Part 9
But all these flaws were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed, pretty to observe how, being the keenest sighted of women, she occasionally sees things that she will not see. Thus, she writes of her daughter’s boasted style, “It is perfect. All you have to do is to keep it as it is and not try to improve it.” Or of her attitude towards herself. “Somebody said the other day that, with all the tender affection you have for me, you don’t get as much out of my society as you might, that you do not appreciate what I am worth, even as regards you.”
For the most part, however, it is a sweet, warm tempest of praise, an indigestion of praise, touchingly at variance with the chilly judgment of those who looked on. Madame de Grignan has not only the choicest of intellects, but the tenderest of hearts. She has a stoical, old Roman virtue which the vulgar may mistake for indifference; but underneath she is so surprisingly sensitive that every precaution is necessary to guard her too delicate nerves from intolerable shock. She thinks loftily, she speaks wittily, and her letters are the quintessence of everything finished and exquisite, so different from the hasty and careless scrawls of this scribbling mother, though, to be sure, good judges have found ours, also, not unworthy of commendation. And some, who do not believe that a love that takes us out of ourselves is the best worth having of all things in this loveless world, may think such a degree of self-deception puerile. It is a little unusual, at any rate.
Such a love, in a universe of cross accidents and unforeseen contingencies, is always shot through and through with misery. This woman, so poised and tempered in all that concerned herself and the common course of life, dwelt in a cloud of anxiety for what concerned the welfare of her precious daughter. It was worry, worry from morning till night. In far Provence, where the treasure and her husband and children lived, what disasters might not occur, while the sun was shining and wit sparkling in jovial Paris? With the lovely inconsistency of love, the mother declares at one moment that her passion is all joy and the delight of it far, far outweighs the care and trouble, at the next that life is only wretchedness for those who have a great devotion. “The mind should be at peace,” she says; “but the heart debauches it perpetually. Mine is filled full with my daughter.” She frets over great things and little, Madame de Grignan’s children, Madame de Grignan’s debts, Madame de Grignan’s lawsuits, above all over Madame de Grignan’s health. The daughter was, apparently, one of those persons who are never ill and never well. And the doting mother, at five hundred miles distance, is always suggesting drugs, draughts, plasters, poultices, doctors, doctor’s devices, and devices of the devil.
Also, in the rare intervals when they were together, she suggested to the same effect, and in consequence such sojourns were not happy. I know few things more tragic than this vast affection, longing, longing to be with its object, and when they did meet, thwarted, hampered, blighted by that fatal inadequacy of human contact which makes love’s fine fruition a joy not of this transitory world. We have, of course, little record of things actually done or said while the lover and the beloved were together. But we have the piteous cry of the bereaved one when they had felt themselves compelled to part. “Was it a crime for me to be anxious about your health? I saw you perishing before my eyes, and I was not permitted to shed a tear. I was killing you, they said, I was murdering you. I must keep still, if I suffocated. I never knew a more ingenious and cruel torment.” Or again, “In God’s name, child, let us try another visit to reëstablish our reputation. We must be more reasonable, at least you must, and not give them occasion to say, ‘You simply kill one another.’” With what a strangling clutch does she tear at her heart, in the effort to make those adjustments of human passion which can never be perfectly made by flesh and blood. “You speak like one who is even further from me than I thought, who has wholly forgotten me, who no longer understands the measure of my attachment, nor the tenderness of my heart, who knows no longer the devotion I have for her, nor that natural weakness and bent to tears which have been an object of mocking to your philosophic firmness.”
But it makes no difference. In spite of presence, or absence, or indifference, the old wound keeps still and always fresh and bleeding. Still, still the longing heart cries out for what it needs, even if it can never obtain it. “How is it that my whole life turns on one sole thought and everything else appears to me to be nothing?” Only God can comfort her. “Everything must be given up for God, and I will do it, and will only wonder at His ways, who, when all things seem as if they should be well with us, opens great gulfs which swallow the whole good of life, a separation which wounds my heart every hour of the day and far more hours of the night than sense or reason would.”
Thus, you see, this sweet and noble lady, whose robust strength it seems as if we might all envy, also carried her burden of spiritual grief. Assuredly she is the more charming for it. As she herself said: “In the midst of all my moralizing, I keep a good share of the frailty of humanity.” Thank God, she did!
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
CHRONOLOGY
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond. Born 1697. Married Marquis du Deffand August 2, 1718. Friendship with Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse 1754-1764. Met Horace Walpole 1765. Died October 24, 1780.
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
We know her intimately through her multitude of letters, but we know her only as a blind, infirm old woman, dependent on the kindness of others for amusement, if not for support, and ready to depart at any time from the well-worn and tedious spectacle of flavorless existence, if it had not been for her utter uncertainty as to the world that lay beyond.
