How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  Yet, as I learned recently, Dominique lived a secret horror for almost thirty years. Her husband was a sadistic pervert. He could make love only by humiliating her, insulting her, making her cry, then taking her violently.

  On top of that, she discovered fairly early in the marriage that he was bedding anyone else he could lay his hands on, mostly young women working in the company he directed, women wanting to get ahead professionally in return for sexual favors.

  Why did Dominique stay in the marriage so long? Her answer: because of the children. She got some satisfaction by taking a lover, who helped restore confidence in herself as a sexual being. Then, with the aid of a psy (that’s the French term for a shrink), she ultimately asked for a divorce, at which point her husband ran off with someone the age of their daughters. Dominique still has nightmares about her husband’s sadistic practices, but in the daytime she leads a very active life. No, she is no longer with her former lover, who was offered a job in another country. She would like to find someone else, just a decent man who has normal sexual needs. Still, she considers herself lucky to be rid of a husband who was, in her words, “right out of a novel by the Marquis de Sade.”

  To schematize the period stretching from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the end of the century, I have tried to show how the French repackaged love in two competing brands: libertinage and sentimentalism. The first brand exaggerated the immoral aspects of gallantry, spreading sexual license from the nobility to the middle and lower classes, and to women as well as to men. The fictions of Prévost, Crébillon fils, and Laclos bore witness to the corrosive presence of libertinage in ancien régime France. The second brand of love accentuated feeling. Sentiment, emotion, tenderness, passion—these were the hallmarks of a true lover. With Rousseau leading the charge, sentimentalism spread its empire among the entire reading public, starting with the bourgeoisie and extending upward to the nobility and downward to the lower classes. Lawyers and administrators, the wives of merchants and doctors, unmarried governesses and shop girls—all professed devotion to sentimental love.

  These four novels reflected the practice of love in prerevolutionary France. And they did more than that: they created new ways of feeling, behaving, and expressing oneself. How many men read and reread the pages in which Versac told them how to conduct themselves so as to seduce as many women as possible and still maintain the reputation of a gentleman? How many parents advised their offspring to read Manon Lescaut and Les liaisons dangereuses as cautionary tales? How many men and women, reborn as sons and daughters of Saint-Preux and Julie, turned their own lives into epistolary novels? One of the latter group, Julie de Lespinasse, provides an extraordinary example of this interplay between fiction and life, so much so that I’ll devote the next chapter to her alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Love Letters

  Julie de Lespinasse

  I REGULARLY RECEIVED TWO LETTERS A DAY FROM FONTAINEBLEAU. . . . HE HAD ONLY ONE OCCUPATION, HE HAD ONLY ONE PLEASURE: HE WANTED TO LIVE IN MY THOUGHTS, HE WANTED TO FILL MY LIFE.

  Julie de Lespinasse, Letter CXLI, 1775

  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Love Letter,” circa 1770–1790. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

  Julie de Lespinasse thought of herself as the heroine of a novel. She considered the facts of her life more fantastic than the fictions of either Samuel Richardson or Abbé Prévost.1 While she never wrote her memoirs for public consumption, the hundreds of letters she left behind read like one half of an impassioned epistolary novel.

  During her lifetime, letters were the staples of human communication within cities, throughout Europe, and across the seas. What the telephone was to the twentieth century, and email, texting, and tweeting are today, letters were to our ancestors. People stayed in touch with each other on a regular basis, sometimes weekly, biweekly, or daily, and these letters were not just short telegraphic messages. They were well-written and lengthy, containing descriptions of one’s experiences and observations, as well as feelings that might have been awkward to express face-to-face. Within Julie’s Parisian circle, which contained many of the best-known figures of her day, letters were often written so as to be read aloud to others or copied for circulation or saved for posterity.

