How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  Any lovers who have a double-digit age disparity between them would do well to read The Red and the Black. I recommended it several years ago to a young man in his twenties who had come from Brussels to study in Paris soon after his mother’s death. He was lodging with his French aunt—his mother’s younger sister—and her husband in the Latin Quarter while attending the Sorbonne. At the request of his aunt, I met with him to discuss the possibilities of literary studies in the United States. During the course of our conversation over a glass of wine in a café near the Panthéon, his mood changed from cautious to confiding. He let me know that he and his aunt were on intimate terms. Since she was over fifty, I wondered how that made him feel. “It’s a problem for her, but not for me.” And how did he feel about the uncle? “Now that’s a problem.” He felt guilty receiving bed and board at his uncle’s expense and wondered how long he could possibly stay with them. At the end of our conversation, he promised me he would read The Red and the Black.

  His aunt had put him in her grown son’s room. She took him with her to various social events, called him “my adoptive son,” and spared no effort to help him in his career. He eventually became a journalist and returned to his home country. Within a year of his departure, his aunt developed cancer and rapidly met a premature death. When I visited her mournful husband, he told me that he had not been blind to the affair. “David came along just when she needed him.” Their own son had recently moved away and she had keenly felt his absence. “At least she had a little pleasure before she disappeared.” It was strange for me to sit in that familiar apartment, where I had come to offer my condolences and where every piece of furniture and bibelot spoke to the dead woman’s presence. It was stranger still to hear her husband speak dispassionately, almost nostalgically, about his wife’s affair with a man half her age. I can’t imagine this scene taking place in my American homeland, or anywhere else but in France.

  The motif of the young man in love with an older woman, and vice versa, is quintessentially French. It does not appear significantly in German, English, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, or American literature, though surely—if Freud is correct—boys from these countries are also subject to the same Oedipal evolution. So what is there in French culture that gets added on to a person’s psychological development to create this socio-erotic pattern? Here are a few of my musings on that question.

  1. The French eroticize everything, including the relation of mother and son. Most French mothers have no trouble caressing their children, boys and girls, and words like mon chéri and ma chérie fall from their lips even when the children are adults. I have seen French boys of twelve and fourteen cuddling up to their mothers in ways that would be unthinkable to most American boys of that age. Some of us remember the film Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart), in which a mother sleeps with her adolescent son and nothing terrible happens to either of them. Once again, a film that could have been made only in France!

  2. The French value erotic love to such an extent that women of all ages make an effort to retain their sex appeal. This means staying thin, having one’s hair done, and dressing fashionably even when one is eighty. Not for the Frenchwoman to bury herself in comforting fat or dowdy black weeds! True, class and region enter into all of this: a Parisian of the upper bourgeoisie may resemble a peasant in the Auvergne only to the extent that a thoroughbred horse looks like a plow horse.

  3. Court society, which encouraged the love of a young man for a mature woman during the Middle Ages, privileged older aristocratic women throughout the ancien régime. For example, the Marquise du Deffand reigned over her prestigious salon long after Julie de Lespinasse’s departure, and when she was sixty-eight and blind, fell so in love with the fifty-year-old Englishman Horace Walpole that he was obliged to assume the role of a younger suitor. It was about this same period that wealthy bourgeois women, like Madame Geoffrin, also began to establish salons that served as gateways for young men into “the world.” Whether they were writers, philosophers, scientists, or just plain social climbers, these men counted on older women to provide a showcase for their talents and lobby on their behalf for prizes, entrance into academies, and social acceptance among their peers.

  4. The medieval romances and sentimental novels that French girls and boys read in childhood and adolescence offer models of behavior for the adult years. Each generation that acts out these models adds a new chapter and inspires further stories in this vein.

  Today, a woman of thirty, as in Balzac’s novel with that title, has become a woman of fifty, or more. Both in the United States and in France, it has become increasingly common for some women—single, married, widowed, or divorced—to take a younger partner.6 With increased longevity, careful diet, good medical care, cosmetic surgery, and often her own earnings, it is possible for a woman to keep her sex appeal well into her later years. That is, if she wants to, and many Frenchwomen seem to want just that.

  Of course, it is still more common for an older man to take a younger mistress or wife, especially if he is rich and famous. How many well-known actors, politicians, and industrialists are pictured in the newspaper alongside first, second, or third wives who look like their daughters? Yet French novels and plays contain comparatively few accounts of an older man’s passion for a much younger woman.

  On the other hand, the theme of the young man in love with an older woman had become almost commonplace by 1869 when Flaubert published his eponymous novel, L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education). By then, even a few women writers had taken up the subject, most notably George Sand, whose life and work were inscribed from a female perspective. But as we shall see in the next chapter, the theme of older woman–younger man was only one aspect of Sand’s peerless romantic career.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Love Among the Romantics

  George Sand and Alfred de Musset

  ANGEL OF DEATH, FATAL LOVE, OH MY DESTINY, UNDER THE FACE OF A BLOND AND DELICATE CHILD. HOW I STILL LOVE YOU, ASSASSIN!

