How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  So, in the novel, when the future Princess de Clèves, barely sixteen, is offered the Prince de Clèves as a suitable match, she does not find him unacceptable, even though she does not love him. For one thing, she has never felt those delicious internal stirrings that the French aptly call troubles. She has lived a protected life under the guidance of her widowed mother, Madame de Chartres, a woman of known distinction and virtue. Madame de Chartres had not only sought to cultivate her daughter’s wit and beauty—the two qualities considered necessary for a marriageable woman—she had also tried to make her “virtuous.” Female virtue consisted mainly in shunning the practices that led to sexual entanglements. Madame de Chartres warned her daughter of love’s dangers, however attractive they were made to appear: she spoke to her of “men’s insincerity, of their deceptions and infidelity, of the disastrous effects of love affairs on conjugal life,” and she argued convincingly for “the only thing that can ensure a woman’s happiness,” namely, reciprocal love between husband and wife.

  The young woman’s first appearance at court produced a sensation. The Prince de Clèves was struck by her beauty and modest behavior, and fell in love with her on the spot. This was the classic coup de foudre, love at first sight, that enters through the eyes and travels immediately to the heart and other unmentioned organs.

  Other love-struck rivals presented themselves, but events conspired to leave the field open to the Prince de Clèves. He managed to find an occasion to speak to her of his passion in a suitably respectful manner. “He begged her to let him know what her feelings were for him and told her that his own were of a kind that would make him eternally unhappy if she obeyed her mother’s wishes only out of duty.”

  All this high-flown language centers on one question: “Do you love me?” It is still a question that causes anxiety on the part of the person who asks, as well as the person obliged to answer. “Loves me, loves me not” cannot be determined by plucking daisy petals. It is something one feels in a rush of hormones when one is very young, and even when one is supposedly mature. Mademoiselle de Chartres does not yet know what love feels like. She tells her mother that she would marry Monsieur de Clèves “with less reluctance than another man, but that she felt no particular attraction for his person.”

  Madame de Chartres accepted the prince’s proposal for her daughter and had no reason to believe that she was giving her a husband she could not love. In this respect, the union was not unlike traditional marriages in India, where many parents still choose spouses for their children and hope that the bride and groom will come to love each other in time. Most young people today in the West assume they will choose their own mates on the basis of the shared love they have already known, whereas in arranged marriages you are given someone “to love” in the future. In La Princesse de Clèves, we are at a key point in Western history when romantic love was beginning to make inroads into marital choices, even at the highest level.

  After a short engagement, Mademoiselle de Chartres and the Prince de Clèves are wed in a ceremony that takes place at the Palais du Louvre, followed by a nuptial supper attended by the king and queen. We are barely twenty pages into the novel and already the marriage has taken place. What would constitute the happy ending of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English novel occurs near the beginning of this quintessentially French story.

  Unfortunately, marriage does not change the nature of the princess’s feelings, and the prince is not satisfied with their union, though he has given her his name and has access to her bedchamber. (At this level of society, they would have had separate suites.) He wants her to love him with some measure of the passion he feels for her. But love and passion are still sentiments unknown to the princess. All she can feel for the prince is amitié, a form of affection closer to friendship than to sexual love. In this respect, the princess exemplifies the belief held by Marie de Champagne and her twelfth-century associates that true love cannot exist between spouses.

  A twenty-first-century reader finding his or her way through La Princesse de Clèves will certainly notice its rich amatory vocabulary and the fine distinctions made between various shades of sentiment. Amour, passion, amitié, tendresse, attachement, inclination, trouble, agitation, ardeur, flamme, embarras—these are only some of the many terms that French characters use as they endlessly analyze their feelings. Let us not forget that Madame de La Fayette and other writers of her generation were influenced by the linguistic innovations introduced by a group of highly sophisticated ladies known as précieuses, who demanded purity in language, delicacy in thought, and a new psychological awareness. Les précieuses promoted an ultra-refined conversational tone that filtered into many important literary works. One of the first, Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie, histoire romaine (Clelie: A Roman Story) offered an allegorical journey to the land of love. Its “Map of the Land of Tenderness” was to become the most celebrated graphic document of its day, and one that has been reproduced countless times. I still have a copy bought on the banks of the Seine, which is reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. Note how the lovers’ path takes them through the many stages of love, from Nouvelle amitié (new friendship), Billets doux and Petits soins (love letters and minor attentions), upward toward the imaginary land of Tendresse (tenderness), with its surrounding communities of Obéissance (obedience), Bonté (goodness), and Respect. If the lovers wish to reach their goal, they must be especially careful to avoid the hamlets of Perfidie (perfidy), Médisance (slander), and Méchanceté (maliciousness), and not stray to the Lake of Indifference.