  Love letters constituted a prized category. Would he have the nerve to declare himself in writing? Would she respond with the appropriate dose of encouragement? Would they manage to keep their correspondence free from snooping eyes? How could they endure silences due to illness or distant travel or letters that simply went astray? What should she surmise if he sent letters less frequently than before? If she was approached by another suitor, could she write to the second man as well as the first? Love letters were meant to be treasured, to be read over and over again while passion burned, and again in old age when the fires of youth had cooled. If the affair didn’t turn into a lifetime attachment, the right thing to do was return the letters to their author. People died with love letters stashed away in boxes and desks, leaving instructions in their wills that all their papers should be destroyed. Though most of the love letters written to Julie were indeed burned right after her death, a few others managed to survive; and, above all, the 180 letters she wrote to the Comte de Guibert bear witness to her incredible life story.2

  When Julie de Lespinasse died at the age of forty-four in 1776, she was famous as the muse of the Encyclopédistes—d’Alembert, Condorcet, Diderot, and so many other luminaries who had been regulars at her lively salon. For twelve years, the cream of French literary, scientific, and artistic society streamed into her apartment almost every day from five to nine in the evening for the sole pleasure of conversation. Her demise was mourned by Enlightenment leaders from Paris to Prussia. Frederick II sent his condolences to Jean le Rond d’Alembert, and d’Alembert wrote her two intensely moving love letters several weeks after she had died.

  Who was d’Alembert and why would he have written to Julie after her death? D’Alembert was a renowned mathematician and philosopher and Diderot’s first collaborator on the Encyclopédie—a mammoth dictionary of eighteenth-century knowledge. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five d’Alembert wrote the numerous treatises that would place him in the ranks of the greatest Enlightenment intellectuals: Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Buffon, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Nearing forty, he fell in love with Julie, who was fifteen years his junior. For twelve years, from 1764 to 1776, their shared life was a matter of public record. For the sake of form, they lived in separate quarters of the same building, although everyone assumed they were lovers. They probably were for a time, and then they were not. But whatever the exact nature of their relationship during all the years they were together, d’Alembert never stopped loving her and treating her as the exclusive mistress of his heart.

  But Julie, after her first years with d’Alembert, was not satisfied with the love of one devoted man, however distinguished. There would be two other lovers during this same period. Somehow she managed to keep the depths of her great passion for the Marquis de Mora hidden from d’Alembert. Similarly, he didn’t know the true nature of her relations with her last lover, the Comte de Guibert.

  Julie’s letters to Guibert, which were published by his widow in the early nineteenth century after all the principal parties had died, revealed a woman who was proud to be driven by passion. She wrote of herself that she had “the good fortune of loving and of being loved” and that if she had to live her life all over again, she would devote herself a second time to “loving and suffering, heaven and hell.” She had no desire to live in the temperate climate inhabited by “all the fools and all the automatons by whom we are surrounded” (Letter XCIX). This credo certainly reflected the mentality of a generation who had fallen under the spell of another Julie, Saint-Preux’s beloved in La nouvelle Héloïse.

  And what about d’Alembert? How did he interact with this excitable creature and how did he survive her demise? In the first of the two letter
s that d’Alembert wrote to Julie after her death, he poured out his heart to the one who could no longer hear him. It is one of the strangest love letters in history, for he articulates not only the devastating loss felt by a surviving partner, but also his sense of betrayal in discovering that the woman he adored had been madly in love with another. This came about because Julie had asked d’Alembert to burn her papers, which contained many of the love letters she had received from the Marquis de Mora as well as a memoir of their affair.

  D’Alembert’s first words to Julie convey a state of utter despair. He feels abandoned, horribly alone, and inconsolable.

  Oh you who can no longer hear me, you whom I loved so tenderly and so constantly, you who I thought loved me for a few moments, you whom I preferred to everything, you who would have taken the place of everyone for me, if you had wanted to; alas! If you can still feel some emotion in that dwelling place of death for which you have so deeply sighed, and which will soon be mine, look at my misfortune and my tears, the solitude of my soul, the horrible emptiness you have placed there, and the cruel abandonment in which you leave me!

