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

by Marilyn Yalom

  Years later, after he had married the Chinese woman his father chose for him, after they had produced an heir, he comes to France with his wife. By then, the girl from Vietnam is a well-known writer. She had lived through the war, marriages, children, divorces. He phones and she immediately recognizes his voice. His voice trembles, he is nervous, still afraid. “And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.”

  Why does this story make me cry as I read its final pages? Is it because I want to believe that such an enduring love is still possible? Is it because Duras has created a myth of carnal love that goes beyond the physical and transcends barriers of race, class, and money? Or is it because this story evokes my own history of a love affair in France when I was twenty (with a Norwegian) and a phone call forty years later when we immediately recognized each other. Duras tells a story, and it becomes your own.

  The Lover plays out the quintessentially French idea of love anchored in the flesh. The body of the other, when caressed and cared for like that of a child, can lead to supreme pleasure and diffuse happiness for both parties. For a time, the lovers were able to resist the prejudices of a colonial society that treated interracial unions as taboo. In this respect, Duras was well ahead of her time. Even if the lovers are eventually parted and each returns to the culture that birth dictated, this does not mean that their love was worthless. On the contrary, Duras suggests, in each of her works, that love, however curtailed, can provide an emotional wellspring as long as memory endures.

  Duras opened up a subject that has had enormous ramifications in France: interracial love affairs resulting from the French colonial interventions in Indochina, Africa, the Near East, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. Such unions unsettled traditional French notions of love. Whereas it was once unthinkable, or at least very rare, for a white French man or woman to marry someone of a different race, today such unions have become considerably more common. Men coming from the Ivory Coast or Guyana, women from Vietnam or the Antilles sometimes pair up with indigenous French and produce tea-skinned or café-au-lait children. France is becoming multiracial faster than anyone could have predicted when Duras was a girl.

  Marguerite Duras’s assiduous biographer, Laure Adler, tracked down the origins of The Lover in Vietnam.4 She concluded that the Chinese lover had really existed. She visited his grave in the company of his nephew and saw his house, now turned into a police station. But the lover that Marguerite Duras wrote about in her famous novel, as well as in other works, was by no means identical with the man she had known at sixteen. Though he was Chinese, very rich, and her suitor for two years, he was definitely not nice-looking—in fact, he seems to have been quite ugly. Moreover, though he paid large sums of money to the Donnadieu family for Marguerite’s company, he may not have slept with her until shortly before she departed for France. These differences and significant others are inscribed in notebooks, discovered after Duras’s death, that are probably closer to the lived facts than the account in The Lover. Ultimately the lived events inspired a more aesthetic reality.

  By the time Duras wrote The Lover, at the age of seventy, the Chinese lover had become part of her personal mythology, and she herself might not have been able to distinguish between life and literature. With his yellow-white skin and fine hands, his wealth and outsider status, he was the transgressive lover who had initiated her into sex and love. For the rest of her life, he would remain embedded in her consciousness. As a writer, Duras could repair the flaws in the original relationship. Such is the grace of memory. She could transform a somewhat sordid affair into a mutually passionate romance and project into posterity her vision of love as an irresistible force that penetrates through the skin, regardless of its color.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Love in the Twenty-first Century

  TODAY, CAN YOU IMAGINE A NOVEL HAVING AS ITS TITLE TREASURE OF LOVE?

  Philippe Sollers, Trésor d’amour, 2011

  Postcard: Paris Capitale des amoureux. LAPI–Roger Viollet/D/R.

  April in Paris is sometimes all it’s supposed to be. With the horse chestnut trees in flower, sending their white spikes up like candles, and the yellow tulips drinking up the sun in the Luxembourg Gardens, I returned to my cultural home. Young and not-so-young lovers sitting on benches were still kissing each other avidly, oblivious to the tourists from every country gazing enviously at such unseemly behavior. Yes, indeed, the cupid-bedecked postcard I bought for one euro had reason to advertise Paris as the capitale des amoureux, the capital city of lovers. But what kind of French lovers does one find in the twenty-first century? That was the question at the top of my list when I returned to France in 2011.

