How the French Invented Love (7 page)

This man—handsome, gallant, well-spoken, a connoisseur of art, and clearly still in love with his wife after some thirty years—comes right off the pages of a medieval romance. He is willing to put up with her imperious behavior because he loves her. Like a faithful knight, he honors love, despite its torments. And she, in turn, reciprocates that love, in her fashion.

My youngest son once commented on Simone’s difference from the American women he knew. “Not just beautiful,” he said, “but more mysterious.” Indeed!

Frenchwomen cultivate mystery. I was not surprised to read in a recent magazine dedicated to the subject of monogamy that French psychotherapists have very different views from their American counterparts as to whether couples should discuss with each other all aspects of their lives. A Parisian family therapist expressed horror at the thought, even in a counselor’s office. He is quoted as saying: “Mystery is an essential ingredient in maintaining interest in our partner over time. To keep my marriage enlivened, I must feel there’s always more to my wife than what I already know.”
²¹
He portrayed a good marital relation as two intersecting circles that do not entirely overlap. “In France,” he said, “when we think about ‘the relationship,’ there’s rarely more than one-third of each circle that overlaps. Married people here are not only entitled to their privacy, they
must
have private lives to remain interesting and alluring to each other.”

Call it “mystery” or “subterfuge” or “dishonesty,” but when it comes to love, French men and women have little regard for the tell-all ideal so popular among many Americans. They prefer to think of love as a game in which you do not show your hand.

I have pondered this difference for the better part of a lifetime and garnered a few enduring insights by considering our respective national histories. The American ideal of love, with its own transformations over four hundred years, developed in a strange new world where spouses had to depend on each other as “yoke partners.” Far from settled communities, without parents or siblings to count on, husbands and wives were thrust together in a battle against the elements and other peoples. Romantic love did not become the major factor in American marriages until the early nineteenth century, and even then “the couple” quickly ceded primacy to “the family.” For a long time, American women have lived in a culture of what one author has called “strong mothers, weak wives.”
²²
Today, the needs of the married couple frequently take second place to the needs of the children, with romance between husband and wife often difficult to maintain. My French daughter-in-law remembers being shocked when she first came to the United States and heard one of her coworkers dismiss her husband as “incidental” to the primary relationship she had with her children.

The French, on the other hand, with centuries of court culture behind them, have developed their ideas on love from the top downward. Kings and queens, lords and ladies, minstrels and writers eulogized, poeticized, and acted out love within a world of their peers. From the Middle Ages onward, erotic love was a privileged phenomenon, with standards and ideals that were shared by members of the same social circle. In time, what began in the enclosed atmosphere of provincial and royal courts would ripple out far beyond regional boundaries, and far beyond the age of the troubadours.

CHAPTER TWO

Gallant Love

La Princesse de Clèves

A
MBITION AND LOVE AFFAIRS WERE THE LIFE-BLOOD OF THE COURT, ABSORBING THE ATTENTION OF MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE.

Madame de La Fayette,
La Princesse de Clèves,
1678

“Carte du Pays de Tendre” (Map of the Land of Tenderness). Mlle de Scudéry,
Clélie
, 1654.

F
rom the twelfth century onward, fashionable courts throughout France promoted all the arts, including the art of love. Certainly Anglophiles, Italianophiles, and Germanophiles (or Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Greek, Russian, and Scandinavian aficionados) can point to their own glories during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but it is safe to say that the French cultural beacon illuminated the rest of Europe until the fall of the monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century.

In matters of love, a new style called
galanterie
became the rage. Broadly defined as a set of refined manners directed toward the opposite sex, and narrowly defined as the art of pleasing the ladies, it would dominate polite society for at least three hundred years. Though its meaning would change over time, we still apply the word “gallant” to men when they demonstrate courtesy and charm.

Galanterie
,
galant
,
galante
,
Le Vert Galant
,
fêtes galantes
,
Le Mercure Galant
,
les Indes galantes
,
annales galantes
,
lettres galantes
,
les muses galantes
—these terms proliferated among the upper classes. Men were expected to exercise gallantry with the same ease required of them in the saddle. To show no interest in the fair sex was as much a flaw among noblemen of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as it had been among the troubadours of an earlier period, the main difference being that gallantry did not promise lifetime loyalty. Courtly love in the Middle Ages had required devotion to only one lady, who was usually married and of higher status than the knight. Gallantry could be spread around: men usually courted women of their own rank, but could also reach out to women above and beneath them, as long as everyone understood that lovers of unequal status were not likely to marry.

Gallantry started at the highest level, at the level of kingship. Unlike the cuckold depicted in medieval literature, the king, rather than the queen, was entitled to bedmates beyond the royal spouse. While she ostensibly devoted her intimate parts solely to the purpose of producing heirs, he could receive other women in his bedchamber or find his way to numerous assignations where receptive women would meet him with open limbs. In time, royal mistresses rivaled legitimate queens in their opulence and influence.

The great Renaissance king François I (1494–1547) installed his official mistress (
maîtresse en titre
), Anne, Duchesse d’Étampes, in the royal castle of Fontainebleau. He pursued his love affairs—with her and with others—not only at Fontainebleau but also at the Palais du Louvre and châteaux in the Loire Valley, which became gardens of pleasure for the king and his courtiers.

