How the French Invented Love (13 page)

The emphasis on language is ubiquitous in France, from politics and medicine to lovemaking. The late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan categorized human beings as
des êtres parlant
: “speaking beings.” In France, you are expected to be able to articulate desire. Declarations of love help to define one’s feelings and encourage the loved one to reciprocate in kind.

When Phèdre begins to talk in the hope of finding release through confession, the opposite occurs: speaking out inflames her ardor. She works herself up to a pitch of erotic excitement in her conversations with Oenone and then with Hippolytus, despite the moralistic self-censure that weaves through her words. Only in her confrontation with Theseus does she learn to curb her tongue, and eventually shut up.

Theseus is both husband and father figure to Phèdre, as well as king of Athens and father to Hippolytus. He represents ultimate authority in both public and private life. The kings of the
ancien régime
, the leaders of the French Revolution, Napoleon I and Napoleon III, the Restoration monarchs, and the French Republic presidents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—they all represented the rule of the father.

The father is always there lurking in the background of French literature, as he is in traditional life. He may have been a great womanizer, as was Theseus in his early manhood; he may be a foolish dupe or ridiculous
arriviste
, as are Molière’s fathers, but whatever his foibles, his authority is pervasive. Phèdre cannot loosen Theseus’s hold on her, even when he is away, even when he is presumed dead. Hippolytus, too, must brave Theseus’s sanction if he is to love Aricia.

Perhaps one source of Phèdre’s uncontrollable lust for Hippolytus springs from repressed rage against Theseus. Preferring a younger edition of the man she had married is one way of throwing off the shackles she has worn as a wife. But let us not get carried away with psychoanalytic investigations into Phèdre’s unconscious, nor apply a patently feminist interpretation to the institution of marriage. Phèdre is an older woman who falls in love with a younger man. This could happen to any woman. The irresistible attraction of youth fuels her desire, and when she hears of Hippolytus’s love for Aricia, jealousy, too, increases her turmoil. In the end, totally distraught, she turns to Theseus to set things right. In the end, the rule of the father prevails.

Despite the social advances made by Frenchwomen in the seventeenth century, Racine, Molière, and most of their contemporaries had no intention of disavowing male authority. With Louis XIV firmly on the throne, autocratic power was at its zenith. Moreover, Frenchmen would have seen the male principle embodied not only in government and family but also in the mental capacity of reason. Women, they averred, were more given to sentiments, like love, which reputedly clouded their judgment. Witness Phèdre. Nevertheless, it was one of Racine’s fellow writers, a French scientist and faith-affirming Christian philosopher named Blaise Pascal, who came up with the best-known credo for those addicted to love: “The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know.”

I
n the three works I have chosen from a wealth of seventeenth-century material—
La Princesse de Clèves
,
Le Misanthrope
, and
Phèdre
—love is always involuntary. It thrusts itself upon us. We do not choose to love or not to love. Call it the consequence of a love potion, or Cupid’s arrow, or “chemistry,” love defies rational explanations. The husband who should be loved in
La Princesse de Clèves
is never able to inspire within his wife one ounce of the craving she feels for a man she should not love. Alceste is a temperamentally unsuitable suitor for Célimène, and even though he knows it, he cannot free himself from the love trap she has set for him. Phèdre is doubly inappropriate as a partner for Hippolytus, for she is married to his father, which makes her desire both adulterous and incestuous. Such loves cannot have happy endings.

Still, some lovers do enjoy brief moments of bliss. If they are young, physically well-endowed, and drawn to one another by a robust magnetic pull, all external efforts to pry them apart will fail. Such is the case for the
jeunes premiers
, the youthful lovers in many of Molière’s comedies. Despite the increasingly problematic picture of human relations that he presents in his later plays (for example,
Tartuffe
and
Don Juan
), despite the somber portrayal of illicit or unrequited love found in most of Racine’s tragedies, despite Madame de La Fayette’s sober renunciation of sexual love in her fiction, the ideal of true love remained entrenched within the French mentality. While gallantry often acquired a world-weary tinge and could degenerate into cold-blooded seduction, claims of the heart were never silenced. Both of these currents would find their voice in the following century.

CHAPTER FOUR

Seduction and Sentiment

Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos

Y
ES, MY FRIEND, WE SHALL BE UNITED IN SPITE OF OUR SEPARATION; WE SHALL BE HAPPY DESPITE FATE.
I
T IS THE UNION OF HEARTS WHICH CONSTITUTES THEIR TRUE FELICITY.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Julie, or The New Eloise,
Part II, Letter XV, 1761

S
HE IS CONQUERED, THAT PROUD WOMAN WHO DARED TO THINK SHE COULD RESIST ME!
Y
ES, MY FRIENDS, SHE IS MINE, ENTIRELY MINE; AFTER YESTERDAY, SHE HAS NOTHING LEFT TO GRANT ME.

Choderlos de Laclos,
Dangerous Liaisons,
Part IV, Letter CXXV, 1782

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Happy Lovers,” 1760–1765. Pasadena: Norton Simon Museum. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

E
ighteenth-century French art and fiction are practically synonymous with lovemaking. If we were to judge only by paintings, we would conclude that members of the upper classes had nothing to do other than disport themselves as lovers. The
fêtes galantes
series of Jean-Antoine Watteau portrayed delicate and wistful figures embarking to the Isle of Cythera—the legendary birthplace of Venus. This pastoral paradise inhabited by dreamy ladies and lazily attentive men acted as prelude to the openly erotic works of Watteau’s celebrated successors, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Boucher’s female figures were overtly sexual, sometimes exposing their breasts and derrières to anyone wanting to gape at them. He also painted seductive women, their luxurious clothing enhancing their curves, as in his portraits of Madame de Pompadour, the third of King Louis XV’s official mistresses. Boucher’s sumptuous colors and sensual overtones fulfilled to perfection the libidinous taste of the century.