  This tone of general grief fills several pages before d’Alembert turns to the subject of his second affliction: the discovery of her lover.

  Cruel and unhappy friend! It seems that by making me responsible for the execution of your last wishes, you wanted to add more to my pain. Why did the duties which this execution imposed upon me teach me what I should never have known, and what I would have liked to ignore. Why didn’t you order me to burn that disastrous manuscript without opening it—that manuscript which I thought I could read without finding in it more subject for grief, and which taught me that, for at least eight years, I was no longer the first object of your heart, in spite of all the assurances you so often gave me? Who can say, after this distressing reading, that during the eight or ten additional years when I thought I was so loved by you, you had not already betrayed my tender love? Alas, didn’t I have reason to believe such a thing when I saw, in that immense multitude of letters which you ordered me to burn, that you had not saved a single one of mine?

  There is something so touching about d’Alembert’s reaction. That Julie saved a multitude of letters from Mora, and not one of his, wounded him to the marrow. His pain rings true. Here was a man totally shattered by the loss and duplicity of a woman. Here real life seems to have imitated art, and surpassed it.

  In a second letter to Julie written six weeks after the first, he visits her tomb in a somewhat more forgiving mood. He remembers:

  You who no longer loved me, it is true, when you were delivered from the burden of life! But you who did love me once . . . you loved me at least for a few instants, and no one loves me now and will ever love me again. Alas! Why must you now be nothing more than ashes and dust? Let me at least believe that these ashes, as cold as they are, are less insensitive to my tears than all the icy hearts that surround me.

  Julie had been d’Alembert’s greatest love, and he had no hope of ever loving again. It is impossible to read these two letters without feeling the agonizing pain of this aging philosopher, who never got over his attachment to his irreplaceable mistress, though he lived on for seven more years in the shadow of her death.

  Now I shall turn to the beginning of her life and you will see why Julie had reason to believe that it was stranger than fiction. Julie’s baptismal certificate, dated November 10, 1732, and issued in Lyon, stated that her parents were Claude Lespinasse and Julie Navarre. Neither of these two adults had ever existed. Julie’s real mother was the Comtesse Julie-Claude d’Albon, a member of an illustrious family whose nobility went back to the Middle Ages. Her father? Ah, there’s the problem. Like the heroes and heroines of many English novels, Julie’s father was unknown, but instead of turning up at the right moment to claim his daughter and elevate her to her proper place in society, Julie’s father remained forever hidden from her. One thing was certain: he was not her mother’s legal husband, Claude d’Albon, the cousin whom Julie-Claude had married when she was sixteen and the man with whom she had had two surviving children, a girl and a boy. Soon after the boy’s birth in 1724, the parents legally separated.

  The Comtesse d’Albon remained at the country manor with her two children and in time took a lover. In 1731, she gave birth to a son named Hilaire, whose baptismal certificate also bore the names of false parents, like her daughter—our Julie—born twenty months later. Hilaire was sent off under an assumed name to be raised in a monastery, whereas Julie was raised at home in the company of her mother’s legitimate children. No one publicly acknowledged the mother-daughter connection; no one publicly revealed the identity of Julie’s father. She grew up within a bubble of mystery, the “bastard child” protected by a mother who could not acknowledge her own daughter.

  In her adult correspondence with Guibert, Julie wrote: “Heroines in novels have little to say about their education: mine will merit being written because of its peculiarity” (Letter XLVI). It was a strange childhood, indeed, and one from which Julie could never entirely shake herself free. Guibert, her confidant and last lover, would write after her death: “Several times she had related to me the first years of her life. Everything one hears at the theater, everything one says in novels, is cold and devoid of interest in comparison with that tale.” Both Julie and Guibert looked to novels and plays as the only appropriate references for the storybook quality of her life.