  George Sand, Intimate Journal, 1834

  Romantic couple. Nineteenth-century color engraving. Signed M. Adolphe.

  Quite early in life, I came to love the English romantics. Lines from Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats circled in my head as I walked to school or meandered in Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek Park. The mental picture of Wordsworth hiking the Lake District accompanied me as I asked my own questions about “nature’s holy plan” and lamented “what man has made of man.” The romantics were poets, prophets, philosophers, and they all came from England.

  When I encountered the French romantics in college, it took me a while to understand how the two groups could share the same name. Yes, they were poets given to bucolic reverie. Yes, they were misunderstood individuals at odds with society. But what did a group of Parisian bohemians have in common with the demigods who retreated to the English countryside or made pilgrimages to Italy and Greece?

  The French poet Lamartine, to be sure, contemplated nature with a romantic sensibility. His verses conjured up the majestic mountains and soothing streams craved by troubled souls, as in these words, from “Le Vallon” (The Valley).

  . . . la nature est là qui t’invite et qui t’aime;

  Plonge-toi dans son sein qu’elle t’ouvre toujours.

  . . . there is nature, which invites and loves you;

  Plunge into her breast, which she offers you always.1

  However, the unprecedented success of Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques in 1820 sprang mainly from something even dearer to the French than the love of nature: his poems were inspired by a tragic love story, by love itself (l’amour tout court). Behind the solitary sojourner hoping to find consolation in nature’s bosom is the lover who had lost his mistress. Lamartine’s beloved Julie Charles went to an early death in December 1817. Under the name of Elvire in his poetry, she would be granted eternal life. Is there any French person who doesn’t know
the line “Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé” (“A single person is missing, and the whole world is depeopled”). Lamartine’s poignant loss, his melancholy tone and mystical longings—all resonated within the hearts of Rousseau’s spiritual descendants.

  One now-famous poem, “Le Lac,” born from Lamartine’s personal experience, offered an art of love intended for everyone. Returning to the lakeside where the lovers had once shared ecstatic moments, Lamartine recalled Elvire’s moving words: “O temps, suspends ton vol!” (“O time, suspend your flight!”) In response, the poet threw himself into love’s incessant flux as a counterforce to despair.

  Aimons donc, aimons donc! De l’heure fugitive,

  Hâtons-nous, jouissons!

  L’homme n’a point de port, le temps n’a point de rive;

  Let us love, let us love, in this passing hour,

  Hurry up, let’s enjoy!

  Man hasn’t any port, time hasn’t any shore.

  What is left of our frenzied existence? Only the memory. As a site of remembrance, the lake has the power to evoke the only words that matter: “Ils ont aimé!” (“They have loved!”) This will be the creed for a whole generation of writers born around 1800—Alfred de Vigny, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier.

  By 1830, almost all these French romantics had gathered in Paris. Writers from abroad, like the German poet Heinrich Heine and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, would join them, as well as famous musicians like Chopin, Liszt, and Meyerbeer, and painters of every stripe. Once again Paris was the European capital of literary and artistic creation, as it had been during the reign of Louis XIV and the Enlightenment.

  The year 1830 was marked by two major cultural events: Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People, in honor of the July revolution that forced the abdication of Charles X and ushered in the liberal reign of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe; and Victor Hugo’s revolutionary play Hernani. First performed at the Comédie Française on February 25, 1830, Hernani officially launched French romanticism. It is true that the play is less memorable today as a work of art than for the demonstrations it provoked, pitting young enthusiasts against entrenched conservatives. The bandit Hernani’s love of Doña Sol, contested by two high-born men who are also in love with her, brought Spanish passion to the stage as seen by French eyes—that is, cloaked in violent melodrama. This vein of Spanish exoticism had already been mined by Musset in his Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (Stories from Spain and Italy, 1829) and would be reworked by Prosper Mérimée in his story Carmen (1848), which provided the plot for Bizet’s world-famous opera. In all of these works, Spain was represented as the country of fatal love.

  French romantics projected upon Spanish princes, bandits, and gypsies their own roiled emotions. Love combined with suffering, jealousy, infidelity, honor, and death inspirited their lives and made for marketable literature. If previous generations had given love its due as prescribed by the codes of fin’amor, gallantry, or sensibility, the romantics raised the stakes: love or death, love and death, love in death, love, love, love as the supreme value in life. Love was worth living for and dying for. In novels and plays, women and men died of broken hearts, even as their authors recovered and went on to new romances.

  No one incarnates the French romantic spirit better than George Sand. From the start, even before her birth, Sand’s story was what the French would call romanesque, meaning “like a novel.” Sand was born on July 1, 1804, only one month after her parents, Maurice Dupin, a dashing Napoleonic officer, and Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, a woman with a shady past, legalized their union. She was baptized the next day as Amantine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin. Her parents’ liaison of four years had been hidden from Maurice Dupin’s aristocratic mother, since she would never have accepted his marriage to the disreputable daughter of a bird vendor. But when Dupin met an untimely death, his mother, Madame Dupin de Francueil, was obliged to look out for her daughter-in-law and her four-year-old granddaughter, Aurore. Growing up in her grandmother’s country manor at Nohant (today a pilgrimage site for Sand aficionados), Aurore Dupin experienced a divided sense of loyalty between the mother she fiercely loved and the grandmother she profoundly respected. Although she attributed her artistic genes to her parents, it was probably the education she received under her grandmother’s tutelage that deserves equal credit for her ability to compete in the male literary arena.

