How the French Invented Love (9 page)

Despite her good intentions, she is unable to hide the pleasurable stirrings she feels in the duke’s presence. “A man less acute than he would perhaps not have noticed them; but so many women had already been in love with him that he could hardly fail to recognize the symptoms.” Emboldened by this knowledge, the duke commits a shameless act: he steals a miniature portrait of the princess while they are both in the room of the Queen Dauphine. Even though the princess sees the theft, she cannot bring herself to denounce him or ask that he return the portrait.

At this point, the duke revels in the belief that he is “making her love him despite herself.” When the theft is discovered, Monsieur de Clèves is pained by its disappearance and says, in jest, that his wife must have given it to a lover. The princess is filled with remorse, yet unable to quell the storm of emotions raging inside her. So the trio of husband, wife, and would-be lover continue their dance of deception and hurtle toward an inevitable confrontation.

From scene to scene, the princess descends the slope toward “the miseries of a love affair” against which her mother had assiduously warned her. She even discovers the torments of jealousy resulting from a far-fetched subplot: a letter from her uncle’s mistress falls into her hands, and she mistakenly believes that it is addressed to the Duc de Nemours. Once she learns the truth, she is relieved of her jealousy, but the hurt still lingers and opens her eyes to questions she has not been willing to face before. She asks herself bluntly: “Am I ready to embark on a love affair? to be unfaithful to M. de Clèves? to be unfaithful to myself?” At this point, she is still able to answer no.

The plot becomes increasingly convoluted when the princess again retreats to the Clèves country home in a further effort to distance herself from her potential lover. And it is here that the most famous—and most incredible—scene of the book takes place. She confesses to Monsieur de Clèves that she loves someone else, a confession so remarkable that when the novel was published, the popular magazine,
Le Mercure Galant
, asked its readers this question: “Should wives confess to their husbands their passion for other men?” And if the confession wasn’t difficult enough for a reader to swallow, the author would have us believe that the conversation between husband and wife is overheard by none other than the duke, silently hidden in the garden pavilion where the prince and princess are sitting. Do we believe? Judge for yourself when you read the book.

The Prince de Clèves is devastated. He asks his wife to try to resist her inclination, not only as her husband “but as a man whose happiness depends on you and who loves you more passionately, more tenderly, more violently than the man your heart prefers.” The prince is a very decent man, a nobleman in every sense of the word, the very antithesis of a laughingstock cuckold. He clearly deserves to be loved, but in this story, that is not to be. Instead, aroused by further suspicions, he falls into despair and, “unable to resist the crushing sorrow” that overcomes him, he is struck down by a violent fever. As he sinks toward death, the prince musters his strength one last time to express his love and his fears for his wife. His death will turn out to be another sacrifice, like that of her mother, on behalf of the princess’s character development.

For it is her story that gives the novel its title, and it is her story that grips us to the end. Now that she is free to follow her heart and marry the Duc de Nemours, she chooses another path. Despite the duke’s continued attentions and her own rekindled passion at his sight, the princess turns down his offer of marriage. Why? The obvious answer is that she is filled with too much remorse at the thought of her husband’s death, which she attributes directly to the duke’s behavior and her own. The duke’s attempt to discount her rejection of him as a “phantom of duty” does not work. She is adamant, and not only because she is consumed with guilt for the past. Another, deeper reason lies in her fears for the future with a husband such as Nemours. She presents this reason lucidly and eloquently in their spellbinding last meeting. Let us listen.

    What I fear is the certainty that one day the love you feel for me now will die. . . . How long does men’s passion last when the bond is eternal? . . . it seems to me, indeed, that your constancy has been sustained by the obstacles it has encountered. There were enough of them to arouse in you the desire for victory. . . .

        I confess . . . that my passions may govern me, but they cannot blind me. . . . You have already had a number of passionate attachments; you would have others. I should no longer be able to make you happy; I should see you behaving towards another woman as you had behaved towards me. I should be mortally wounded at the sight. . . . A woman may reproach a lover, but can she reproach a husband who has merely stopped loving her? . . .

    I intend to remove myself from your sight, however violent the pain of separation. I implore you, by all the power I have over you, not to seek any opportunity to see me.

This long monologue plumbs the soul of an extraordinary lady, who has grown into her nobility through the course of two years and 150 pages. She has evolved from a naïve teenager into a mature woman who has learned from her own experience, including the experience of being in love. For how could she judge love’s true worth without having undergone its delights and its torments? Anyone who has ever fallen in love, who has fantasized a meeting with a lover, who has woken up with the enhanced pleasure of knowing she will see him, who has put on a flattering dress and more makeup than usual—that person knows there is little in life so intense as being in love. Madame de Clèves knows all this and yet renounces a future with the man she loves.

Whether we agree with her decision or not, one thing is clear: henceforth love will have to bear the burden of trenchant psychological scrutiny. Henceforth love will be accompanied by a certain skepticism. Can it last? Is it worth it? Are men congenitally inconstant?

With
La Princesse de Clèves
, the medieval tradition of courtly love collides with seventeenth-century skepticism. Descartes and La Rochefoucauld, following on the heels of Montaigne, question the reliability of our most cherished beliefs. They bring critical thinking into the realm of human relationships, religion, philosophy, and what we now call psychology. Madame de La Fayette does not deny the power of love. She masterfully describes it, even inflates it, then analyzes and deflates it. She would have heard from her friend La Rochefoucauld some of his caustic maxims that warn against the folly of love: “All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.” “The mind is always the dupe of the heart.” “True love is like seeing ghosts: we all talk about it, but few of us have ever seen one.”

