How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  Julie closed the doors of her salon to all but her most intimate friends. And while she genuinely mourned the sublime Marquis de Mora, she was tormented by her ineradicable love for Guibert. She now lived exclusively for his visits and his letters as she had previously lived for those of her former lover. Her letters to Guibert are one long cry of the heart, begging him to assuage the feelings that were tearing her apart:

  Oh, my friend, commiserate with me! Have pity on me! You alone in nature can penetrate my mortally wounded soul with feelings of sweetness and consolation. [Letter LIV]

  Oh my friend, my soul is aching. I have no more words, I have only cries. I have read, I have reread, I shall read your letter a hundred times. Oh my friend, how many boons and how many ills are joined together. [Letter LVI]

  I hate myself, I condemn myself, and I love you. [Letter LVII]

  I am waiting for the hour of tomorrow’s post with an impatience that you alone can perhaps understand . . . of course, it would be sweeter to be in a dialogue, but a monologue is endurable. [Letter LXV]

  Months later she is still crying out: “My God! How I love you!” (Letter XC) even as she implores him: “My friend, deliver me from the misfortune of loving you” (Letter CII). Julie conceptualizes herself as a creature whose entire being is given over to “loving and being loved” (Letter CIX). And however sick she becomes, with a wracking cough and high fever, it is always some sign from Guibert that brings her back to life. “My friend, I live, I shall live, I shall see you again; and whatever fate awaits me, I shall once more have an instant of pleasure before dying” (Letter CXIX). “I am condemned to love you as long as I shall breathe” (Letter CXX).

  As I made my way through her letters, I asked myself: Could this be the same woman known for her charm, intelligence, and culture? Love had turned her into the slave of overripe passion, like Racine’s Phèdre, whom she often cited in her letters to Guibert. At times hysterical, at times calmed by opium, often reproachful, but steadfast in her declarations of love, Julie must have become a burden to Guibert long before she died. How many times does a man want to hear that he is madly loved, without being able to reciprocate in kind? How many times does he want to be reproached for his neglect or coldness or interest in other women?

  And yet, even amidst what she called her sottes écritures (her stupid writing), we espy the sophisticated woman who merited the esteem of her contemporaries. She critiques Guibert’s paper in praise of Catinat, which he will submit to the Academy of Sciences for a prize and lose out to La Harpe. She goes almost daily to the opera to hear Orphée by Gluck, her favorite composer. She cites the great classical authors—Racine, La Fontaine, Molière, Boileau—often finding lines that are applicable to her present reality. She mingles with the best-known Enlightenment figures of her day—Condorcet, Holbach, Voltaire, Marmontel, Grimm, La Harpe—and dines with the upper crust of Parisian society. It is breathtaking to see her shift from the self-abasing stance she takes in voicing her unhappy love for Guibert to accounts of her social calendar, without even opening a new paragraph.

  There are moments when she regains her dignity, asking Guibert to refrain from visiting. In September 1775, when he marries a young aristocrat with a sizable fortune, she insists they break off their liaison. “Oh my God! The moment has come when I can say, or I must say: I shall live without loving you.” She compares the passion she has had for him to “a great sickness” and asks that he return her letters. In October she senses that she is dying and pronounces dramatically, “I must submit to my horrible destiny, to suffer, to love you, and soon to die” (Letter CXXXVI). Still, she languishes for seven more months, during which time she writes Guibert forty-four more letters. Her last written words to him carry her love credo to the grave: “Goodbye, my friend. If ever I return to life, I would like to spend it once more in loving you; but there is no longer any time” (Letter CLXXX).

  Julie de Lespinasse died on May 23, 1776. Several hours before her death, she asked d’Alembert to pardon her. In his words: “You asked me for that harrowing pardon, a last testimony to your love, of which the sweet and cruel memory will always remain in the depths of my heart.”

