohant, pink for her time away with a lover, and yellow when unknown. I may be wrong about the colors, but I am certain that Lubin knew more about George Sand’s life and work than anyone other than Sand herself. His card catalog was essential for the huge projects he undertook as editor of her two-volume autobiography and her twenty-six-volume correspondence. And all the while, he found time to help others with the new Sand scholarship that was sparked by the centennial of her death in 1976.

  Let me close with a memory of Georges Lubin amid a lively group of Sand scholars in a Paris restaurant, probably Le Procope. We knew each other from a series of conferences organized by Hofstra College in New York and from special sessions on Sand at the Modern Language Association meetings. Sitting next to me was a Japanese professor who had come to know Sand through his admiration for Chopin. He was fascinated by the woman who had taken care of her “little” Chopin like a protective mother and was of the opinion that their relationship had been chaste. Lubin, sitting on the other side of me, gently disagreed. Chopin and Sand had been lovers in every sense of the word, at least in the beginning. Our Japanese colleague became heated, as if it were an affair of honor. Lubin, with old-school courtesy, commended the man for defending Sand’s virtue. The Japanese man looked puzzled. Then, with ritual solemnity, he slowly uttered these words in French: “Ah, non. Pas Sand. Chopin. Je défends Chopin.” He was defending Chopin, not Sand. Then it was Lubin’s t
urn to become indignant on Sand’s behalf, as if her honor had been besmirched. I found myself in the peculiar situation of having to intervene. “Messieurs, les duels sont interdits depuis cent ans. Veuillez terminer vos repas et laissez les morts en paix.” (Gentlemen, duels have been forbidden for a hundred years. Be so good as to finish your meal and leave the dead in peace.)

  Think of what Sand or Balzac could have done with such a scene!

  CHAPTER NINE

  Romantic Love Deflated

  Madame Bovary

  THE MATERIAL OF HER RIDING HABIT CAUGHT ON HIS VELVET COAT. SHE TIPPED BACK HER HEAD, HER WHITE THROAT SWELLED WITH A SIGH; AND WEAKENED, BATHED IN TEARS, HIDING HER FACE, WITH A LONG TREMOR SHE GAVE HERSELF UP TO HIM.

  Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857

  Flaubert dissecting the heart of Madame Bovary. Caricature by Achille Lemot. From “Parodie,” 1869. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale.

  In the 1850s, when Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary, he corresponded regularly with his Parisian mistress, the poet Louise Colet. From the house that he shared with his mother at Croisset in Normandy, he expressed the torments of a writer dedicated to the religion of art. Sometimes he barely eked out a line a day, and often Emma Bovary literally made him sick. Why would anyone want to write a novel about an overly romantic woman who marries a feckless country doctor, has two affairs and mounting debts, and ultimately commits suicide? Flaubert had his reasons. As he noted in his letter of April 12, 1854, to Colet: “A terrible reaction is taking place in the modern conscience against what we call love. . . . Our century looks through a magnifying glass and dissects on its operating table the little flower of Sentiment, which smelled so good in the past!”1

  Times had changed since romantics exalted all-consuming love. Realists like Flaubert were determined to deflate the romantic ideal, which he attributed to the banality of everyday existence. His commitment to portraying people “objectively,” with all their defects and base cravings, contributed substantially to the French de-romanticization of love. It even left him vulnerable to the charge of indecency. A government trial against Madame Bovary was instituted on the grounds that it was “an outrage to public and religious morality,” but fortunately for Flaubert, who was at risk for imprisonment and a heavy fine, he was acquitted on February 6, 1857. (Just as I was writing this chapter, National Public Radio reminded its listeners that it was the 154th anniversary of Flaubert’s acquittal. How about that!) The prosecution had the expected results of making Flaubert better known and increasing book sales. With the notoriety surrounding Madame Bovary, the chic French view of love shifted from illusion to disillusion.

  Flaubert and his fellow realists—Guy de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, Émile Zola—were out to prove that love was nothing more than a trick the mind plays on itself. As Stendhal had observed a generation earlier in De l’amour (On Love, 1822), when we fall in love, we embellish the beloved person with all the good qualities we want that person to have. Stendhal’s word for that process was cristallisation, a term he derived from the formation of diamondlike crystals on a tree branch when it is left in a salt mine for two or three months.2 In Madame Bovary, Flaubert set out to show how cristallisation worked within the psyche of a young woman, successively infatuated with two men who were not her husband.

  But it would be wrong to think of Flaubert solely as a realist—a term he himself repudiated later in life. Though Madame Bovary does indeed puncture and destroy Emma Bovary’s romantic illusions, we can never forget Flaubert’s assertion that he and Madame Bovary were, at some level, the same person. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” he declared. How else could he have created that pathetic creature with whom so many readers have empathized and so many women have identified?