  As a child, Aurore caroused with peasant children of both sexes. She spoke their patois and joined in their rustic activities—milking cows and goats, making cheese, dancing country dances, eating wild apples and pears. Up to the age of thirteen, she could roam according to her fancy and read whatever she liked. In the twelve months between her twelfth and thirteenth years, Aurore grew three inches, attaining a maximum height of five feet two. It was then that she began to show the signs of adolescence that became the despair of her grandmother—irritability, temper tantrums, outbursts toward her tutor. At this point, her grandmother decided to send her off to a convent school in Paris so as to transform her from an unmannered country girl into a marriageable young lady.

  Sand’s autobiography Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life) presents the picture of an active, energetic, curious thirteen-year-old who had trouble adapting to convent ways.2 But gradually she settled in and formed close friendships. Sand, at the age of fifty, remembered in detail a large number of girls she had loved with great tenderness. She also wrote of the nuns who served as mother figures, including “the pearl of the convent,” Madame Alicia, for whom she developed a great worshipful love, and the lowly lay sister, Sister Hélène. These intense attachments, all the more intense because they were formed in the absence of boys, can be seen as the prototype for the highly charged friendships the future author would form throughout adulthood.

  We mustn’t leave Aurore’s school years without speaking about her conversion experience. During her second year at the convent, she had an epiphany in the chapel: “I felt faith grab hold of me.” That episode inaugurated “a state of calm devotion” that she maintained throughout her third and final school year. For the rest of her life, despite her unconventional existence as a novelist, an adulteress, a cigarette-smoking woman in male clothes, and a political radical, she held onto her faith in God.

  At sixteen, Aurore Dupin returned to her grandmother’s estate and renewed the freer existence she had known before. Reading books, playing the harpsichord, going out horseback riding, befriending the locals, and taking classes with her old tutor filled her days, until her grandmother had a stroke and died in December 1821. Then, with mixed emotions, Aurore went to live with her mother in Paris. Her relations with her mother were always extra sensitive: as a child she had idolized her; as a young woman she recognized her mother’s character flaws. Temperamental, uneducated, unpredictable, and disorderly, the younger Madame Dupin was in every way the opposite of Aurore’s dignified grandmother.

  Before her marriage to Maurice Dupin, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty-six, Sophie Delaborde belonged to that class of women known as demi-mondaines—women of doubtful reputation supported by their lovers. One of her previous lovers had fathered Aurore’s half-sister, Caroline. On the paternal side, Aurore also had to deal with an illegitimate half-brother, Hippolyte Chatiron. And for all her grandmother’s haughty sense of class, she, too, had been the illegitimate daughter of the field marshal Maurice de Saxe and his mistress, Aurore de Königsmark. Aurore Dupin, one month short of being illegitimate herself, was surrounded by the fruit of irregular unions. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the man she was to marry was the illegitimate son of a baron, who legally recognized him and passed on the baronial title.

  Nine months after her grandmother’s death, Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant, a thin, elegant-looking military man with the friendly air of a companion
. She was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. The first year of their marriage passed congenially enough for Aurore, elevated to the rank of a baroness and blessed with a son named Maurice. Though her affection for Casimir seems to have been relatively short-lived, her great love for her son would last a lifetime.

  Sand’s maternal capacity would be manifest not only to her son and later to her daughter, but also to her younger lovers. In these relations, she was wont to refer to her lover as enfant (child) and to herself as mère (mother) and take the lead in helping him advance both professionally and personally. Her standards were high, too high for some of the men, whom she abandoned or who broke away on their own. But most agreed, at least in retrospect, that she had played the combined role of lover and mother at a time when they needed both.

  Much has been written about Sand’s successive love affairs, a good deal by Sand herself in her correspondence, intimate journal, autobiography, travel literature, and semiautobiographical fiction. Numerous biographies have attempted to capture the intensity of a woman given to love, who was also a tireless writer, a wage earner, a concerned mother, a devoted friend, a sometime political activist, and an estate manager. I shall try to extract from her life story those elements that are quintessentially romantic.

  George Sand—she took that pen name in 1832 for her novel Indiana—was a force of nature, endowed with physical energy and mental vigor that lasted into her seventies. Whether she was horseback riding at night to meet her lover Michel de Bourges, traveling abroad with Musset to Venice or with Chopin to Majorca, launching a political magazine or promoting a friend, Sand gave herself heart and soul to the enterprise. And all the while, she was writing from late evening till five in the morning in order to provide for herself, her children, some of her lovers, and numerous hangers-on. Like Hugo and Balzac, Sand was an indefatigable writing machine.