  When we listen in on the conversations of the characters in La Princesse de Clèves, we hear echoes of les précieuses and their purified discourse. Gone are any blunt allusions to the flesh that often erupted in medieval and Renaissance literature. The prince speaks only of the greater privileges afforded him by the status of husband, without suggesting that they may have anything to do with the body. So too, Madame de Chartres speaks to her daughter about “love affairs” without any reference to their carnal nature. Does Mademoiselle de Chartres have any idea of what is in store for her on her wedding night? We shall never know. Whatever transpired that night does not seem to have affected her, for better or for worse. Her first experience of sexual intercourse (to revert to less elegant terminology) did not entail an assault upon her heart. Despite his best effort, the Prince de Clèves had not managed to lead his princess into the Land of Tenderness.

  And now, of course, a third party enters the scene. The Duc de Nemours, the most handsome and attractive man at court, meets the princess in a thoroughly romantic manner: without ever having seen her before, he is ordered by the king to dance with her at a betrothal ball for the king’s daughter, Claude de France. This fairy-tale meeting amid a crowd of awed admirers can lead in only one direction. Predictably, Monsieur de Nemours falls wildly in love with the princess, and the rest of the book describes his ill-fated attempts to claim her as his own. Or, in the language of the seventeenth century, Nemours plays the game of galanterie with a mastery unequaled by anyone else at court, and yet he fails to obtain the rewards he considers his due.

  Why not? That is the essential question one asks after finishing the book. It is not because the princess is lacking in passion; the intense arousal sparked by the Duc de Nemours bears no resemblance to the sexless feelings she has for her husband. No, indeed. Little by little, she comes to know the joys and torments of burning love for a man who is the darling of the French court and even a candidate for the hand of the queen of England, Elizabeth I. For the first time in her life, the princess conceals her feelings. But her mother is no fool, and she begins to suspect her daughter’s budding love. Worry about her daughter precipitates her sudden illness and contributes to her decline, but before she dies, she makes sure that the princess becomes fully aware of the dangers before her. “You have an inclination for M. de Nemours; I do not ask you to confess it to me . . . you are on the edge of a precipice.
” Madame de Chartres counsels her daughter to withdraw from the court in order to avoid “the miseries of a love affair.”

  While the loss of her mother causes the princess great affliction, it also strengthens her will to resist the Duc de Nemours’ advances. As a narrative strategy, the mother’s death is a form of sacrifice for the good of her daughter, who retreats to the country and clings to her husband more than ever in the hope that her attachment to him will provide a defense against the duke. But in time, the prince and princess are obliged to return to the court, and she is once again confronted with the duke’s winning ways.

  He manages to declare his love to her in the oblique manner favored by les précieuses. “There are women to whom one dares give no sign of the passion one feels for them. . . . Since we dare not let them see we love them, we should at least like them to see that we have no desire to be loved by anyone else.”

  If anyone today were to declare his love in this manner, we would think of him as peculiar, if not downright zany. We would find such speech roundabout and devious. American men tend to be more laconic in their expressions of love, however sincere. And what about Frenchmen today? Do they still practice an art of verbal gallantry meant to please the ladies? Some do, particularly older men of the educated classes, for whom le bon mot—the clever phrase—is still a must. It is still not uncommon for Frenchmen to make advances in a flowery style they learned from the classical texts they read in school. “Madame s’amuse à Paris avec nos hommes galants?” (“Madame is having a good time in Paris with our gallant men?”) “Cette robe a été faite exprès pour rehausser la couleur de vos yeux.” (“That dress was made specially to bring out the color of your eyes.”) “Votre passion pour la littérature française nous honore. Et le plaisir?” (“Your passion for French literature honors us. And what about pleasure?”) Pleasure? In French, the word for “pleasure” has a distinctly sexual connotation. I knew exactly what that gentleman had in mind, just as the princess knew exactly what the duke was saying.

  Despite her good intentions, she is unable to hide the pleasurable stirrings she feels in the duke’s presence. “A man less acute than he would perhaps not have noticed them; but so many women had already been in love with him that he could hardly fail to recognize the symptoms.” Emboldened by this knowledge, the duke commits a shameless act: he steals a miniature portrait of the princess while they are both in the room of the Queen Dauphine. Even though the princess sees the theft, she cannot bring herself to denounce him or ask that he return the portrait.

  At this point, the duke revels in the belief that he is “making her love him despite herself.” When the theft is discovered, Monsieur de Clèves is pained by its disappearance and says, in jest, that his wife must have given it to a lover. The princess is filled with remorse, yet unable to quell the storm of emotions raging inside her. So the trio of husband, wife, and would-be lover continue their dance of deception and hurtle toward an inevitable confrontation.

  From scene to scene, the princess descends the slope toward “the miseries of a love affair” against which her mother had assiduously warned her. She even discovers the torments of jealousy resulting from a far-fetched subplot: a letter from her uncle’s mistress falls into her hands, and she mistakenly believes that it is addressed to the Duc de Nemours. Once she learns the truth, she is relieved of her jealousy, but the hurt still lingers and opens her eyes to questions she has not been willing to face before. She asks herself bluntly: “Am I ready to embark on a love affair? to be unfaithful to M. de Clèves? to be unfaithful to myself?” At this point, she is still able to answer no.