She had been very young, however, very young and very gay, as traditions tell us. Born into the most dissipated period of French social life, the regency of the first half of the eighteenth century, she was conspicuous for her charm and wit as well as for the irregularity of her conduct. She is said to have been loved by the regent himself. In any case, she was most intimate with him and with his favorites, and turned that intimacy to advantage by securing a pension which was of solid value to her in later life. She fascinated others besides the wicked. The great preacher, Massillon, was summoned by her friends to convert her in early youth. He talked with her very freely, but would make no comment except that she was charming, and when asked to prescribe for her case would suggest nothing but a five-cent catechism.
She was married for convenience, but most inconveniently to her and her husband both. Either he was too fast for her, or too slow, at any rate he was too dull. She left him, and returned to him, and left him again, and was adrift in the wide world.
It is important to note that with Madame du Deffand, as with some other French women, extreme freedom of living is quite compatible not only with great refinement of taste, but with a singular delicacy and sensitiveness of moral perception. She has an occasional coarseness of speech belonging to her age, but few people have been more alive to fine shades of affection, of devotion, of spiritual tact.
Nevertheless, her early life must be remembered, if we would understand her later. She herself says, “Oh, I should not want to be young again on condition of being brought up as I was, living with the people I lived with, and having the sort of mind and character I have.” Dissipation, even less innocent than hers, disorders life, strips it of illusion, takes away utterly and forever the charm of simple things.
With Madame du Deffand, at any rate, there was no illusion left, and in her gray old age the charm of simple things was gone and of complex also. If she could have detailed her chill philosophy to Rosalind, that child of dawn would have cried out even more than to the curious Jacques, “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.” To this disillusioned lady the men and women of the age she lived in were either cynics or pedants, they were bold without force and licentious without merriment, they had little talent and a vast deal of presumption. But as far as her thought and her reading and her knowledge went, the men and women of other times were little better. Most were either fools or knaves and the few who were not were so painfully conscious of it that living with them was more of a burden than with the others. She has words more bitterly acrid than even La Rochefoucauld’s to designate the folly and emptiness and wickedness of life. “I do not know why Diogenes went looking for a man: nothing could happen to him worse than finding one.” And she sums it up in one terrible sentence. “For my part, I confess that I have but one fixed thought, one feeling, one misfortune, one regret, that ever I was born.”
As a general thing, however, her complaint is less violent than this and what impresses her in life is not so much its actual evil and misery as its intolerable ennui. I must ask the reader’s pardon for using the French word, which is, perhaps, by this time almost English. No equivalent exactly fits it. “Melancholy” suggests somewhat more of abstract reflection and “boredom” more of irritation with external circumstances. Both these are sometimes applicable, but one cannot get along without “ennui” in discussing Madame du Deffand.
This, then, is the deadly burden that life inflicts upon her. The great hours run by, immense, interminable, with nothing to fill them, nothing that inspires her, nothing that amuses her, nothing that distracts her even. The weary waste of time to come can be judged only by the barren memory of time past and that holds out neither encouragement nor hope. To be sure, she readily recognizes that the root of the trouble may be within. A certain lady fails to please her, “but she shared this misfortune with many others, for everything seems insupportable to me. This may very well be because I am insupportable myself.” Whatever the cause, the malady is always present and without cure. “I end because I am sad with no reason for sadness except that I exist.”
It might be supposed that, drifting always in such a dead fog of ennui, she might bore her correspondents, much more her readers among posterity. She does often. She would very much oftener, if she were not after all a Frenchwoman of the wittiest age of French social life, with the sparkle of French vivacity at the end of her pen. Feeble as she was, world-weary as she was, perhaps even in close connection with these conditions, she had an indomitable nervous energy, which responded in the most surprising way to social or spiritual stimulus. Horace Walpole speaks with admirable justice of her “Herculean weakness.” She found life dull. Yet out of the dulness she could weave the tissue of a correspondence with Voltaire in which the balance of brilliancy is not always on one side. Could we say more? She goes right to the fact in her letters, speaks vigorously, without tautology, or circumlocution. “I care nothing for perfection of style or even for finished politeness. I detest phrases and energy delights me.” With what verve and petulance does she express the emotion of the moment, grave or gay. “Quick, quick, quick, let me tell you about the supper of yesterday which worried me so for fear I should be dull, or crabbed, or embarrassed. Nothing of the sort. I never remember in all my life being younger, or gayer, or merrier.”
