How the French Invented Love (20 page)

W
hen 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.
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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.
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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.

    Imagine my surprise and my joy when I saw my beloved! His absence had caused me to spill many tears. I found him very changed. He asked for news of myself and all my family . . . he asked me many questions and tried to test me.

    He asked if I was not going to be married soon, if I loved someone, if clothes and frivolous pleasures were to my taste, and, when married and a mother, whether I would like to breastfeed my children.

All these questions constituted a kind of premarital test to determine whether Elisabeth had the appropriate character to become a republican wife. She clearly passed the test, for Le Bas ended up saying: “I have cherished you since the day I saw you.”

The lovers continued to reveal their true feelings. Le Bas had thought ten times a day of writing her but refrained for fear she would be compromised by his letters. (Any reader of novels knew what mischief such letters can lead to.) A visit from Maximilien had assured him that the Duplays were pure people, “devoted to liberty.” Augustin also agreed that the Duplay household “breathed virtue and pure patriotism.” With this background check, Philippe was ready to ask for Elisabeth’s hand.

Because Le Bas was ten years older than Elisabeth, well educated and well placed, he was able to speak to her mother as an equal, while Elisabeth remained mutely on the sidelines. Her mother’s major objection was that she wanted to see her two older daughters married before Elisabeth, who was still very young and flighty. Le Bas insisted: “I love her like that. . . . I shall be her friend and mentor.” The next day, when he addressed both parents together, Elisabeth was not even allowed to be present. But eventually, her parents consented to the marriage and Elisabeth was called in to share the good news. “Imagine my happiness! I could not believe it. . . . We flew into my father’s and mother’s arms. They were moved to tears.” It is a scene out of a painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who captured the spirit of sentimental love better than any other artist of that period. Like figures in one of Greuze’s paintings, Philippe, Elisabeth, her family and friends (Robespierre was there too) shed tears of joy as they toasted their engagement with hot chocolate.

Yet, as in a novel, there were still obstacles to overcome. One appeared in the form of a villain who slandered Elisabeth so as to make Philippe believe she had had past lovers. It turned out that the scoundrel wanted Philippe to marry his own daughter. Elisabeth held her own, defending herself as an innocent person raised by her parents to remain chaste before marriage and to become a virtuous wife.

Ultimately, of course, Philippe saw the truth and a wedding date was set, but then another major obstacle occurred. Philippe was sent on a special mission by the Committee of Public Safety. While the lovers were separated, Elisabeth bombarded Robespierre with entreaties to bring Philippe home. She readily admitted: “I was having so much pain that I did not want to be a patriot any longer. I was inconsolable. . . . My health suffered considerably.” Lovesickness held on to its literal meaning.

Finally Philippe was brought home long enough for the wedding to take place and long enough for Elisabeth to become pregnant. They would have barely a year of conjugal intimacy before Le Bas lost his life in the catastrophe of the ninth of Thermidor. Based on the revolutionary calendar, this date referred to the coup of July 27, 1794, when Robespierre and his close associates were brought down by their own excesses and their political enemies.

In Elisabeth’s account, we witness revolutionary trauma invading the household. As soon as her husband was arrested, government officials came to close their apartment and take away all their personal papers. Le Bas went to face his destiny at the Hôtel de Ville. Elisabeth recorded his last, patriotically inspired words, intended for their son. “Nourish him with your own milk . . . inspire in him the love of his country; tell him that his father has died for her; adieu, my Elisabeth, adieu! . . . Live for our dear son; inspire him with noble sentiments, you are worthy of them. Adieu, Adieu!”

She writes that she never saw Le Bas again. She does not say that he shot himself several hours later in the same room in which Maximilien was already gravely wounded and from which Augustin Robespierre threw himself out the window. Instead, she paints her own despair in the Duplay house.

    I went home distraught, almost crazy. Imagine what I felt when our dear infant stretched out his little arms to me. . . . From the ninth to the eleventh [of Thermidor] I remained on the floor. I no longer had strength nor consciousness.

As Elisabeth lay unconscious on the floor, the mob carried Robespierre and the rest of his political clan past her house on their way to the guillotine. Shortly thereafter, members of the Committee of Public Safety came for Elisabeth and her baby. Judged guilty by association with her husband, she was incarcerated with her son in the Talarue Prison. Her life situation could not have been worse: “I had been a mother for five weeks; I was nursing my son; I was less than twenty-one years old; I had been deprived of almost everything.”

The prison ordeal bred in Elisabeth a wild rage. When propositioned by government agents to marry one of the deputies and thus “abandon the infamous name” of her husband, she cried out, “Tell those monsters that the Widow Le Bas will never abandon that sacred name except on the scaffold.” Such defiance in the face of prolonged incarceration derived from an imperishable love for her dead husband and an intractable belief in the righteousness of his cause. Clinging to her married name, she emerged from prison after nine months as a force to be reckoned with. Until her death in 1859, she proclaimed republican principles and continued to cherish Le Bas’ memory.

The Revolution had nourished and then destroyed her one great love; she clung to that memory in old age as to a life raft. For the rest of her days—a full sixty-five years—she would look back nostalgically to the period from the fall of 1792 to the summer of 1794 as the paradise from which she had been violently ejected.

W
hile Elisabeth Le Bas’ short memoir is virtually unknown, that of Madame Roland is the best-known eyewitness chronicle of the Revolution.
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She, too, was a political prisoner by virtue of her husband’s involvement in revolutionary politics. During her five-month incarceration, before she was sent to the guillotine, she wrote both a history of revolutionary events and her private memoirs. The latter interest us here because they touch upon love both inside and outside a long-standing marriage.

Before her marriage, Marie-Jeanne Manon Phlipon was something of a bluestocking, dissatisfied with her lot as a woman. She wrote to a friend in 1776: “I am truly vexed to be a woman: I should have been born with a different soul or a different sex . . . then I could have chosen the republic of letters as my country.” Later, converted to the cult of domesticity by her passion for Rousseau, she followed the path of Julie in the second half of
La nouvelle Héloïse
by marrying a man twenty years her senior and giving herself unstintingly to wifehood and motherhood. Hers was a marriage of mutual esteem, nourished by shared values and goals. There was none of the passion we find in eighteenth-century novels or in the life of Julie de Lespinasse. Manon’s husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, was a distinguished lawyer who became minister of the interior from 1791 to 1793. In that role, he relied heavily on his highly literary wife, his secret aid in drafting many of his letters and circulars. In the eyes of the world, they formed an exemplary couple.