His successors, most notably Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIV, and Louis XV, were famous for their amatory exploits with numerous women, starting with their official mistresses. You could say that French kings enjoyed a form of regal polygamy. Even if a woman was reluctant to grant sexual favors, as was the case of the teenaged Gabrielle d’Estrées when approached by the “old” Henri IV (he was thirty-seven), it took little to persuade her that it was in her interest, and the interest of her family, to submit to the king’s desires. Here’s how he addressed her on April 19, 1593, in one of his many love letters: “Sleep well, my sweet love, so you’ll be fresh and fleshy when you arrive.”
¹

Among the more than fifty mistresses attributed to Henri IV, Henriette d’Entragues, who replaced Gabrielle after she died in childbirth, was arguably the most impertinent. She seems to have been able to do and say pretty much what she pleased with the king, including telling him to his face that he smelled like carrion. Henri IV kept Henriette on as his leading mistress even after he brought Marie de Médicis to Paris as his queen. During the ten years of their marriage (1600–1610), which produced six royal children, the queen had to put up with the king’s voracious extramarital appetite. He came to be known as
Le Vert Galant
(the dashing gallant), a name that appears to this day on the marquee of a famous restaurant in Paris, not far from the statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf.

Right till the end of his life, Henri IV was in and out of bed with a wide assortment of women—those he professed to love and others he simply wanted to seduce. His very last love was a teenager stolen away from his friend, the soldier and diplomat François de Bassompierre. Here is how Bassompierre recounted the affair in his memoirs.

Bassompierre could boast of several mistresses. In October 1608, when he was twenty-nine, he was offered the possibility of marriage with the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Connétable de Montmorency. It would be an advantageous union for Bassompierre, and besides, the young woman was extremely beautiful. But in January 1609, the king saw her and, as he confessed to Bassompierre, fell “not only in love with Mademoiselle de Montmorency, but furiously and outrageously so. If you marry her and she loves you, I shall hate you.”
²

The king conceived another scenario: she would be the “consolation” of his old age. (He was fifty-six at the time and destined to die in little more than a year.) He would marry her off to his nephew, the Prince de Condé—a man who “loves hunting a hundred thousand times more than the ladies.” The prince would receive 100,000 francs a year “to pass the time” while the young woman was in attendance on the king. He tried to make Bassompierre believe that he wanted nothing more from her than her affection. As a reward to Bassompierre for his loss, the king offered to arrange his marriage with another highly ranked woman and to make him a duke and peer of the realm. For Mademoiselle de Montmorency and Bassompierre, there was no choice but to acquiesce. However, the story did not end as Henri IV had planned. The marriage with the Prince de Condé took place on May 17, 1609, but shortly thereafter the couple stole off to Brussels, much to the king’s chagrin.

It is clear from this example that sexual intrigue was as much a part of court life as political stratagem. Whom you slept with and whom you married were not just private affairs. They concerned relatives, friends, priests, even the king and queen, as members of the nobility jockeyed with each other for royal favor. In a society where whole families could be made or undone by a felicitous marriage or an ill-advised liaison, love was the least of many considerations to be taken into account by a young person experiencing his or her first pangs of passion.

No one has better described the amatory hotbed of the French court than Madame de La Fayette in her novel
La Princesse de Clèves
. She writes: “There were countless interests at stake, countless different factions, and women played such a central part in them that love was always entangled with politics and politics with love.”
³

Published anonymously in 1678,
La Princesse de Clèves
became an instant best-seller in France, to be followed the next year by a popular translation into English. Controversy over the book erupted in both countries. Who was this person—who were these “wits of France”—responsible for revealing the erotic commerce of the French court?
⁴

While Madame de La Fayette never confessed to having written this work (or others that were subsequently attributed to her), there is little doubt today that she was the author. Perhaps she did collaborate with some of the men in her intellectual circle, most notably her intimate friend, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, whose cynical
Maximes
had already attracted a wide readership. Anonymous publication, in and of itself, points to a woman’s hand, since it was not considered seemly in the seventeenth century (as in the eighteenth and nineteenth) for a woman to publish under her own name.

La Princesse de Clèves
is one of the first “psychological” novels ever written, and, in my opinion, it has no equal among seventeenth-century works of fiction. As I explain later, it played a significant role in my life, so much so that I felt personally offended when President Sarkozy, in 2009, dismissed the book as irrelevant to the education of French students. Had I not been five thousand miles away, I would have joined the French protesters who took turns reading it in public as an act of political opposition. As President Sarkozy’s popularity declined among the French, sales of
La Princesse de Clèves
soared.

This relatively short work has had a multitude of fans worldwide for good reasons. It is a love story, albeit a thwarted one, between a young married noblewoman and her equally noble suitor. It is a marital drama quite unlike any other that had been written until then. It is a story that sometimes strains the reader’s credulity, with overheard conversations and lost letters, but redeems itself as a convincing portrayal of the sentiments felt by women and men as they fall heedlessly in and out of love.