  And then that story became even more improbable. In 1739, when Julie was seven, a dashing officer and distant relation turned up at the manor house. At forty, Gaspard de Vichy was still an attractive man and succeeded in winning the heart of Julie’s half-sister, Diane, aged twenty-four. Nothing unusual about that, except . . . it appears that Gaspard was Julie-Claude d’Albon’s former lover and the father of her two illegitimate children, Hilaire and Julie! It must have been a tormenting experience for the countess to see Gaspard turning his affection to her daughter instead of to her. Yet everyone kept up appearances (the French are very good at this), the wedding took place, and Diane went off to live with her husband at his château, leaving behind her mother and Julie, who was now not only Diane’s unacknowledged half-sister but also her unacknowledged stepdaughter. Did Diane know this at the time of her marriage? In the atmosphere of half-truths that surrounded the d’Albon family, she probably had her suspicions, which would be revealed to her in time.

  The story worsens. The Comtesse Julie-Claude d’Albon died nine years later from tuberculosis, leaving her sixteen-year-old daughter Julie to the mercy of Gaspard and Diane, now the parents of two children. (Try to figure out their relationship to Julie.) Before her death, Julie’s mother left her a sum of money in a small desk, which ended up in the pocket of the legitimate son, and an annual pension of 300 pounds to cover her food, upkeep, and education—a pittance, considering the family fortune. At sixteen, Julie was hardly of an age to live alone, so off she went to live with Gaspard, Diane, and their two children, as the poor relative, half-governess, half-maid.

  Still, with the education she had received in her mother’s home, where she had been bred on classical French writers like Racine and La Fontaine and learned to read English and Italian, she was able to continue her studies and, however unknowingly, prepare herself for the day when she would entertain France’s greatest intellectuals.

  The transition from poor relative to Parisian star took place through an unlikely intermediary—Gaspard’s younger sister, the Marquise du Deffand. In 1752, when the widowed marquise arrived at her brother’s home for a visit, she had a history she no longer talked about. While her husband had been alive, they had lived largely apart. Among the provincial nobility with means, it was not uncommon for a wife to leave her husband to his hunting and estate management in the country while she enjoyed the bounties of Paris. Sometimes the situation was reversed, but in her case, it was the wife, rather than the husband, who established herself as a welcome pre
sence in Parisian society.

  She was received at the court of the regent, Philippe d’Orléans during the years when sexual liberties were notably flamboyant. What we have seen in Crébillon fils’s novel The Wayward Head and Heart is a pale reflection of the orgies characteristic of Philippe’s reign. Suffice it to say that he slept with the young marquise and with every other female in reach, including, according to rumors, his own daughter. But it was also at the court of Philippe d’Orléans that Madame du Deffand met Voltaire and began her social ascendance among the philosophers. Thanks to the magnificent correspondence she carried on with him and other notables, we have precious information about the cultural life of her century.

  Madame du Deffand was already past fifty when she met Julie de Lespinasse. Since 1745, the marquise had run a noteworthy salon at the apartment she rented from the sisters of Saint Joseph in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, in today’s fashionable sixth district. Voltaire and d’Alembert were her intimate friends. She had at her disposal a considerable fortune, left to her by her long-neglected husband, and was still one of the most sought-after women of Paris. But she was going blind, and she was bored. The meeting with Julie at twenty, a charming young woman with an uncertain future, revived her spirits. Here was someone through whom she could live again. She invited her to come to Paris and live under her protection. It took two years of complicated negotiations with Julie’s “family” before she found herself at the Marquise’s side.

  No one ever said that Julie de Lespinasse was beautiful, or even pretty. But everyone agreed that she had something special—charm, intelligence, wit, sensitivity, vivacity, spontaneity, and, above all, passion. In short, she captivated through her mind and speech, rather than through the usual attributes of female pulchritude. If she was physically ugly, as some have said, she was what the French call une jolie laide—an ugly woman who knows how to make herself attractive. With Madame du Deffand as her mentor, Julie metamorphosed into a warm and gracious woman, at home in the marquise’s salon, at home answering letters from French philosophes, at home at the theater and the opera, at home in her skin. Finally, it seemed, the female bastard had found her rightful place.