Part 10

By this time it must be very clear that the lady’s worst tormentor was herself. If she could have followed the wholesome advice of her exquisite friend, Madame de Choiseul, she would have seen life differently. “Eat little at night, open your windows, drive out often, and look for the good in things and people.... You will no longer be sad, or bored, or ill.” It was quite in vain. In such maladies the patient must minister to himself, and this poor patient not only submitted to the black ennui of to-day but doubled it, in fact gave it its chief significance, by dreading the longer, blacker hours of many to-morrows.

So you set her down as a cold, barren, dead old woman, and think you have heard enough of her. But there is more and of singular interest. She had noble and beautiful and winning qualities. For one thing, she was frank, straightforward, and sincere. Indeed, it was the excess of these fine traits that caused her troubles. She would have no illusion, no deception, no sham, nothing but the truth. It was the exaggerated fear of accepting pleasant falsehoods which led her to believe that necessarily everything pleasant must be a falsehood. But her honesty draws you to her, even while her misery repels.

Then, curiously enough, though the case is not unprecedented, her very pessimism and failure to find any good in the world resulted from an inherent idealism, from too high expectations of men and things. Her imagination was so keen that it discounted every pleasure before it came, with resultant disappointment. Her natural instinct was to trust, often unwisely. Then, when she was deceived, she mistrusted and suspected—unwisely also. Primarily she was a dreamer, a hoper, as she herself phrases it in her vivid language, “a listen-if-it rains, a visionary, who watches the clouds and sees lovely things there that fade even as one beholds them.” And vast dreams dispelled left a darker and a sadder emptiness.

So with people. She demanded perfection, and would take nothing less. Men and women thus tempered go starved and discontented in this far from perfect world. “I pass in review everybody I know and everybody I have known; I do not see one of them without a fault, and I find myself worse than any of them.” But, good heavens, what son or daughter of Adam can endure such a test as that? Yet some are extreme good company, nevertheless.

In other words, her bitter judgments were founded on an over-exacting standard and did not exclude pity or tenderness. Though too impatient to be of great help to others and too critical to be tolerant towards them, she was capable of keen and passionate sympathy, and she held kindness to be a great and most estimable virtue. With the candor which is one of her chief charms she confesses, “I renew every day the resolution to be kind and loving myself. How much progress I make I do not know.”

And following this clue, if we probe still deeper, we come across a curious fact in Madame du Deffand’s temperament, which seems to explain many things. Under all her misery, all her discontent, all her boredom, she was aching for love. Perhaps she was incapable of it. Perhaps her keen vision, and her deep mistrust, and her lofty demands on human nature made it impossible for her to give or to receive the passionate affection which might have filled her life. But after careful study it is impossible to resist the conclusion that she more than most women felt the deep need of all women, that the right home, and the right husband, and the right children might have given her the satisfaction she could not get from books, or thought, or art, or nature.

She herself recognized this, with lucidity as well as pathos. She repeats often that she loves nothing, less often that some inborn flaw, some unconquerable twist or imperfection, makes her incapable of loving anything. But far more often still does she cry out for love and tenderness. “Friendship is almost a mania with me; I was born for nothing else.” “I love nothing and that is the true cause of my ennui.” When she was dying, she saw her secretary, Wiart, who had long served her, in tears. “You love me, then?” she murmured, and so her last words expressed at once the doubt and the longing of her life.

Of her earlier attempts to satisfy this natural instinct three, at least, are well known to us and none was perfectly successful. For years she lived in the most intimate relations with Hénault, a man of the highest position and character; but he was not of a nature to feel ardor or inspire it. Their mutual attitude was one of respectful esteem, largely tempered with keen-sighted criticism. Again, Madame du Deffand took into her protection a young orphan relative, Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse, hoping to find a comfort for her age. But the older lady was exacting, the younger restless, and they quarreled and parted by the fault of both—or of neither. Finally, there was Madame de Choiseul, with whom it was not easy to quarrel. Madame du Deffand adored her, called her “grandmamma,” though she was many years the younger, declared over and over again that her love was all she wanted, all her hope and comfort in life. Yet in one of her moments of desperate petulance she could write of even Madame de Choiseul: “She shows a good deal of friendship; and as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is perfectly natural that we should exchange the tenderest expressions in the world.” Truly, a strange, subtle, and difficult temper, and one ill-fitted to separate the evil from the good in the tangled yarn of human life.

Then, after all these attempts at love and failures, came a most singular adventure. Madame du Deffand, at seventy, fell in love with a man of fifty. This world-worn, life-wearied, pale, frail, dusty heart was suddenly set beating by another as cold, as disillusioned, if not as bored as hers, that of Horace Walpole, a bachelor, a dilettante, and an Englishman. And this old woman’s love was no mere fancy, no indifferent whim, lightly caught and blown off like a feather. It was a real, intense, absorbing, overwhelming passion, like that of a girl of twenty or a woman of forty. “Everybody loves after his own manner; I have only one way of loving, infinitely, or not at all.” “The thought of you enters into everything I think and everything I do.” This is the tone, not for an hour, or a day, but over and over and over, for eleven years. Let us note some of the special phases of such an unusual experience.