  First I attended the funeral services of a ninety-one-year-old woman whom I had known for more than forty years. And I had known her deceased husband even longer, as far back as my student days in Tours. Paul and Caroline had become lovers in a familiar French manner—that is to say, she was over thirty and married with two children when they met, while he was single and six years younger. I remember a letter from Paul describing their torrid love affair and his escape just in time from her marital bedroom. The expression “J’ai failli y laisser ma peau” (I almost left my skin there) remains inscribed on my brain. Leaving her husband and a very advantageous financial situation, Caroline moved into Paul’s bachelor apartment, taking her daughter with her and sending her son to boarding school in Switzerland. They remained there until Paul died and Caroline went to live near her married daughter in the south of France. Whatever their problems—and there were many—their tender devotion to each other was evident to anyone who knew them. Caroline, in her seventies and eighties, was still a very elegant coquette and held onto all the wiles that Frenchwomen of her generation and class knew how to manipulate. Later, when Caroline lived in a nursing home, she lost much of her memory but not all her charm. At one point she asked her sister-in-law: “How many husbands did I have?” When her sister-in-law responded, “Two,” Caroline was a little disconcerted. “What? Only two!”

  I did not expect to find this kind of love and marriage among the younger generation, and I did not. Everything I encountered in Paris from friends, academics, plays, movies, and printed materials drew me into a whirlpool of present-day love relations, where the rules for men and women were in the process of change and where marriages of fifty years seemed more and more unlikely. And yet, love itself had not disappeared. Not at all. It was still as obsessively present in France as it had always been.

  Popular plays with titles like L’illusion conjugale (Conjugal Illusion), Le gai mariage (Gay Marriage), J’adore l’amour (I Adore Love), Un manège nommé désir (A Merry-Go-Round Named Desire), La meilleur amant que tu aies eu? (The Best Lover You Ever Had?), L’amour sur un plateau (Love on a Tray), Ma femme me prend pour un sextoy (My Wife Takes Me for a Sex Toy), Amour sur place ou à emporter (Love Right Here or Carry Out), and Mars et Vénus: La guerre des sexes (Mars and Venus: The War of the Sexes) were attracting enthusiastic audiences throughout the city, and so were classical plays like Le Misanthrope and Cyrano de Bergerac. There was even a version of Tristan et Yseult, publicized as “a love of youth and adultery, passionate, enflamed, loaded with carnal desire,” and ending with the question: “A myth or an ordinary tragedy?”

  I attended a Sunday matinee of the award-winning L’illusion conjugale. The house was packed and the performance outstanding. So what if it dealt with the oldest of all French themes: the husband, the wife, and her lover? The wife was, of course, beautiful, thin, stylish, charming, and dependent on her husband for her material situation. She was the same stereotypical Frenchwoman who had appeared in any number of comedies during the gay nineties and the 1930s. In this play, the wife suggests that she and her husband tell each other the number of affairs they have had during the course of their long marriage. How many has he had? Well, he finally admits to twelve. She takes the number in stride. And
she, how many has she had? Just one, just one? He explodes. One is worse than twelve. One means that she truly cared about someone, whereas his were just passing affairs. Once unleashed, his jealousy cannot be contained. He must know more. How long did it last? Who was it? Was it his best friend? The best friend arrives and further revelations take place that shake the entire foundations of the marriage. Yet in the end, the wife refuses to confirm her husband’s suspicions. She retreats into mystery, a safe haven for Frenchwomen, and ultimately, it appears, the necessary glue for French marriages. Tell all and you destroy the conjugal illusion.

