The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, who became by marriage the Comtesse de La Fayette, is a more attractive figure because she not only wrote a famous romance, but lived one more famous still. She received an unusually full education. After her marriage (1655) she went to live in Auvergne. Finding life dull there, she arranged an amicable separation from her husband (1659), came to Paris, and joined the circle that met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. She became lady in waiting to Madame Henrietta, and later commemorated her in a loving memoir. She was a relative but friend of Mme. de Sévigné, who, after forty years of intimacy, wrote of her: “Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship; long habit had not made her merit stale to me; the flavor of it was always fresh and new.” 57 This is an exceptional compliment to both parties, for friendships are as mortal as romantic love. We shall find a rare union of love and friendship in Mme. de La Fayette’s relations with La Rochefoucauld.

  When she decided to cross pens with Mlle, de Scudéry she hit upon a revolutionary innovation: she wrote a romance in one volume only two hundred pages long. She adopted the principle that, other things equal, the best book is that which omits most of its original form; every sentence omitted, she said, added a louis d’or to the value of the book, and every word omitted added twenty sous. After some minor products she composed (1672) and published (1678) her chef-d’oeuvre, La Princesse de Clèves. The plot (to mix figures) was a triangle with a tangent. Mlle, de Chartres is so modestly beautiful that the Prince de Clèves becomes her slave at first sight. On her mother’s advice she marries him, but with no warmer sentiment than respect. Soon thereafter the Duc de Nemours sees her and falls precipitately in love with her. She repels him virtuously, but his feverish persistence touches her; and gradually her pity turns to love. She confesses this development to her husband, and begs him to take her away from the court and temptation. He cannot believe that she is faithful, and worries himself to death, gored, so to speak, with his own imaginary horns. The Princess, in remorse over his death, repulses the Duke, and devotes the rest of her life to charity. The skeptical Bayle remarked that if so pure and faithful a woman could be found in France he would walk twelve hundred miles to see her. 58

  The book was published anonymously, but the literary world soon decided that it was one result of an already famous intimacy. Said Mlle, de Scudéry, “M. de La Rochefoucauld and Mme. de La Fayette have written a novel . . . which I am told is admirably done”; 59 but she added, “They are no longer of an age to do anything else together.” 60 Both the alleged authors disclaimed authorship. “The Princesse de Clèves” wrote La Scudéry, “is a poor orphan, disowned by father and mother.” In any case there was general agreement that this was the finest novel yet written in France. Fontenelle confessed to having read it four times, and Boileau, foe of romance, judged Mme. de La Fayette “the finest spirit and best writer among the women of France.” History recognizes La Princesse de Clèves as one of the first, and still one of the best, psychological novels. It is the only French novel of that age that can still be read without pain.

  VII. MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ: 1626–96

  But there are ten volumes surviving from that reign—and also by a woman—that even in the palpitation of our time can be read with a selfsurrendering delight. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal lost her parents in her childhood, and inherited their substantial fortune. Some of the best minds in France collaborated in her education, and the best families in France formed her in the arts of life. At eighteen she married Henri, Marquis de Sévigné; but this philanderer loved her fortune more than herself, squandered part of it on mistresses, fought a duel over one of these, and was killed (1651). Marie tried to forget him, but she never married again, absorbed in bringing up her son and daughter. Perhaps, as her malicious cousin Bussy-Rabutin suggested, she was of “a cold disposition”; 61 or perhaps she had learned that sex depletes while parentage fulfills. Her letters are alive with happiness, almost all parental.

  She loved society as much as she distrusted marriage. As a young widow with 530,000 livres, 62 she had many a noble suitor—Turenne, Rohan, Bussy . . . She saw no sense in driving all but one of them away; yet no word of scandal or liaison has clouded her name. She was loved with a less doubtful sincerity by her friends, who included de Retz, La Rochefoucauld, Mme. de La Fayette, and Fouquet. The first two were barred from the court for participation in the Fronde, the last for inexplicable wealth; Mme. de Sévigné, as warmly faithful to all four, was not welcome in the sacred precincts, though we find her receiving some gracious words from the King at a performance of Esther at St.-Cyr. Outside the court many circles took pleasure in her company, for she had all the graces of a cultured woman, and conversed as spiritedly as she wrote. This is the reverse of a more usual compliment; we are often advised, perhaps recklessly, to write as we speak.

  Over fifteen hundred of her letters survive, nearly all to her daughter; for Françoise Marguerite married (1669) the Comte de Grignan, and soon went to live with him in Provence, where he was lieutenant governor. From 1671 to 1690 the mother dispatched a letter by almost every post—sometimes twice a day—to this young wife now separated from her by the length of France. “The correspondence I have with you,” she told her, “is my well-being, the sole pleasure of my life; every other consideration is but mean when put in competition with this.” 63 The love that had found no man satisfying became a passion for a daughter who felt herself unworthy of it. Françoise was of a more reserved character; she did not know how to phrase her feelings warmly; she had a husband and children to care for, and sometimes she became cross or somber; yet for twenty-five years, except when ill, she wrote to her mother twice a week, rarely missing a post, so that the fond mother worried that she was taking up too much of her daughter’s time.