To begin with, how about Walpole himself? He was not infatuated. He never could have been, and certainly not at fifty, for an aged Frenchwoman. He kept a cool head and saw with perfect clearness the foibles of his ardent correspondent. At the same time, his bearing in a rather difficult situation is on the whole loyal and manly. He defended his aged friend against criticism and mockery and it is from him that we get the finest appreciation of her good qualities, her noble sincerity, her unconquerable vivacity, her social charm.

But if he sees her as we see her, assuredly she does not see him as we see him, or never, never admits that she does. Without accepting all of Macaulay’s severe judgment, it is difficult to place Walpole on a very heroic plane. He was kindly, he was gentle, he was generous where it cost him little, he was mildly loyal to his friends. But he was vain, superficial, snobbish while pretending to democracy, incapable of great devotion and of self-forgetfulness. The Walpole that Madame du Deffand loved was, however, far different from this. He had the virtues of French and English combined and the vices of no race. As an author, he is in the same class with Voltaire, his letters are like Voltaire’s for style, and far above for matter. “For style they have had no model and cannot be imitated. They are the sublime of abundance and of naturalness.” If you know Walpole, what do you think of that? And his character is as sublime as his letters. He is perhaps a little godlike for perfect friendship, or is she wrong about this? But in the early stages of her passion she proclaims the lover’s idea from which she never swerves. “If others saw as clearly as I do, you would be placed first, not only in England, but in the universe; this is not flattery; wit, talent, and the perfection of kindness have never been united as they are in you.” What a marvellous light is thrown on the woman’s character, as we have studied it, by such a sentence as that!

So she plays, in letter after letter, on the whole compass of the tenderest, most self-abandoning affection. With him in London and herself in Paris, and several days of delaying post between them, she writes incessantly, begging for good news, bad news, any news. His plans, she must know every detail of his plans, what he does, where he goes, whom he sees. His health. Let but the gout touch him and she is in misery. She showers remedies, like a quack doctor, or an aged nurse. Her distress is everywhere made plain to us by the vivid touches of her quick imagination. “I am like a child hanging out of a window by a cord and every instant on the brink of falling.”

The best remedy for the anxiety of absence would certainly be presence and she seems to live only in the passionate hope of those rare and hurried visits which brought her beloved to her. Yet even so, she is most characteristically afraid that when he does come he will be bored. He shall see only whom he wishes when he wishes, provided he gives long hours to seeing her. He comes, she is in Paradise, sits talking with him till two in the morning, and he gets a long letter from her before he rises the next day.

Then he is gone again and she is in pain again. The memory of past pleasure only makes the pang of separation keener. She is old, old, hardly a particle of life left in her, and she cannot hope to live to see him ever any more.

A passion like this, full as it is of tragedy and pathos, will at times tempt sarcasm. The sincerity and fine intelligence of Madame du Deffand make it impossible for a sympathetic reader even to smile at her. But Walpole was by nature abnormally sensitive to ridicule, as he himself confesses. To be praised as if he were a god and loved as if he were an opera tenor by an old lady of seventy, whom he knew to be living in closest intimacy with the most critical and mocking wits of the world, placed a man of his temper in an exceedingly difficult position. Beware of romance, he cautioned mildly. But she laughed at him. Romance! at her age! She had never been romantic, had all her life stripped the veil of sentimental illusion from the cold bones of reality. Romance! Her feelings were nothing but common, daylight friendship. In which she was quite wrong, for nothing about her was or could be common or of every day.

So felt Walpole. And he still shuddered at the thought of the vast guffaw of future generations. Destroy my letters, he insisted, and do, do moderate the tone of yours. And he cautioned, and he lectured, as a tutor might lecture a moonstruck girl.

She did not like it, she resented it. The notes she writes so thickly are of painful interest in their sore, hurt, pleading, protesting energy. “If I were as unreasonable as you, you would never hear another word from me. The letter I have just received is so offensive, so extravagant, that I should throw it in the fire unanswered.” “Should throw,” you notice, not “have thrown.” “It is impossible to judge more falsely than you judge me.... You see yourself in everything I say about others and think I am finding fault with you, when I find fault with any one.” “God is not more incomprehensible than you; but if he is not more just, it is hardly worth while believing in him.”