Perhaps the Princess de Clèves had another quote attributed to La Rochefoucauld in mind when she mustered the strength to refuse the Duc de Nemours: “Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.” Observing the fate of other women at court—wives and mistresses, women who had been loved, betrayed, and abandoned—she did not want to end up like them. She chose caution and renunciation over the hope of enduring love. We have come a long way from the reciprocal passion of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere. Madame de La Fayette and many of her contemporaries regarded passion as a recipe for disaster.

La Princesse de Clèves
marks a notable shift in the French erotic saga. While romantic love will return in various guises over and over and over again during the next three hundred years, it will never be the same. It will never be as free from suspicion as it was before Madame de La Fayette’s masterpiece.

Reader, by now you have guessed that
La Princesse de Clèves
carries special meaning for me, as it did for the thousands of French men and women who were offended by President Sarkozy’s dismissal of the book. I can even say that it changed my life. In fact, when Alain de Botton’s lovely book
How Proust Can Change Your Life
appeared, I thought of how Madame de La Fayette had changed mine, for she was directly responsible for a major decision I made in 1976.

That winter, when I was still teaching French literature and Western civilization at a state university in California, I was asked to review the 1973 edition of the Norton
World Masterpieces Since the Renaissance
. It contained 1,859 pages of literature from France, England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, the United States, Russia, and Norway: 1,859 pages chosen and edited by seven men—1,859 pages that did not include a single selection from a woman! (You think the gender gap is bad now? Then it was undoubtedly much worse.) My mind jumped immediately to Madame de La Fayette. How could they have ignored
La Princesse de Clèves
? Yes, indeed, most of the authors included in the Norton anthology were men of great distinction, but I simply could not understand why there was a place for Solzhenitsyn and none for Madame de La Fayette, not to mention Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf. Rather than argue the respective merits of, say, Heinrich Heine and George Sand as representatives of European romanticism, or the need to include Simone de Beauvoir along with Sartre and Camus, I made my case to Norton on the basis of
La Princesse de Clèves
. Surely, this was a masterpiece in every sense of the word and deserved to be included in the next edition of
World Masterpieces
. I’m pleased to say that every subsequent edition of the Norton anthology has included selections written by women.

My experience in 1976 forced me to rethink what I was doing in a department of literature, a discipline that tended to ignore and often denigrate the contributions of women writers, however outstanding. In casting about for a different way of using my professional skills, I chanced upon the newly created Center for Research on Women at Stanford University. There I was able to find a home as a senior research scholar and, later, as one of its directors. Since that transition I have been engaged in writing about women’s cultural history, with a special focus on women in France and the United States.

Thinking about women, I have never been far away from their relationships with men. I have tried to understand how men and women see themselves within a given culture and historical moment. I have read, with fascination, their accounts of how they acquired gender-specific traits and roles. While males and females in France and the United States pass through the same biological stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and old age, each of these stages is so shaped by a person’s specific time and place that they often bear little resemblance to each other across the divide of language, region, and class, not to mention sex. The first great American poet, Anne Bradstreet (circa 1616–1672), who wrote amazing love poems for her husband, was born scarcely a generation earlier than Madame de La Fayette; yet in Puritan New England where Anne lived as an adult (after her earlier life in England), she conceptualized love in a manner so different from the courtiers of seventeenth-century France that we wonder if she and they are writing about the same thing. Love, too, we are forced to admit, is socially constructed.

For Madame de La Fayette, love was fabricated according to the rules of
galanterie
as dictated in the salons of the precious ladies and as practiced at the court of Louis XIV. While Louis XIV was alive—he did not die until 1715—gallantry remained an honored French attribute, a sophisticated game as in the title of Marivaux’s famous comedy,
Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard
(
The Game of Love and Chance
), published in 1730.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one learned how to please the opposite sex by reading novels and poetry, by attending plays, and by observing the conduct of one’s elders and contemporaries. It was understood that a man should always make the first advance, never a woman. She, on the other hand, had the right to encourage or discourage a would-be suitor. This verbal play between man and woman was as essential to court life as music and dance. Let us not forget that in 1656, when Louis XIV was only eighteen, he danced in Lully’s ballet entitled
La Galanterie du Temps
(Gallantry in Our Times). Following the example of their king, men were proud to be called
galants
. For women, however, the term
femme galante
was less flattering, implying “an easy woman” or even a courtesan.

By the time of Madame de La Fayette, in the last third of the seventeenth century, gallantry implied a certain emotional lightness. If you could manage it, it was even possible to juggle several affairs at the same time without sanction from one’s peers—something that would have been denounced by Marie de Champagne in her twelfth-century verdicts.

The Duc de Nemours excelled at gallantry. His striking appearance, polite manners, and way with words lifted him far above the ordinary suitor. He was a star in a firmament of lovers, a catch for any woman, even for the Princess de Clèves. And yet . . . what woman would not fear that this very same man, with a string of love affairs behind him, would cast her off when the pleasures of love had become too familiar? Her all-engrossing fairy tale might eventually deteriorate into a demonic nightmare. She could not risk a catastrophic ending to her unparalleled story. Let it be one of emotion recollected in tranquility (
pace
Wordsworth) rather than in bitterness. Let it be a story that ennobles, without the negative side of gallantry.

Although the dissolute side of gallantry would become more pronounced in the eighteenth century, the French would continue to claim it with pride. Pierre Darblay, in his 1889
Physiologie de l’amour
, would call it the “character of our nation.”
⁵
In our own time, Alain Viala asks whether gallantry is a cultural category peculiar to the French. Indeed, when he mentioned his intended book title—
La France galante
—to British colleagues at Oxford, one called it a pleonasm.
⁶
He was right to associate gallantry with the French, not only for its privileged history within the
ancien régime
but also for its ongoing presence in postrevolutionary France, where it continues to inspire considerable admiration and a measure of mistrust from Anglo-Saxons.