  The most touching incident in these letters is the life and conventual death of Mme. de Grignan’s first child. She came to Paris to be delivered under the care of her mother. Soon she sent an apology to her husband for having borne a girl—who would have to be reared painfully, dowered expensively, and then lost; and when Françoise returned to Provence she left little Marie Blanche for a while with the fascinated grandma. Mme. de Sévigné wrote to the father: “If you want a son, take the trouble to make him.” 64 She wrote to the unappreciative parents ecstatic details of the marvel they had reluctantly begotten:

  Your little girl grows lovable. . ., white as snow, and laughing incessantly . . . Her complexion, her throat, all her little body, are wonderful. She does a hundred little things—babbling, coaxing, striking, making the sign of the cross, asking pardon, making a bow, kissing her hand, shrugging her shoulders, dancing, wheedling, plucking your chin . . . I amuse myself with her for hours together.” 65

  It cost Grandma many a tear to let the plump miracle go to Provence; and many more when the parents put her into a convent when she was still but five years old. The child never came back. At the age of fifteen she took the vows, and disappeared from the world.

  The lieutenant governor was extravagant, and entertained beyond his station. His wife periodically informed her mother of their approaching bankruptcy; the mother scolded them lovingly, and sent them great sums. “How, for the love of God or man, can one keep so much gold, so much silver, so many jewels, such furniture, amid the extreme misery of the poor who surround us in these times?” 66 To keep herself solvent after these deductions, Mme. de Sévigné traveled laboriously to her property at Les Rochers in Brittany to see that it was properly tended, and its rents transmitted to her with only reasonable pilferage. She found a new happiness in the fields, the woods, and the Breton peasantry, and wrote of them as vividly as of that Parisian society of which she was the semiweekly newsletter for her daughter.

  Her son was a problem of another kind. She was very fond of him, for he was good-natured, and had, she tells us, a “fund of wit and humor. . . . He used to read us some chapters out of Rabelais, which were enough to make one die of laughter.” 67 Charles was a model son, except t
hat he walked in his father’s steps from one port of call to another, until—but let Madame, writing to her daughter, bear responsibility for the rest; nothing could better illustrate the tone of the time:

  A word or two concerning your brother . . . Yesterday he wanted to acquaint me with a dreadful accident that had befallen him. He had met with a happy moment; but when he came to the point—It was a strange thing! The poor damsel never had been so entertained in her life. The cavalier, quite defeated, retired, thinking himself bewitched; and, what you will find better than all the rest, he could not be easy till he had acquainted me with his disaster. We laughed very heartily at him; I told him I was overjoyed to find him punished in the sinful part . . . It was a scene for Molière. 68

  He contracted syphilis; she berated him; but she nursed him lovingly.

  She tried to infuse a little religion into him, but she had so little of it herself that she could not give him much. She was moved by Bourdaloue’s sermons, and had some spurts of piety, but she smiled at the religious processions that so pleased the people of the tenements. She read Arnauld, Nicole, and Pascal, and sympathized with Port-Royal, but she was repelled by their concentration on avoiding damnation; she could not bring herself to believe in hell. 69 In general she shied away from serious thought; such matters were not for women, and disturbed the charm of a comfortable life. Yet her reading was of the best—Virgil, Tacitus, and St. Augustine in Latin, Montaigne in French, and she knew intimately the plays of Corneille and Racine. Her humor was heartier, more joyous, than Molière’s. Hear her on a friend given to absent-minded contemplation:

  Brancas was overturned the other day into a ditch, where he found himself so much at his ease that he asked those who came to help him out if they had any occasion for his services. His glasses were broken, and his head would have been so too, if he had not been more lucky than wise; but all this did not seem to have interrupted his meditation in the least. I wrote him word this morning . . . to let him know that he had been overturned and was very near breaking his neck, as I supposed he was the only person in Paris that had not heard of it. 70

  Altogether, these letters make one of the most revealing portraits in literature, for the Marquise chronicles her faults and virtues carelessly. A loving mother, at home in the salons of the capital and the fields of Brittany; telling her daughter of the latest gossip of the aristocracy, but also that “the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the warbler are beginning [to sing] in the spring of the woods”; rarely uttering an ill word about the hundreds of persons who flutter through her two thousand pages; always ready to help those in trouble, and gracing her speech with delicate compliments and courtesy; guilty, now and then, of unfeeling mirth (as when she joked about the hanging of some poor Breton rebels), yet sensitive to the sufferings of the poor; condoning the immorality of her times and class, but herself of conduct irreproachable; a spirit bubbling with good will and joie de vivre; too modest to publish a book, but writing the best French in that age of the best French ever written.