Yet she kissed the hand that chastened her, she turned like a child to its tutor, for advice and comfort, with blind trust, blind confidence, blind hope. He is a true physician for the soul, she says, and one who needs no physician for his own. She only wishes that he might have had control of her from childhood. How different she would have been! “You would have formed my taste, my judgment, my discernment, you would have taught me to know the world, to mistrust it, to despise it, to enjoy it; you would not have bridled my imagination, or blighted my passions, or chilled my soul; but you would have been like a skilful dancing-master, who keeps the natural poise of health and vigor and adds to it finished grace.”

So she loved for eleven years and died with this final illusion like the cross in her hands and the sacred wafer at her lips. You think she was pitiably infatuated. Perhaps she was. But it was an infatuation that not only furnished the clue to her whole life, but in a manner sanctified it.

It is a curious thing that the two greatest women letter writers of France, perhaps of the world, Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand, should each have built the main fabric of their correspondence on an exaggerated, not to say abnormal, affection. It is far more curious that this affection should be with Madame de Sévigné the one flaw in a singularly well-balanced character and with Madame du Deffand the most marked symptom of health in a character otherwise erratic, distorted, and unsound.

VIII

MADAME DE CHOISEUL

CHRONOLOGY

Louise Honorine Crozat du Châtel. Born 1734. Married Duc de Choiseul 1750. Choiseul’s ministry 1758-1770. Husband died 1785. Died December 3, 1801.

VIII

MADAME DE CHOISEUL

A portrait of Madame de Choiseul seems the natural complement to the portrait of Madame du Deffand. The two were intimate friends, in spite of a considerable difference in age; their lives were intertwined in the closest fashion. At the same time, they present a marked contrast in temperament, character, and habits of thought. Madame du Deffand’s estimate of her younger friend, whom she playfully called “grandmamma,” will serve well to set the note for a portrayal of the latter: “If there is a perfect being in the world, ’tis she. She has mastered all her passions. No one is at once so sensitive and so completely mistress of herself. Everything is genuine in her, nothing artificial, yet everything is under control.”

Elsewhere Madame du Deffand points out that if Madame de Choiseul was perfect, she had everything to make her so, family, fortune, friends, and social position. “I know no one who has been so continuously and so completely fortunate as you.” In a sense this was exact. Madame de Choiseul from birth filled a high position in the social life of the French mid-eighteenth century. She married early a man of the greatest distinction and charm, who came to occupy the most important political offices, and for a time she was perhaps the leading lady of France, next the queen—and the king’s mistress. But her life was not all roses, by any means. Her husband was charming to others as well as to her. She had no children. Politics brought her misery as well as fortune, since the duke lost his office and was sent in disgrace and banishment from court. Later he died and she was left alone to face the Revolution, which she did with the splendid patience and courage shown by so many women of her class. But this was long after Madame du Deffand had exchanged the ennui of earth for the felicity of heaven.

During the time she held a leading social position, Madame de Choiseul proved to be in every way fitted for it. She herself declares she has no preference for such a life, complains that her hours are filled not occupied, longs for solitude and quiet, and when they come, as a result of political failure, accepts them with a sigh of genuine relief.

But all agree that for the manifold uses of society she had a singular aptness and charm. She was married when she was fifteen, and at eighteen went as ambassadress to Rome, where she made herself beloved by every one. She was not perhaps regularly beautiful, but her little figure had a fairylike grace and lightness, and her simple, dainty speech and manners doubled the attraction of her figure. “A Venus in little,” _Vénus en abrégé_, Voltaire calls her. Horace Walpole, who to be sure loved all the friends of Madame du Deffand, says of the duchess: “Oh, it is the gentlest, amiable, civil, little creature that ever came out of a fairy egg! So just in its phrases and thoughts, so attentive and good-natured!” Elsewhere he is even more enthusiastic: “She has more sense and more virtues than almost any human being,” and another brief touch gives a climax quite unusual with the cynic of Strawberry Hill: “The most perfect being I know of either sex.”

Nor was this grace and perfection of the tame order which effaces itself and merely warms others till they sparkle and flame. The lady had a fairy’s vivacity as well as a fairy’s daintiness. It is true, social embarrassment sometimes overcame her—most winningly. She had, says Walpole further, “a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which the court has not cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the most interesting sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn and propriety of expression.” She herself gives a charming account of a social crisis in which she was utterly at a loss what to do or say and could only stammeringly repeat the words of others, “Yes, Madam, no, Madam,—I think, that is, I believe—oh, yes, I am sure I agree with you entirely.”

But she had wit of her own, spirit of her own, courage of her own, and could find words in plenty when occasion really called for them. Madame du Deffand has preserved many of her clever sayings, as the comment on two gentlemen equally amiable, but different. “One is charming for the manner that he has and the other for the manner that he has not.”

