How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  7. Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Acquaintances, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 160.

  Chapter Five: Love Letters

  1. Julie de Lespinasse, Lettres, ed. Eugène Asse (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1994), p. 91. Subsequent citations from Lespinasse, d’Alembert, and Guibert are my translations from this edition.

  2. For a fuller version of her life, see Duc de Castries, Julie de Lespinasse: le drame d’un double amour (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985). See also Marie-Christine d’Aragon and Jean Lacouture, Julie de Lespinasse: Mourir d’amour (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2006).

  3. Cited by Aragon and Lacouture, pp. 128–129; from David Hume, Private Correspondence of David Hume with Several Distinguished Persons, Between the Years 1761 and 1776 (London, Henry Colburn, 1820).

  4. Cited by Aragon and Lacouture, p. 132; from Voltaire, Correspondance générale (Paris: Garnier, 1877).

  5. Elisabeth Badinter, Les passions intellectuelles, vol. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 17–20.

  6. Cited by Aragon and Lacouture, p. 299; from d’Alembert’s letter of June 29, 1776. Archives du Comte de Villeneuve-Guibert.

  Chapter Six: Republican Love

  1. Marilyn Yalom, Le temps des orages: aristocrates, bourgeoises, et paysannes racontent (Paris: Maren Sell, 1989); Marilyn Yalom, Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

  2. Elisabeth Duplay Le Bas, “Manuscrit de Mme Le Bas” in Autour de Robespierre. Le conventionnel Le Bas, ed Stéfane-Pol (Paris: Flammarion, 1901), pp. 102–150. My translation.

  3. Madame Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986). My translation.

  4. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997), chap. 4.

  Chapter Seven: Yearning for the Mother

  1. Benjamin Constant, Adolphe, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 31–39. All citations from Adolphe are from this editon.

  2. Marilyn Yalom, “Triangles and Prisons: A Psychological Study of Stendhalian Love,” Hartford Studies in Literature 8, no. 2 (1976).

  3. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, trans. Jean Steward and B. C. J. G. Knight (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), p. 22.

  4. Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir (Paris: Michel Lévy, Frères, 1866), p. 85. My translation.

  5. Honoré de Balzac, Le lys dans la vallée (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1966), p. 5. My translation.

  6. Sylvain Mimoun and Rica Etienne, Sexe & sentiments après 40 ans (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), pp. 20–24.

  Chapter Eight: Love Among the Romantics

  1. The translations from Lamartine’s poems are my own.

  2. George Sand, Oeuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Lubin (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 2 vols. My translations. See also Sand, Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand. A Group Translation, ed. Thelma Jurgrau (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).

  3. George Sand, “Lettre à Emile Regnault, 23 Janvier, 1832,” Correspondance [de] George Sand, vol. 2, ed. Georges Lubin (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1964–), p. 12. All subsequent references to Sand’s letters are from this multivolume correspondence.

  4. George Sand, Indiana, trans. Eleanor Hochman, preface Marilyn Yalom (New York: Signet Classic, Penguin Books, 1993). Subsequent citations are from this edition.

  5. George Sand, Lélia. Translated by Maria Espinosa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

  6. George Sand, Journal intime, in Lubin, Oeuvres autobiographiques, vol. 2, pp. 953–971; my translation. See also The Intimate Journal, trans. Marie Jenney Howe (Chicago: Cassandra Editions, 1977).

  7. Alfred de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1960). My translation.

  8. E. O. Hellerstein et al., eds., Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France and the United States (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 254–255.

  Chapter Nine: Romantic Love Deflated

  1. Gustave Flaubert, Lettres à sa maîtresse, vol. 3 (Rennes: La Part Commune, 2008), p. 425.

  2. Stendhal, De l’amour (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1959), pp. 8–9.

  3. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2010).

  Chapter Ten: Love in the Gay Nineties

  1. Pierre Darblay, Physiologie de l’amour: étude physique, historique, et anecdotique (Pau: Imprimerie Administrative et Commerciale, 1889), p. 83.

  2. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 6.

  3. Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, ed. Leslie Ross Méras (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1936). The most recent English translation is by Lowell Blair (New York: New American Library, 2003). All translations from Cyrano are my own.