  In 1948, the poet Paul Claudel had begun the preface to a new edition of his own play Partage de midi (Break of Noon), first written in 1909, with these words: “Nothing apparently more banal than the double theme on which this drama is based. . . . The first one, that of adultery: the husband, the wife and the lover. The second, that of the struggle between a religious vocation and the call of the flesh.”1 In 2011, you can forget about the struggle between a religious vocation and the demands of the flesh, but adultery still packs them in.

  There were, however, different themes in theater, film, and fiction that pointed to new issues in the eternal quest for love. For example, the play Le gai mariage was emblematic of the remarkable openness with which the French now treat homosexuality. Why, even the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is openly gay. French laws established in 1999 allow for a form of civil union known as PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) that provides all the financial benefits of matrimony, regardless of the partners’ sex. Although PACS was set up with same-sex couples in mind, it has now been co-opted by heterosexual couples as well. At present, there are two civil unions for every one marriage performed in France. Civil unions are much easier to enter into than legal marriages and much easier to dissolve. Perhaps that is why straight couples are PACSing more and more frequently. Many young people, straight and gay, seem to be uncomfortable with the notion of lifelong marriage. With life expectancy hovering around eighty-four for French women and seventy-seven for men, the thought of spending fifty or sixty years with the same person may be too much to expect.

  So, then, France, like the United States, is undergoing a romantic revolution. Premarital sex, living together with or without legal commitment, divorce, and serial unions are ousting old-fashioned lifetime marriage. The traditional format of husband and wife (with breathing space for his and her lovers) is becoming less of a norm than an ideal.

  What has changed everything is that more women are now working outside the home and, as in the United States, trying to combine all the wifely virtues with the hard-nosed realities of the working place. My younger women friends—those under forty-five—still tend to their appearance, do the cooking, are attentive mothers, and now contribute to the family economy. This makes for the same kind of conflicts in time and energy that American women are facing. Of course, the French governmental support for maternity leave and day-care centers make it somewhat easier for French mothers to continue working. The French legally have fourteen weeks of paid maternity leave, which increases to twenty-six weeks for a third child, as well as fourteen days of paternity leave, but many mothers manage more. My hairdresser took six months with full and then partial pay for the birth of each of her daughters. A friend who has an important position with a European airline took off a year with each of her sons, and her husband got unpaid paternal leave for the year between their births. Many men have taken over child-care responsibilities that would have been unthinkable in the past. For example, my French publisher habitually leaves her daughter with her ex-husband or her live-in lover when she must travel.

  There is no doubt that the reality of women as economic competitors with men has thrown a wild card into the game of love. Men who once knew what to expect of themselves and of the women who were economically dependent on them are confused by women who may earn as much as they do and sometimes even more, though the work world still privileges men in numerous ways. One senses a malaise in France among certain men and women who have become afraid of love. My women friends tell me that it is the men who shy away from permanent attachments, whereas the women invest greater emotional energy in maintaining their relationships. If this is true, French and American women have much in common.

  The noted French intellectual Philippe Sollers begins his 2011 book by asking if we can imagine a novel with the title Treasure of Love. He believes readers would find such a title grotesque and open it only in secret.2 Such is the contemporary disillusionment with romance, according to Sollers. Nonetheless, he titles his autobiographical novel Trésor d’amour and rhapsodizes about Minna, his love treasure.

  Minna is thirty-five; Sollers, the male protagonist (who doubles for the flesh-and-blood Sollers), is at least twice her age. Minna was married for two years to an Italian banker and has a five-year-old daughter. So much for numbers. Venetian-born, Minna is Italian and a specialist of French literature, most notably Stendhal. Sollers and Minna share a love for Venice, where they meet on a regular basis two or three days a month, and a passion for Stendhal, whose life and work become the subtext of the novel.

  Sollers sums up the history of French love in the following manner:

  In three centuries, we have thus gone from repression and religious sublimation to libertinage, from libertinage to romantic passion, from there to exaggerated modesty, and once again from there to sexual and pornographic proliferation, before returning, via sickness and reproductive technology, to original, ordinary repression.