  Julie was buried the next day at the Church of Saint-Sulpice. D’Alembert and Condorcet led a crowd of mourners, which included a tearful Guibert. Grieved to the depths, d’Alembert had no way of knowing that worse was yet to come. When he waded through the thousands of letters Julie had left behind, including those from Mora, and the memoir she had written of their affair, he was torn to pieces, lacerated, destroyed. What words can convey the agony he felt?

  Thank God he was spared the knowledge of Julie’s second passion, since those letters were locked in a little writing desk, and d’Alembert followed Julie’s instructions by sending it, unopened, to Guibert. The extent to which he was willfully blind and ignorant of their liaison shows up in the letter he sent Guibert along with the desk. Taking Guibert for a confidant in his discovery of Julie’s love for Mora, he wrote: “Commiserate with me. . . . I was never the first object of her heart; I have lost sixteen years of my life and I am now sixty. Would that I could die while writing these sad words and would that they were engraved on my tomb. . . . Everything is lost for me, and I have only to die.”6

  If ever there was une grande amoureuse—a woman whose existence was synonymous with loving—it was Julie de Lespinasse. Intemperate by nature, excessive by choice, she forces questions about the nature of love itself. What does it mean to love not just one man but three, more or less at the same time? The French have accepted Julie as one of their own, a variant on the theme of l’amour fou (crazy love) that reappears in different incarnations from century to century: think of Racine’s Phèdre, or the writer George Sand, or the singer Edith Piaf. In France, for all her eccentricity, the woman who loves too much assumes a heroic dimension.

  To love excessively, wildly, madly, to sacrifice and even humiliate oneself for love, is a radical but not unrepresentative expression of French culture. It was, after all, the French who invented romantic love with such all-or-nothing characters as Tristan and Iseult, and Lancelot and Guinevere. Julie shares with her fictive predecessors a seemingly inexhaustible fund of passion, but she does not invest it all in a single love object. She loves different men differently—d’Alembert with tender affection, Mora with mutual enthusiasm, Guibert with obsessive passion. She belies the idea that love must always be exclusive.

  Julie’s story also exemplifies the pervasive interchange between an individual life and the culture of her time and place. The sentimental novel, popularized in England and France by Richardson and Rousseau, was not merely a literary artifact: it had consequences in the lives of real people. Julie de Lespinasse, Mora, Guibert, and even d’Alembert fashioned their behavior on the models they had discovered in books. In an age that celebrated feelings, they could not appear to be lacking in sensibility. Obviously there were differences in the depth of their emotions and differences in their manner of expression, ranging from Guibert’s studied gallantry to Julie’s overwrought declarations, which resembled professions of faith, but for all of them, the ability to love was considered a reliable measure of worth.

  By the 1740s when Julie was a girl and Richardson’s epistolary novels were gaining international celebrity, letters had become a conventional accompaniment to love affairs. The eighteenth century is famous for its correspondences between intellectuals and between lovers. In the latter category, those of Julie rank at the top of the list. They make a stunning contrast with the letters of her transatlantic contemporaries, Abigail and John Adams, who bequeathed to posterity the richest marital correspondence in American history. The Adamses’ enduring love was bound up in the proprieties of marriage, religion, and politics, all of which were firmly grounded in the virtue of subordinating pleasure to duty. We see this principle at work during the many trying years when the couple was separated by John’s public service in Philadelphia, Paris
, and the Netherlands, while Abigail raised their children and managed their Massachusetts farm. When she finally joined John in Paris, she was—not surprisingly—uncomfortable with the sexually charged mores enjoyed by the French. She was taken aback by men and women who were physically expressive in public and openly discussed private matters that were not considered fit for polite conversation in her homeland. She was shocked when Madame Helvétius, widow of the famous philosopher, threw her arms around Benjamin Franklin’s neck and bussed him on both cheeks. She was embarrassed and offended when ballerinas showed their ankles at the opera. As representatives of a provincial and still-puritanical American culture undernourished by passion, the Adams family set a tone of domestic harmony that neither Franklin nor Jefferson, unencumbered by wives during their overlapping ministries in Paris, had reason to convey. John and Abigail’s carefully preserved letters document a loving commitment that lasted more than half a century. In contrast, Julie’s love letters to Guibert have the operatic extravagance we have come to associate with a notable current in French literature and life.