She had the sheer salt of French wit, too, could tell a story inimitably, or strike off a stinging epigram. It was she who created the well-known phrase in regard to St. Denis’s long perambulation with his head off: “It is the first step that costs”; she who said—untranslatably—of the verses that showered on Voltaire’s grave, that the great author had become “_la pâture des vers_”; she who remarked of one of her own friends that her wit was like a fine instrument always a-tuning and never played on. Above all, she could make inexhaustible mockery of her besetting evil. “Write disagreeably, if you like,” she urges. “As the man said of the rack, it will help me to pass an hour or two, at any rate.” And again, “I hear nothings, I speak nothings, I take interest in nothing, and from nothing to nothing I travel gently down the dull way which leads to becoming nothing.”
Thus the roses strewn over the abyss make it only deeper and blacker and more horrible. Others may take pleasure in her vivacity, may laugh at her stories and applaud her wit. She takes no pleasure and finds the applause and laughter utterly hollow. Man delights her not nor woman either. And still those interminable hours drag along, unfilled and unfillable as the sieves of the daughters of Danäus.
To be sure, when all these glittering analyses of nothing were written, she was old, and blind, and sleepless, three things that are apt to dull the quickest spirits. Before she was far past middle life her eyesight failed her and she became the frail, exquisite, touching figure that we see in her best-known portrait, sitting in a great straw-canopied chair, her _tonneau_, she called it, with fine, earnest, sensitive features, stretching out her hands in the groping gesture pathetically characteristic of her affliction. And loss of sight to eyes so keen must leave an appalling emptiness.
Also she was tormented by insomnia, to long, blind, empty days added solitary nights, when the tossing of weary limbs doubles the tossing of weary spirits. “One goes over and over in one’s mind everything that worries and distresses one; I have a gnawing worm which sleeps no more than I do; I reproach myself alone with all my troubles and it seems clear that I have brought them all upon myself.” At two A.M. such things do have a most intolerable clarity.
With afflictions like these, at seventy years old, it is perhaps not wonderful that a lone woman should feel she had had enough of life. Unfortunately Madame du Deffand’s weariness began when she was young and could see—too well. According to Mademoiselle Aïssé, after she and her husband had parted, she asked him to come back to her, desiring to reëstablish her position in the world. For six weeks things hobbled along. Then she became bored till she could endure it no further, and she made her state of mind so evident, not by ill-temper, but by all signs of depression, that the husband departed, this time for good and all. But who can depict her experiences better than herself? “I remember thinking in my youth that no one was happy but madmen, drunkards, and lovers.” And elsewhere she flings the facts at us like a glass of cold water in the face. “I was born melancholy. My gayety comes only by fits and they are growing rare enough.”
Those things which distract and divert most men and women, those great passions and little pleasures which to some of us seem to fill every cranny of life with business and delight, to her meant simply nothing. If we review them in their larger categories, we shall see her lay her cold, light finger on them and shrivel them up. It is not deliberate on her part. She would be glad to enjoy as others do. But she has not the power. “It is not my purpose to refuse happiness from anything. I leave open every door that seems to lead to pleasure; and if I could, I would bar those that let in sorrow and regret. But destiny or fortune has bereft me of the keys that open and close the mansion of my soul.”
Nature, the calmest, the most soothing of spiritual consolations? She has no place for it. As a scientific, intellectual pursuit, she blasts it with her savage, untranslatable epigram on Buffon: _“Il ne s’occupe que des bêtes; il faut l’être un peu soi-même pour se dévouer à une telle occupation._” As for the emotional, imaginative aspects of the natural world, she grudgingly confesses that she might enjoy them, if circumstances were favorable: “I am not insensible to natural and rural beauties, but one’s soul must be in a very gentle and peaceful mood to get much pleasure from them.” Her friend, Horace Walpole, can hardly be regarded as an ardent nature lover, he who wrote of general birdsong, “It is very disagreeable that the nightingales should sing but half a dozen songs, and the other beasts squall for two months together.” Yet to Madame du Deffand it seemed that even Walpole’s delight in country life was quite incomprehensible. “I cannot form any idea of the pleasures you taste in solitude and of the charm you find in inanimate objects.”
But the more human interests did not please her any better. Thought, learning, the long effort to understand the secret of life and the springs of human action? Will this dissipate ennui? Not hers. It only deadens it.
Politics? The movement of the world, wars, battles and sieges, deaths of illustrious princes and of unknown thousands? They move not her. High and mighty potencies seem to her perfectly trivial. “Let me whisper in your ear that I make precious little account of kings; their protestations, their retractations, their recriminations, their contradictions, I find them of no more moment than the mixing of a breakfast for my cat.” But if you think that at the other extreme she had any more sympathy with the people, just then at the point of striving so mightily, you are altogether mistaken. “From the Agrarian Law down to your monument, your lanterns, and your black flag, the people, with its joy, its anger, its applause, and its curses, is thoroughly odious to me.”