  Chapter Eleven: Love Between Men

  1. Jonathan Fryer, André & Oscar: Gide, Wilde, and the Gay Art of Living (London: Constable, 1997), p. 144.

  2. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 208–209, 211–212.

  3. Bryant T. Ragan Jr., “The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality,” in eds. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr., Homosexuality and Modern France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 8–29.

  4. Cited by Michael David Sibalis, “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789–1815,” in Merrick and Ragan, ibid., p. 81.

  5. Cited by Jacob Stockinger, “Homosexuality and the French Enlightenment,” in eds. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, Homosexualities in French Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 168.

  6. Jean Delay, The Youth of André Gide, trans. June Guicharnaud (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), 1963, p. 289.

  7. André Gide, L’immoraliste (Paris: Mercure de France, 1946). My translation. For an English version, see Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Knopf, 1970).

  8. Monique Nemer, Corydon citoyen: essai sur André Gide et l’homosexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), p. 27.

  9. Cited by Wallace Fowlie in André Gide: His Life and His Art (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 168.

  Chapter Twelve: Desire and Despair

  1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 24. All Proust translations are from this magnificent three-volume edition.

  2. Nicolas Grimaldi, Proust, les horreurs de l’amour (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008).

  3. André Gide, Journal, 1889–1939, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 691–692.

  4. I am indebted for this observation and others to William C. Carter, Proust in Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 100.

  5. Gaëtan Picon, Lecture de Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 131.

  6. André Aciman, ed., The Proust Project (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), p. x.

  Chapter Thirteen: Lesbian Love

  1. Quoted by Tirz True Latimer in Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 42.

  2. Colette, My Apprenticeships & Music-Hall Sidelights (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 55.

  3. Ibid., p. 57.

  4. Colette, Claudine at School, trans. Antonia White (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 16. Further citations are from this edition.

  5. Colette, Claudine Married, trans. Antonia White (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960), pp. 93–94. Further citations are from this translation.

  6. Elaine Marks, “Lesbian Intertextuality,” in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, Homosexualities and French Li
terature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 363.

  7. Le Cri de Paris, December 2, 1906, cited in Colette, Lettres à Missy, ed. Samia Birdji and Frédéric Maget (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), p. 17. My translation.

  8. Quoted by Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 136. Taken from Sido, Lettres à sa fille (Paris: des Femmes, 1984), p. 76.

  9. This and the following quotations from Colette’s letters are my translations from Birdji and Maget, eds., Lettres à Missy.

  10. The Vagabond, trans. Enid McLeod (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), p. 126.

  11. Renate Stendhal, ed., Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994), p. 156.

  12. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Baby Precious Always Shines, ed. Kay Turner (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

  13. Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1965), p. 348.

  14. Isabelle de Courtivron, “From Bastard to Pilgrim: Rites and Writing for Madame,” in Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, ed., Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 138.

  15. Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir. A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 505.

  Chapter Fourteen: Existentialists in Love

  1. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 339.

  2. Ibid., p. 345.

  3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 24.

  4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres, vols. 1–2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Simone de Beauvoir, Lettres à Sartre, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

  5. Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête. The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

  6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1940–1963 (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), pp. 273–274.

  7. Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, p. 55.

  8. Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1990), p. 333.

  9. Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (New York: New Press, 1998).

  10. Bianca Lamblin, A Disgraceful Affair, trans. Julie Plovnick (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996).

  11. Cited by Rowley, Tête-à-Tête, p. 335.

  12. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010).

  13. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brian (London: André Deutsch/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), preface.

  14. Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 183.

  Chapter Fifteen: The Dominion of Desire

  1. Marguerite Duras, 10:30 on a Summer Night, trans. Anne Borchardt, in Four Novels by Marguerite Duras (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 165. Subsequent translations of this novella are from this edition.

  2. Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile, trans. Richard Seaver, in ibid., p. 81. Subsequent translations from this novella are from this edition.

  3. Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p. 32. Subsequent translations from this novel are from this edition.

  4. Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), pp. 53–67.

  Chapter Sixteen: Love in the Twenty-first Century

  1. Paul Claudel, Partage de midi (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 7.

  2. Philippe Sollers, Trésor d’amour (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

  3. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).