  Let me confess at the onset, I was one of those teenage girls who identified completely with Emma Bovary. It seemed inconceivable to me that such a beautiful young woman with a fertile imagination should be asked to settle for a mediocre country doctor lacking all distinction. She who had dreamed of refinements above her station as a farmer’s daughter was understandably disappointed by her humdrum marriage and driven to look elsewhere for romance. I can’t say that I admired her as I did the morally upright characters in British novels, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, but I did sympathize with her and bemoan her fate.

  Several years later, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, I took a course on Flaubert with the then-famous Professor René Jasinski and read Madame Bovary again. This time I was pregnant with my first child and had trouble staying awake in Jasinski’s after-lunch class. (I learned later that the medication I was taking had the side effect of making me drowsy.) Nonetheless, I struggled through the course and wrote a paper on Emma Bovary that expressed how much she had descended in my esteem. Emma’s romantic reveries were no longer ones I could identify with, and Emma herself just seemed misguided and shallow. Two months after the course had ended, the birth of my daughter compelled me to dislike Emma even more. There I was with a delicious baby girl, and Emma did not have the slightest affection for her own daughter. Bad wife! Bad mother! How could I have loved the book so much when I was fifteen?

  Still later, in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I read Madame Bovary for a third time with insights provided by the now-famous Professor René Girard, then my dissertation director and presently a member of the Académie Française. I came to see Emma Bovary in the light of what Girard called “mimetic desire”—that is, she desired what she had learned to desire through a third party. The romantic novels she had read were, as she remembered, “all about love, lovers, sweethearts . . . gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.” Words like “passion” and “felicity,” “which had appeared so beautiful in books,” had given her a false notion of what love could be. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire made sense to me because I knew how books, movies, and movie magazines had affected my girlfriends and me in the formation of our romantic desires. (Of course, at Johns Hopkins, you were supposed to avoid movies, unless it was one of Ingmar Bergman’s.)

  This third reading of Madame Bovary, which was not to be my last, opened my mind to the multiple layers of meaning within the book. I began to see how romanticism and realism, illusion and disillusion, comedy and tragedy, sociology and psychology, lyricism and materialism, pathos and irony, all formed a web of interconnected threads fostering different interpretations. As a fifteen-year-old, I had been drawn into Emma’s romantic fantasies. As a young wife and mother, I rejected them and adopted a down-to-earth stance toward love and marriage. As a more sophisticated reader, I could appreciate the true greatness of Madame Bovary as a consummate work of art. Flaubert had insisted that his prose be as rigorous as poetry: every word must count, every sentence must ring true. The total work must be so rich and tightly constructed that we never doubt its credibility, that we become captivated by its characters and plot and take away feelings and thoughts that linger long after we have read the last page. For our purposes, Madame Bovary represents not only a rebirth of the cynical seduction theme that had been present in France for centuries, but also as a touchstone for a new anti-romantic vision of love.

  Madame Bovary begins and ends not with the heroine herself but with the story of Charles Bovary, Emma’s future husband. This neat framing device situates her within the confines of marriage to a man who is physically unattractive and congenitally unimaginative. As a schoolboy, he wears a bizarre cap, “one of those sorry objects, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression, like the face of an imbecile.”3 Whew! Charles is an ugly duckling who will always remain an ugly duckling. As a newly minted officier de santé—a health officer or second-class doctor—he is married off by his parents to a financially comfortable widow twice his age and is destined for a mundane life until he meets Emma. Seeing her for the first time at her family’s farm, where Charles has come to set her father’s fractured
leg, he is struck by “the whiteness of her fingernails” and “her full lips, which she had a habit of biting in her moments of silence.” These expressions of refinement and sensuality, clues to her character, draw Charles back to the farm after his first wife’s death and inspire him to ask for Emma’s hand.

  Charles and Emma’s two-day country wedding begins with a realistic picture of guests arriving in carriages, one-horse chaises, two-wheeled cars, open gigs, vans, wagons, and carts, followed by a description of farming people in their best attire—women with bonnets, fichus, and gold watch chains; men with frock coats, tailcoats, and long jackets. Then a lyrical portrayal of the procession, “united like a single colorful scarf, undulating over the countryside,” zeroes in on the fiddler with his beribboned violin leading the married couple, relatives, friends, and children to the town hall. After the ceremony, food was laid out under the cart shed, and the guests ate copiously until night. The pièce de résistance was a wedding cake in the form of a temple with a small Cupid balanced in a chocolate swing. Emma would have preferred a midnight wedding with torches, but such romantic ideas had been dismissed in favor of an old-fashioned celebration suitable for country folk. After the couple had retired for the night, they were not spared some of the usual wedding tricks: a fishmonger squirted water through the keyhole of their bedroom. The next day, Charles looked elated, whereas the bride gave nothing away.