The lasting evidence for us, however, of Madame de Choiseul’s vivacity is her letters. They exist in no such number as Madame du Deffand’s or Madame de Sévigné’s, but they yield to neither in ease, in variety, in grace and swiftness of expression. These qualities are equally manifest in her long description of the busy day of a prime minister’s wife,—the scores of petitioners, the hurry from one function to another, the tedious necessity of being something to everybody while nobody is anything to you,—and in little touches of the most pregnant and delicate simplicity. “What is there to say in the country when you are alone and it rains? We were alone and it was raining. This suggested talk of ourselves and, after all, what is there that we know so much about?” or again, “To love and to please is to be always young.” She could and did write French as perfect as Voltaire’s. But she did not hesitate a moment to twist grammar or syntax, when some unusual turn of thought required it. “I propose to speak my own tongue before that of my nation,” she says, “and it is often the irregularity of our thought that causes the irregularity of our expressions.”

But it was neither her beauty nor her wit that made the duchess so much admired and beloved. It was her sympathy and tenderness, her faculty of entering into the joys and sorrows of others and her pleasure in doing so, that drew all hearts to her. “She had the art of listening and of making others shine,” says a memoir writer of her own day. This is a social quality by no means contemptible. But the quality of sympathetic comprehension served for much more than social purposes. “I cannot bear the idea of suffering, even for persons indifferent to me,” she writes. This did not mean, however, that she fled suffering, but that she endeavored to alleviate it, by every means in her power. Where the suffering was mental or imaginary, she soothed and diverted it by sound counsel and gentle rallying, if necessary. Where it was physical, she gave her time and thought and strength to substantial relief.

Her dependents, her servants, the poor in all the region round, adored her. She gave them money, she gave them food, she gave them the sunshine of her presence and her cheerfulness. A servant whose work had been about the house was offered a better position outside. He refused it. “But why,” urged the duchess, “why? Your pay will be better, your hours shorter, your work lighter.” “Yes, madam, but I shall not be near you.” After the Revolution, when she had lost everything and was living in a garret, there came one day a knock at the door. She opened it to a rather prosperous-looking mechanic, and inquired what he wanted. “Madam, when I was a poor peasant, working on the roads, you asked me what I desired most in the world. I said, a cart and an ass to draw it. You gave them to me and I have made a comfortable fortune. Now it is all yours.”

If she was thus kind to those who were nothing to her personally, it may well be supposed that she was devoted to her friends. She had many of them and never felt that she had enough. Like all persons of such ample affection, she had her disappointments, with resulting cynicism, and once wrote: “It is well to love even a dog when you have the opportunity, for fear you should find nothing else worth loving.” But in general, though she was far from indiscriminate in her choice, she loved widely, and she repeats again and again that love is the only thing that makes life worth living, that love is life. When the bitter saying of Madame de Staël is reported to her, that she was always glad to make new acquaintances because she felt sure they could not be worse than those she had already, Madame de Choiseul rebels with the utmost indignation, declaring that she is not dissatisfied with any of her acquaintance and that she is enchanted with her friends. It seems, also, that her friendship was to a singular degree sympathetic and self-forgetful. So many of us see our friends’ lives from the point of view of our own and enter into their interests chiefly so far as they are identical with ours. But this lady has one beautiful and perfect word on the subject: “I have always had the vanity of those I love, that is my fashion of loving.”

One of her friendships we can study in minute detail and we find it to be without fault or flaw, that for Madame du Deffand. One friend was young, rich, beautiful, popular, driven in the rush and hurry of the great world. The other was old, feeble, blind, forlorn. Yet the friendship was as genuine and heartfelt on one side as on the other. Madame de Choiseul had the discernment to see Madame du Deffand’s fine qualities, her clear head, her tender heart, her magnificent sincerity; but she cherished her, as love does cherish, not from a mathematical calculation of fine qualities, but simply because it does and must. I love you, she repeats, I love you. I think of you daily, hourly. Tell me everything, as I tell you everything. Let there be no secrets and no shadows between us.

Nor was it by any means an untested friendship. Madame du Deffand had nothing to do but think of trouble, she was critically sensitive, knew her own weaknesses, and could not believe that anybody loved her. Often she intimates her complaints, her dissatisfaction, her jealousy. Madame de Choiseul is sometimes forced to treat her like the child she calls her. There are moments when a frank, outspoken word is necessary. But it is spoken with careful tenderness. “You think I love you from complaisance and ask you to visit me from politeness. I don’t. I love you because I love you. I will not say because you are lovable; for your fears, your doubts, your absurd hesitations annoy me too much for compliments. I don’t care about doing you justice. I want to do justice to myself. I love you because you love me, because I have my own interests at heart, and because I am absolutely sure of you.... I want to see you, because I love you, right or wrong.” And she did love her, in spite of all criticism and difficulty, with patient tenderness, thoughtful devotion, and infinite solicitude, till the very end.