  Did she think her letters might be published? Sometimes she indulged in rhetorical flights as if smelling printers’ ink; yet her letters are full of business details, emotional intimacies, and compromising revelations, which she could hardly have intended for the public eye. She knew that her daughter showed her letters to friends, but such sharing was frequent in those days, when correspondence was almost the sole means of communication through distances. Her granddaughter Pauline, whom she kept from following Blanche Marie into a nunnery, inherited and preserved the letters, but they were not published till 1726, thirty years after the Marquise’s death. They are now among the most treasured classics in the literature of France, a rich bouquet whose fragrance grows with the centuries.

  As she neared the end of her life she thought more about religion, and confessed her fear of death and judgment. In the mists of Brittany and the rains of Paris she developed rheumatism, lost her joy in life, and discovered that she was mortal.

  I embarked upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; this overwhelms me. And how shall I go? . . . When will it be? . . . I bury myself in these thoughts, and I find death so terrible that I hate life more because it leads me toward death than because of the thorns with which it is planted. You will say that I want to live forever. Not at all; but if my opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse’s arms. That would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have given me Heaven full surely and easily. 71

  It was not true that she hated life because it led to death; she hated death because she had enjoyed life intensely for almost seventy years. Wishing to die in the home of her beloved daughter, she crossed France through four hundred miles and pains to the Château Grignan. When death came she faced it with a courage that surprised herself, comforted with the sacraments and hoping for immortality. It has been granted her.

  VIII. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613–80

  What a different spirit was the most famous of modern cynics, the most merciless unmasker of our frailties, the gloomy invalid who slandered women and love, and whom three women loved to their death?

  He was the sixth François de La Rochefoucauld, born of a long line of princes and counts, eldest son of the grand master of the wardrobe to Queen and Regent Marie de Médicis. Until he inherited the ducal title on his father’s death (1650), he was Prince de Marsillac. He was educated in Latin, mathematics, music, dancing, fencing, heraldry, and etiquette. Aged fourteen, he was married, by his father’s arrangement, to Andrée de Vivonne, only daughter and heir of the late grand falconer of France. At fifteen he was given command of a cavalry regiment; at sixteen he bought a colonelcy. He attended the salon of Mme. de Rambouillet, which polished his manners and style. With all the idealism of youth, and its preference for mature women, he fell in love with the Queen, with Mme. de Chevreuse, with Mlle, de Hautefort. When Anne of Austria plotted against Richelieu, François served her, was detected, and was for a week imprisoned in the Bastille (1636). Soon released, he was banished to the family estate at Verteuil. He reconciled himself for a time to living with his wife, played with his young sons François and Charles, and learned that the countryside has delights that only the city can understand.

  In those days, among the French upper classes, a legal marriage could not be dissolved, but it could be ignored. After a decade of restless monogamy, the Prince set out for adventure in war or love. When he set his sights on Mme. de Longueville (1646) it was no longer through idealistic devotion but in the resolve to capture a renowned and well-defended citadel; it would be a distinction to seduce the wife of a duke and the sister of the Great Condé. For her part she may have accepted him for political reasons; he could be a useful ally in the aristocratic rebellion wherein she was resolved to play an active role. When she informed him that he had made her pregnant, 72 he gave all his support to the Fronde. In 1652 she molted him, and took on the Duc de Nemours; La Rochefoucauld tried to convince himself that this was what he had desired; as he put it later, “When we have loved someone to the point of weariness . . . , most welcome . . . is some act of infidelity that may justify us in disengaging our affection.” 73 In that year, fighting for the Fronde in the Faubourg St.-Antoine, he was struck by a musket shot that injured both his eyes, leaving him partly blind. He retired again to Verteuil.

  He was now forty years old, beginning to suffer from gout, and embittered by misfortunes mostly of his own contrivance. His idealism had died in the wake of Mme. de Longueville, and in the shifty intrigues and ignoble end of the Fronde. He amused his hours, and defended his career, in Mémoires (1662) that showed him a careful master of the classic style. In 1661 he was allowed to return to the court; henceforth he divided his time between his wife at Verteuil and his friends in the Paris salons.

  His favorite salon was that of Mme. de Sablé. There she and her guests occasionally played a game of Sentences: someone would offer a comment on human nature or conduct, and the group would toss it pro and co
n. Mme. de Sablé was a neighbor and devoted friend of Port-Royal-de-Paris; she adopted its view of the natural wickedness of man and the emptiness of earthly life; La Rochefoucauld’s pessimism, born of disillusionments in love and war, of political treachery and physical pain, of deceiving and being deceived, may have received a minor reinforcement from the Jansenism of his hostess. He found a somber pleasure in refining at leisure his own sentences and those of others; he allowed these apothegms to be read, sometimes amended, by Mme. de Sablé and other friends. One of these copied them; a Dutch pirate publisher printed 189 of them, anonymously, about 1663; salon circles recognized them as La Rochefoucauld’s; and the author himself issued a better edition, with 317 entries, in 1665, under the title of Sentences et maximes morales. The little book, soon known briefly as Maximes, became almost at once a classic. Readers not only admired the precise, compact, and chiseled style; they enjoyed the exposure of other people’s selfishness, and only rarely realized that the story was told about themselves.