Fragonard’s less fleshy creatures kiss tenderly in bucolic settings, send each other love letters, soar in garden swings, and vow to love each other forever. The museums and châteaux of France are filled with the rococo paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, but Americans don’t have to go that far to see their work. Superb examples hang on the walls of many American museums, including New York’s Frick, which contains Fragonard’s magnificent series known as
The Progress of Love.
Though these paintings were originally commissioned by Madame du Barry, the last of Louis XV’s official mistresses, and intended for her garden pavilion, she never had them installed. Ultimately they wound up at the Frick, where they can be found in a room with delicately carved wall paneling and elegant pieces of furniture from the same period.

Gallantry was the order of the day, “the taste of our century” according to the Abbé Girard in his 1737 dictionary of French synonyms; these are practically the same words that the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine had used in his 1669 preface to
Psyché
. Had nothing changed in the dominion of gallantry during the seven decades that separated these two works?

What had changed was the meaning of the word “gallantry.” More and more, it implied a short-term sexual affair, with little if any emotional depth. The Abbé Girard distinguished clearly between gallantry and love in the following manner:

    
Love
is more ardent than
gallantry
. Its object is the person . . . whom one loves as much as one loves oneself. . . .
Gallantry
is a more voluptuous passion than love; it has sex for its object. . . .

        
Love
attaches us uniquely to one person . . . so that we feel only indifference for all others, whatever beauty and merit they have.
Gallantry
draws us to all persons who have beauty and charm . . .
gallanteries
are sometimes endless in number, and follow one another until old age dries up its source.

    In
love
, it is mainly the heart which experiences pleasure . . . the satisfaction of the senses contributes less to the sweetness of pleasure than a certain contentment in the interior of the soul. . . . In
gallantry
, . . . the senses are more eager to be satisfied.
¹

This shift in the meaning of gallantry, with its primary emphasis on sexual satisfaction, was due, in part, to the rulers of France who succeeded Louis XIV. After his death in 1715, the underside of gallantry came out in the open. What had been tolerated in secret during his reign no longer bothered to stay hidden. During the scandalous Regency period (1715–1723) when Louis XV was a boy, gallantry gave up the pretense of true love, and openly promoted serial seduction. Under the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, known to sleep with anyone he could lure into his bed, there was little place for heartfelt emotions or moral concerns. What counted was the sheer pleasure of voluptuous lovemaking, not love in any permanent sense.

Certainly Louis XV did little to stop that trend when he took control of the kingdom. Like his predecessors, he enjoyed a long succession of mistresses, among them the Marquise de Pompadour and the Comtesse du Barry mentioned above. But unlike his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, who turned religious at the end of his life under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XV became notorious in his old age for the harem of very young women he bedded on the royal budget. Poor Marie Leszczynska, his Polish wife, was kept busy bearing him children, eleven in all, while in her husband’s quarters, the line between gallantry and debauchery was simply effaced.

What happened to true love in this cynically gallant world? At best, gallantry accommodated the love of two individuals, as long as they played according to the rules. In polite society, lovers—like everyone else—had to make a show of meticulous manners and clever conversation. Public displays of affection were frowned upon, even between married couples. In fact, among the nobility, it was considered
déclassé
for married people to demonstrate their love in social settings. Rémond de Saint-Mard wrote in his
Lettres galantes et philosophiques
: “The Marquis de *** . . . is insufferable: he’s always caressing his wife in public; he always has something to say to her. In short, you would say he acts like a lover.”
²
And that, Saint-Mard added, makes the Marquis de *** appear infinitely ridiculous in the eyes of society. Of course in private, far from censorious eyes, lovers of every stripe voiced their feelings and acted out desire. We get a peek into those secret spaces from a series of eighteenth-century novelists, most notably Abbé Prévost, Crébillon fils, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Choderlos de Laclos, whose works opened up new territory on the map of tenderness.

T
he novel was the consecrated home of love. Love peopled its pages and set off vibrations in the skins of readers eager to experience romance in all its forms, from gallantry to true love. While love was and is essentially a personal affair between two people, gallantry was and is a social phenomenon with similar rules for everyone. It can easily spend itself in artificial gestures and become a caricature of authentic emotion, as we have already seen in
La Princesse de Clèves
and
Le Misanthrope
. During the Regency and the reign of Louis XV, the excesses of gallantry baldly degenerated into libertinage.

A libertine would seduce a woman by any means, take advantage of her youth or modest parentage, and then abandon her after “he had had his way with her.” Often she was left pregnant, which could reduce her to outcast status. This was not merely the stuff of literature; it was an old story in France, as in other European countries, but it seems to have garnered more print attention in the eighteenth century than at any other time. Seduction novels proliferated in France and England, to be imitated by pulp fiction for years to come, well into our own benighted era.

Women were not always the victims of libertinage. They, too, knew how to play the game of seduction, both as gallant ladies and as coquettes. The eighteenth-century
Encyclopédie
distinguished between the two, reserving the greater opprobrium for the coquette who kept several lovers dangling at once. In contrast, the gallant lady, motivated by the desire to please and to be thought lovable, limited herself to one lover at a time. Regardless of the fine distinctions presented in encyclopedias and dictionaries, novels portrayed a messier reality. The important thing was not to be the one who got dumped—that could ruin anyone’s reputation, gallant lady, gallant man, base seducer, or frank coquette.