  What kind of contemporary repression is Sollers talking about? Certainly not sexual repression since French men and women, like Americans, find bed partners more easily than ever before. What has become repressed is the possibility of giving oneself, heart and soul, to what used to be called “true love.” Bombarded by “amour-publicité, amour-cinéma, amour-chanson, amour-télé, amour-magazines, amour-people,” the French are compelled to love according to criteria concocted by the media. But has one ever loved “naturally”? Hasn’t there always been an intermediary that provides the model for lovers? René Girard’s work on mediated desire has convinced us that the greatest works of Western literature, from Dante and Cervantes to Stendhal and Flaubert, present literary figures who took their romantic cues from earlier fictions.3 How many women and men in the second half of the eighteenth century learned to love passionately and cry plentifully from the gospel of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse? Today, movies, television, magazines, and the Internet provide models that literature can no longer compete with on a numerical level.

  Sollers looks back to a time when the French, and the rest of the Western world, turned to literature for exemplary lovers. He evokes love as it was captured in Stendhal’s greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma and in his essay On Love. What we in the year 2011 have lost is Stendhal’s process of cristallisation—the ability to imagine the loved one, to fantasize about that person, to gift him or her with the desirable attributes we admire.

  What’s more, since Internet dating services come up with whatever qualities we would like to find in a person, people can go straight to a site and construct a potential partner from online data. You want someone tall, short, into rough sex? Go to Match.com. Whereas Swann built Odette into an idealized woman, we now start with the ideal construct and then find the matching person. The satisfaction of physical and psychic desire, made too easy, has ruined the process of love.

  Or has it? The Sollers persona has found his ideal love in Minna, in their silent entente and mutual adoration. He is sure of himself: “I love Minna, and she loves me.” Encapsulated within the miracle of Venice, descended from an old Italian family, enmeshed within their shared admiration for Stendhal (who not incidentally adored Italy), Minna emerges from a process of crystallization—like the crystals that develop on the branches left in a salt mine, to use Stendhal’s metaphor—with all the perfections Sollers has projected upon her: youth, beauty, intelligence, and a dis
tinguished Italian genealogy.

  Now and then we get a sense of what Minna thinks. She finds Stendhal’s essay On Love old-fashioned. She loves his statement that “the admission of women to perfect equality would be the surest mark of civilization: it would double the intellectual force of the human species and its chance for happiness.” Watch out, Sollers, there may be a feminist hidden under the skin of the ineffable Minna!

  But Minna is not one of those “terrible” feminists who cause problems. She “has never thought of ‘having a career’ in a university or elsewhere. The idea of assuming power . . . is strange to her. . . . She likes her independent life, her daughter, her apartment in Venice.” And so would I, and so would many other women, if we didn’t have to support ourselves or contribute to a family economy. Come on, Sollers, what century are you living in? Sollers is but one of many writers—both men and women—uneasy with the changes wrought by and for women since the 1960s. He evinces a creeping malaise between the sexes, even as the narrator of Trésor d’amour lauds his perfect relationship with Minna.

  One wonders how Sollers, married in 1967 to the feminist psychoanalytic writer Julia Kristeva, has felt about her international success in academic circles. And one wonders who the model or models might have been for Minna. Sollers and Kristeva, in the tradition of Sartre and Beauvoir, have long been an iconic couple whose private lives are subject to ongoing public scrutiny.

  Even more pessimistic are the works of the poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq. In his much-discussed novel The Elementary Particles, he writes for an age when “feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared.”4 Houellebecq offers detailed descriptions of masturbation, pornography, prostitution, and sex tourism as quick fixes for the absence of love. Though I can appreciate his seriousness as a thinker, he puts me off—totally. I simply do not want to follow Houellebecq in his nihilistic portrayal of unlovely individuals unable to find human connection.