Then there is art, beauty of human creation, to some a resource so great that it overcomes not only tedium but even misery and acute suffering. To this lady with the dead heart beauty makes no appeal whatever. Her blindness of course cut her off from beauty of the eye to which she seldom if ever refers. But the ears of the blind are supposed to be doubly keen and indeed hers were so. Yet to the nerves behind the ears music was mainly a vexation. In one instance she does, indeed, find the harp delightful. This was her idea of delight: “The thought that one gets hold of nothing, that everything slips away and fails us, that one is alone in the universe and fears to go out of it: this is what occupied me during the music.” Do you wonder that she elsewhere writes, “To me music is a noise more importunate than agreeable.”
With literature the case is little better. Madame du Deffand knew well most of the French writers of her day and had little esteem for them or their works. Of earlier authors she thought more, but not much. La Fontaine occasionally made her smile. Corneille’s heroics enraptured her—for a moment. A minor comedy gives her extreme pleasure, in fact she weeps during the whole third act, and “they were not tears of bitter anguish, but tears of tender emotion.” Her usual state of mind is, however, better expressed in another passage: “Everything I read bores me; history, because I am totally incurious; essays, because they are half platitude and half affected originality; novels, because the love-making seems sentimental and the study of passion makes me unhappy.”
For a soul thus blasted by a dry wind from the barren places of this world it would seem as if the thought of another might offer irresistible attraction. It did, and Madame du Deffand is fascinating on the subject. She would like, oh, she would like to practice religion with fervor. She invites a confessor to dine, talks with him, and is quite encouraged. Why should not grace work a miracle for her as well as for others? She reads Saint François de Sales and finds a tender and winning spirit under his “mystical nonsense.” She regrets that he is dead. “He would have bored me considerably, but I should have loved him.” And in her long hours of insomnia she reflects upon the delightful possibility of believing and builds castles in Spain, or in heaven. “I should read sermons instead of novels, the Bible instead of fables, the Lives of the Saints instead of history, and I should be less bored, or no more, than with what I read now ... at least I should have an object to which I could offer all my sorrows and make the sacrifice of all my desires.”
But it is utterly futile, babble of children, dreams of white nuns bereft of all converse with the heart of man. She was the pupil of Voltaire, the mistress of the Regent, the friend of D’Alembert and Helvétius. To be the friend of these celebrities and of God also would have been too much. Therefore she believed in nothing whatever. Faith, she says, is a devout belief in what one does not understand. We must leave it to those who have it. I have it not. And what belief could overcome the colossal wretchedness of having been born? “Everything that exists is wretched, an angel, an oyster, perhaps even a grain of sand; nothingness, nothingness, what better can we have to pray for?” She did not originate, but she would gladly have accepted the bitter definition of life as “a nightmare between two nothings.”
Thus, you see, she missed, as so many do, the one great privilege of universal scepticism: universal hope. There are thousands who, like her, proclaim that they have no belief in anything, yet, like her, appear to have a most fervent belief in the devil and all his works.
It was natural that one isolated by blindness and unable to get pleasure from the resources of her own soul should turn to society, should try to draw life from constant contact with others who had more of it than she. In none was this restless desire ever more intense than in Madame du Deffand. She seeks people always, goes among them when she can, uses every effort to make them come to her. Her chief dread of poverty is that she may lose the means of attracting company. Even dull company seems to her more tolerable than her own thoughts. And as I have already pointed out, when she got among people, they enjoyed and admired her. She was quick, vivacious, brilliant, gave no sign of being bored, if she was so. Some of her words even make one suspect that she exaggerated her troubles and found more in life to please her than she would willingly confess. Hear what she says of a long projected and finally realized visit. “I have been here five weeks and I can say, with entire truth, that I have not been bored one single minute, have not had the smallest mishap or annoyance.” Surely the most contented of us can seldom say as much.
But the general tone of her social experience is much better manifested in one long passage, as remarkable for style as for self-revelation. “Men and women alike seemed to me machines on springs, which went, came, spoke, laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling. Everybody played a part from habit merely. One woman shook with laughter, another sneered at everything, another gabbled about everything. The men’s performance was no better. And I myself was swallowed up in the blackest of black thoughts. I reflected that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had dug for myself all the pits I had fallen into; that all my judgments had been false and rash, always too hasty; that I had never known any one perfectly; that I had never been known by any one either, and perhaps I did not know myself. One seeks everywhere for something to lean on. One is charmed with the hope of having found it: it turns out to be a dream which harsh facts scatter with a rude awakening.”