  The plot becomes increasingly convoluted when the princess again retreats to the Clèves country home in a further effort to distance herself from her potential lover. And it is here that the most famous—and most incredible—scene of the book takes place. She confesses to Monsieur de Clèves that she loves someone else, a confession so remarkable that when the novel was published, the popular magazine, Le Mercure Galant, asked its readers this question: “Should wives confess to their husbands their passion for other men?” And if the confession wasn’t difficult enough for a reader to swallow, the author would have us believe that the conversation between husband and wife is overheard by none other than the duke, silently hidden in the garden pavilion where the prince and princess are sitting. Do we believe? Judge for yourself when you read the book.

  The Prince de Clèves is devastated. He asks his wife to try to resist her inclination, not only as her husband “but as a man whose happiness depends on you and who loves you more passionately, more tenderly, more violently than the man your heart prefers.” The prince is a very decent man, a nobleman in every sense of the word, the very antithesis of a laughingstock cuckold. He clearly deserves to be loved, but in this story, that is not to be. Instead, aroused by further suspicions, he falls into despair and, “unable to resist the crushing sorrow” that overcomes him, he is struck down by a violent fever. As he sinks toward death, the prince musters his strength one last time to express his love and his fears for his wife. His death will turn out to be another sacrifice, like that of her mother, on behalf of the princess’s character development.

  For it is her story that gives the novel its title, and it is her story that grips us to the end. Now that she is free to follow her heart and marry the Duc de Nemours, she chooses another path. Despite the duke’s continued attentions and her own rekindled passion at his sight, the princess turns down his offer of marriage. Why? The obvious answer is that she is filled with too much remorse at the thought of her husband’s death, which she attributes directly to the duke’s behavior and her own. The duke’s attempt to discount her rejection of him as a “phantom of duty” does not work. She is adamant, and not only because she is consumed with guilt for the past. Another, deeper reason lies in her fears for the future with a husband such as Nemours. She presents this reason lucidly and eloquently in their spellbinding last meeting. Let us listen.

  What I fear is the certainty that one day the love you feel for me now will die. . . . How long does men’s passion last when the bond is eternal? . . . it seems to me, indeed, that your constancy has been sustained by the obstacles it has encountered. There were enough of them to arouse in you the desire for victory. . . .

  I confess . . . that my passions may govern me, but they cannot blind me. . . . You have already had a number of passionate attachments; you would have others. I should no longer be able to make you happy; I should see you behaving towards another woman as you had behaved towards me. I should be mortally wounded at the sight. . . . A woman may reproach a lover, but can she reproach a husband who has merely stopped loving her? . . .

  I intend to remove myself from your sight, however violent the pain of separation. I implore you, by all the power I have over you, not to seek any opportunity to see me.

  This long monologue plumbs the soul of an extraordinary lady, who has grown into her nobility through the course of two years and 150 pages. She has evolved from a naïve teenager into a mature woman who has learned from her own experience, including the experience of being in love. For how could she judge love’s true worth without having undergone its delights and its torments? Anyone who has ever fallen in love, who has fantasized a meeting with a lover, who has woken up with the enhanced pleasure of knowing she will see him, who has put on a flattering dress and more makeup than usual—that person knows there is little in life so intense as being in love. Madame de Clèves knows all this and yet renounces a future with the man she loves.

  Whether we agree with her decision or not, one thing is clear: henceforth love will have to bear the burden of trenchant psychological scrutiny. Henceforth love will be accompanied by a certain skepticism. Can it last? Is it worth it? Are men congenitally inconstant?

  With La Princesse de Clèves, the medieval tradition of courtly love collides with seventeenth-century skepticism. Descartes and La Rochefoucauld, following
on the heels of Montaigne, question the reliability of our most cherished beliefs. They bring critical thinking into the realm of human relationships, religion, philosophy, and what we now call psychology. Madame de La Fayette does not deny the power of love. She masterfully describes it, even inflates it, then analyzes and deflates it. She would have heard from her friend La Rochefoucauld some of his caustic maxims that warn against the folly of love: “All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.” “The mind is always the dupe of the heart.” “True love is like seeing ghosts: we all talk about it, but few of us have ever seen one.”

  Perhaps the Princess de Clèves had another quote attributed to La Rochefoucauld in mind when she mustered the strength to refuse the Duc de Nemours: “Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.” Observing the fate of other women at court—wives and mistresses, women who had been loved, betrayed, and abandoned—she did not want to end up like them. She chose caution and renunciation over the hope of enduring love. We have come a long way from the reciprocal passion of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere. Madame de La Fayette and many of her contemporaries regarded passion as a recipe for disaster.

  La Princesse de Clèves marks a notable shift in the French erotic saga. While romantic love will return in various guises over and over and over again during the next three hundred years, it will never be the same. It will never be as free from suspicion as it was before Madame de La Fayette’s masterpiece.

  Reader, by now you have guessed that La Princesse de Clèves carries special meaning for me, as it did for the thousands of French men and women who were offended by President Sarkozy’s dismissal of the book. I can even say that it changed my life. In fact, when Alain de Botton’s lovely book How Proust Can Change Your Life appeared, I thought of how Madame de La Fayette had changed mine, for she was directly responsible for a major decision I made in 1976.