  A love letter had the task of conveying one’s feelings to its recipient in the hope that such feelings were and would be reciprocated. Letters could create an ongoing dialogue while the lovers were apart, but, as Julie wrote to Guibert, even a monologue was better than nothing. Writing to her lover allowed her to vent explosive emotions, like a bloodletting that ostensibly purged the body of excess humors. Julie’s emotions were larger than life, and the men she found to share them with, albeit their distinction, were rarely as passionate as she. Yet, it is perhaps d’Alembert’s story that I find the most moving. His love for Julie was the one great love of his life. He loved her blindly, sincerely, deeply, loyally. He deserved a better fate than to discover her duplicity after her death.

  She, however, had the death she longed for. She died with her reputation intact, beloved and admired by the best of French society. Among the many words of posthumous praise, Guibert’s eulogy would have made her very proud. He wrote of her gift for friendship and her generosity. The friends who gathered around her were united by “the desire to please her, and the need to love her.” He wrote of the harmony that reigned between her thoughts and her manner of expression. “Her letters had the movement and warmth of conversation.” He admitted: “I made a tour of Europe, and her letters followed me, consoled me, supported me.” And in a final personal note that would have touched Julie deeply, he said: “If ever I do anything good or honest, and if I attain something great, it will be because your memory will perfect and still enflame my soul.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Republican Love

  Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland

  NATURE HAS GIVEN ME THE GIFT OF A PURE HEART AND GOOD AND TENDER PARENTS, WHO HAVE BROUGHT US UP WISELY AND GIVEN US AN EDUCATION CAPABLE OF MAKING US VIRTUOUS WIVES.

  Elisabeth Le Bas, “Manuscrit de Mme Le Bas,” 1842

  Republican couple going for a picnic. Circa 1790. Paris: Musée Carnavelet. Photograph by Hubert Josse.

  When I arrived in Paris in the spring of 1988, my friends were anticipating the bicentennial of the French Revolution the following year. They were still debating whether the Revolution had done more harm than good, as if it had occurred just yesterday. I couldn’t help adding my two cents gleaned from the work I was doing on women memoirists from that period. Before I knew it, a publisher offered me a contract to turn my research into a book, provided that I write it quickly and in French. That book appeared in 1989, just in time for it to be cited as one of twelve focusing on women among the 750 publications concerned with male-dominated revolutionary events. Four years later, I published a more comprehensive version in English on the same subject.1

  What I discovered from researching those two books was that women remembered the Revolution in a more personal way than men. (Not surprising!) The memoirs of the leading male figures who survived the Revolution highlighted public events, with little mention of their private lives, but because women were primarily ensconced within the domestic sphere, their accounts were likely to include portraits of themselves as girls, sisters, wives, and mothers. It is from their stories that I was able to discover how love manifested itself in a time of revolution—how it did, and did not, conform to the politically correct discourse of its time.

  This chapter is based on the little-known forty-nine-page autobiography written by Elisabeth Le Bas at the end of her long life, and on the now-famous memoirs written in prison by Madame Roland. Separated by a generation and by differences in education, the two women had little in common beyond their husbands’ republican politics, which they shared. Each saw herself, justifiably, as a victim of the Revolution, since it had already destroyed Le Bas’ husband and would be responsible for the deaths of Madame Roland’s husband and Madame Roland herself.

  Elisabeth Le Bas, née Duplay, was a young woman from a comfortable bourgeois family, who offered lodgings to the Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. Her future husband, Philippe Le Bas, was one of Robespierre’s closest associates. She was scarcely twenty years old when she first encountered Le Bas in 1792. They were married on August 13, 1793, and she was a mother and widow less than one year later, imprisoned with her baby and ostracized after her liberation. How did all these tumultuous events come about in so short a time?

