How the French Invented Love (23 page)

Balzac has conveniently divided womanhood into the prototypes of the madonna and the whore, each satisfying a different part of his nature. That one of these figures is French and the other English allows him to praise the Frenchwoman excessively at the expense of her English counterpart. Rarely will you find pages so outrageously chauvinistic as those written to compare the love of a Frenchwoman with that of an Englishwoman. Balzac is not known for his moderation.

In the end, Balzac kills off Henriette, as so many French authors have done to heroines before and after him, but not before delivering a whopping surprise in her final death agony. I leave that for you to discover. And in the very last pages of the book, in a letter written to Félix by a certain Nathalie, we see that Balzac is capable of critiquing his own creation. However heartfelt his identification with the young Félix, however idealistic his portrayal of the angelic mother, Balzac turns the tables on his hero and takes him to task for his refusal to grow up. Nathalie, to whom Félix has turned for affection, writes him that he can “taste happiness only with dead women.” She is not about to step into the perilous space left empty by Henriette and Lady Dudley. For the moment, Félix de Vandenesse is left stranded in a loveless no-man’s-land, still craving the woman who will bring together his yearning for the mother and his physical need for a mistress-wife. I say “for the moment” because Félix will reappear in nine other novels, all part of the capacious oeuvre Balzac called
The Human Comedy
.

I
s it possible for any living woman today to identify with these mother figures created to fill the psychological needs of men with incestuous longings? As a woman and a mother, I feel no sisterhood with either the mindlessly passionate Ellénore or the saintly Henriette. Only Madame de Rênal comes across as the reflection of a real person, someone whose hesitations and anxieties, transports and fleeting happiness, concerns for her greater age and fear of losing her lover, and simultaneous worries about her children and husband all ring true. More than any other male author, Stendhal endowed women with a credible female psyche. Perhaps he could do this because he carried within him vestigial memories of a loving mother and was not merely prey to unrealistic fantasies of a mother he had never known.

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

A
NGEL OF DEATH, FATAL LOVE,
O
H MY DESTINY, UNDER THE FACE OF A BLOND AND DELICATE CHILD.
H
OW I STILL LOVE YOU, ASSASSIN!

George Sand,
Intimate Journal,
1834

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

Q
uite 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.