  4. Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Vintage, 2000), prologue.

  5. Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie (Paris: Grasset, 2006), p. 9. My translation.

  6. Citations from publicity distributed by Nord/Ouest Documentaires.

  Epilogue

  1. Words attributed to Jean-François Kahn, Le Point, May 26, 2011.

  2. The Key to Love, in The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 37.

  3. Sue Carrell, ed., La Comtesse de Sabran et le Chevalier de Boufflers: Correspondance. Vol. 1, 1777–1785; Vol. 2, 1786–1787 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009, 2010).

  4. “Je t’aime: enquête sur une déclaration universelle,” Philosophie, April 2011.

  5. Elaine Sciolino, La Seduction, pp. 54–57.

  Selected Bibliography

  PRIMARY SOURCES IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  Abelard, Peter, and Heloise. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Translated by Betty Radice. New York : Penguin, 2003.

  Balzac, Honoré de. The Lily of the Valley. [1835] Translated by Lucienne Hill. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1997.

  Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. London: André Deutsch/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984.

  _________. All Said and Done. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. New York: Warner Books, 1975.

  _________. Force of Circumstance. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Putnam’s, 1964.

  _________. Letters to Sartre. Translated by Quintin Hoare. London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Radius, 1991.

  _________. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translated by James Kirkup. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

  _________. The Prime of Life. Translated by Peter Green. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

  _________. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Knopf, 2010.

  _________. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren. Translated by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. New York: New Press, 1998.

  Béroul, The Romance of Tristan. Translated by Alan S. Fedrick. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970.

  Capellanus, Andreas. The Art of Courtly Love. Translated by John Jay Parry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

  Chrétien de Troyes. Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart. Translated by Burton Raffel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

  Colette. Claudine at School. [1900] Translated by Antonia White. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972.

  _________. Claudine in Paris. [1901] Translated by Antonia White. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972.

  _________. Claudine Married. [1902] Translated by Antonia White. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960.

  _________. My Apprenticeships and Music-Hall Sidelights. [1936 and 1913] Translated by Helen Beauclerk and Anne-Marie Callimachi. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1967.

  _________ The Pure and the Impure. [1941] Translated by Herman Briffault. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.

  _________ The Vagabond. [1910] Translated by Enid McLeod. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

  Constant, Benjamin. Adolphe. [1816] Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  Crébillon Fils. The Wayward Head and Heart. [1736 and 1738] Translated by Barbara Bray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

  Duras, Marguerite. Four Novels by Marguerite Duras. Includes 10:30 on a Summer Night. Translated by Anne Borchardt. Includes Moderato Cantabile. Translated by Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1978.

  _________. The Lover. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

  Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. [1857] Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Viking, 2010.

  Gide, André. Corydon. [1924] Translated by Hugh Gibb. New York: Farrar Straus, 1950.

&n
bsp; _________. Fruits of the Earth. [1897] Translated by D. Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1949.

  _________. If It Die. [1926] Translated by D. Bussy. New York: Random House, 1935.

  _________. The Immoralist. [1902] Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Knopf, 1970.

  Houellebecq, Michel. The Elementary Particles. Translated by Frank Wynne. New York: Vintage, 2000.

  Laclos, Choderlos de. Dangerous Acquaintances. [1782] Translated by Richard Aldington. New York: New Directions, 1957.

  Lafayette, Madame de. The Princess de Clèves. [1678] Translated by Terence Cave. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  Lamblin, Bianca. A Disgraceful Affair. Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin. Translated by Julie Plovnick. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

  La Rochefoucauld. Maxims. Translated by Stuart D. Warner and Stéphane Douard. Southbend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001.

  Leduc, Violette. La Bâtarde. Translated by Derek Coltman. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1965.

  Lespinasse, Julie de. Love Letters of Mlle de Lespinasse to and from the Comte de Guibert. Translated by E.H.F. Mills. New York: The Dial Press, 1929.

  Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.

  Miller, Catherine. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Translated by Adriana Hunter. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

  _________. Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M. Translated by Helen Stevenson. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009.

  Molière. “The Misanthrope” and “Tartuffe”. [1666 and 1664] Translated by Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1965.

  Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 1991.