  Elisabeth began her memoirs in medias res:

  It was on the day that Marat was carried in triumph to the Assembly that I saw my darling, Philippe Le Bas, for the first time.

  I found myself, on that day with Charlotte Robespierre. Le Bas came to greet her. He stayed with us a long time and asked who I was. Charlotte told him I was one of the daughters of her elder brother’s host.2

  The narrator knew how to make the most of the historical moment. The beginning of her romance was linked to the day when the radical journalist and Convention delegate, Jean-Paul Marat, overcame his adversaries and was carried on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd back to the assembly. Such intoxicating circumstances were decidedly favorable to the flowering of love.

  Charlotte Robespierre, Maximilien’s sister, played the role of friend, confidante, and mediator for the young woman and her future spouse. She chaperoned Elisabeth at the Convention sessions, introduced her to the deputy Le Bas, witnessed their first exchange of words and trinkets, and counseled the younger woman on the early flutterings of love. At one session, the two women brought sweets and fruit to offer to Philippe Le Bas and to Charlotte’s less famous brother, Augustin Robespierre, also a deputy.

  At the next Convention session, the stakes rose from oranges to jewelry. Le Bas took Elisabeth’s ring and lent the women a lorgnette. Elisabeth remembers:

  I wanted to give him back his lorgnette. . . . He begged me to keep it. I asked Charlotte to ask him again for my ring; she promised she would, but we did not see Le Bas again.

  . . . I had my regrets not to have my ring and not to have been able to give him back his lorgnette. I was afraid of displeasing my mother and of being scolded.

  Budding love, as Elisabeth depicts it, is a comedy of errors, the mishaps contributing to its intensity and leading in a roundabout way to love’s ultimate victory. The would-be lovers are presented as chaste and above reproach, the purity of their actions guaranteed by the watchful eye of a respectable chaperone and the ever-present fear of a stern mother. Their love, consecrated within hallowed halls, must write itself according to a republican script in which women and men eschew the libertine ways of ancien régime aristocrats in favor of virtue, sincerity, and affection.

  After the suggestive exchange of objects initiated by Le Bas—a ploy that produced anxiety in the heart of a naïve young woman—a serious obstacle presented itself. Le Bas fell sick and could not return to the Convention. Elisabeth responded to his illness with signs of sorrow that perplexed her friends. “Everyone noted my sadness, even Robespierre, who asked me if I had some secret sorrow.
. . . He spoke to me with kindness: ‘Little Elisabeth, think of me as your best friend, as a kind brother; I shall give you all the advice you need at your age.’ ”

  Robespierre played a major role as marriage broker. In Elisabeth’s memoir, he comes across as kindly and warm, in contrast to his austere reputation. But another legendary revolutionary figure, Danton, is cast as a villain. Meeting him at a mutual friend’s country house, Elisabeth was repelled by his ugliness and even more so by his forthright sexual advances.

  He said I appeared to be unwell, that I needed a good [boy] friend—that would bring back my health! . . . He approached, wanted to put his arm about my waist and kiss me. I pushed him away with force. . . .

  I immediately begged Madame Panis never to bring me back to that house. I told her that man had made vile propositions to me, such as I had never heard before. He had no respect whatsoever for women, and even less for younger ones.

  The picture of a wanton Danton is not out of keeping with his reputation; one didn’t have to be an aristocrat to model oneself on the likes of Crébillon’s Versac or Laclos’ Valmont. In his presence, Elisabeth’s first duty was to protect her virginity and her good name.

  After two months of illness, Philippe Le Bas returned to public life. Elisabeth ran into him by chance at the Jacobin meeting hall where she had gone to reserve seats for the evening session featuring a speech by Robespierre. As she tells the story, it is clear that this encounter with Le Bas was a turning point in their relationship.