Part 11 (1/2)
Her contemporaries knew her as a woman distinguished for her _esprit_, frank, playful and sprightly humor, irreproachable conduct, loyalty to her friends, and as an idolizer of her daughter; no one suspected that she would partake of the glory of our cla.s.sical authors--and she, less than any one. She had immortalized herself, without wis.h.i.+ng or knowing it, by an intimate correspondence which is, to-day, universally regarded as one of the most precious treasures and one of the most original monuments to French literature. To deceive the _ennui_ of absence, she wrote to her daughter all that she had in her heart and that came to her mind--what she did, wished to do, saw and learned, news of court, city, Brittany, army, everything--sadly or gayly, according to the subject, always with the most keen, ardent, delicate, and touching sentiments of tenderness and sympathy. She amuses, instructs, interests, moves to tears or laughter. All that pa.s.ses within or before her, pa.s.ses within and before us. If she depicts an object, we see it; if she relates an event, we are present at its occurrence; if she makes a character talk, we hear his words, see his gestures, and distinguish his accent. All is true, real, living: this is more than talent--it is enchantment. Generations pa.s.s away in turn; a single one, or, rather, a group escapes the general oblivion--the group of friends of Mme. de Sevigne.”
A woman with characteristics the very opposite of those of Mme.
de Sevigne, but who in some respects resembled her, was Mme. de La Fayette. Of her life, very little is to be said, except in regard to her lasting friends.h.i.+p and attachment for La Rochefoucauld. She was born in 1634, and, with Mme. de Sevigne, was probably the best educated among the great women of the seventeenth century. She was faithful to her husband, the Count of La Fayette, who, in 1665, took her to Paris, where she formed her lifelong attachment for the great La Rochefoucauld, and where she won immediate recognition for her exquisite politeness and as a woman with a large fund of common sense.
After her marriage, she seemed to have but one interest--La Rochefoucauld, just as that of Mme. de Maintenon was Louis XIV. and that of Mme. de Sevigne--her daughter. These three prominent women ill.u.s.trate remarkably well that predominant trait of French women--faithfulness to a chosen cause; each one of the three was vitally concerned in an enduring, a legitimate, and sincere attachment, which state of affairs gives a certain distinction to the society of the time of Louis XIV.
Mme. de La Fayette, like Mme. de Sevigne, possessed an exceptional talent for making and retaining friends. She kept aloof from intrigues, in fact, knew nothing about them, and consequently never schemed to use her favor at court for purposes of self-interest. Two qualities belonged to her more than to any of her contemporaries--an instinct which was superior to her reason, and a love of truth in all things.
Compared with those of Mme. de Rambouillet, it is said that her attainments were of a more solid nature; and while Mlle. de Scudery had greater brilliancy, Mme. de La Fayette had better judgment.
These qualities combined with an exquisite delicacy, fine sentiment, calmness, and depth of reason, the very basis of her nature, are reflected in her works. Sainte-Beuve says that ”her reason and experience cool her pa.s.sion and temper the ideal with the results of observation.” She was one of the very few women playing any role in French history who were endowed with all things necessary to happiness--fortune, reputation, talent, intimate and ideal friends.h.i.+p. Extremely sensitive to surroundings, she readily received impressions--a gift which was the source of a somewhat doubtful happiness.
In her later days, notwithstanding terrible suffering, she became more devout and exhibited an admirable resignation. A letter to Menage will show the mental and physical state reached by her in her last days: ”Although you forbid me to write to you, I wish, nevertheless, to tell you how truly affected I am by your friends.h.i.+p. I appreciate it as much as when I used to see it; it is dear to me for its own worth, it is dear to me because it is at present the only one I have. Time and old age have taken all my friends away from me.... I must tell you the state I am in. I am, first of all, a mortal divinity, and to an excess inconceivable; I have obstructions in my entrails--sad, inexpressible feelings; I have no spirit, no force--I cannot read or apply myself.
The slightest things affect me--a fly appears an elephant to me; that is my ordinary state.... I cannot believe that I can live long in this condition, and my life is too disagreeable to permit me to fear the end. I surrender myself to the will of G.o.d; He is the All-Powerful, and, from all sides, we must go to Him at last. They a.s.sure me that you are thinking seriously of your salvation, and I am very happy over it.”
There probably never existed a more ideal friends.h.i.+p between two French women, one more lasting, sincere, perfect in every way, than that of Mme. de Sevigne and Mme. de La Fayette. The major part of the information we possess regarding events in the life of Mme. de La Fayette is obtained from their letters. Said Mme. de Sevigne: ”Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friends.h.i.+p. Long habit had not made her merit stale to me--the flavor of it was always fresh and new.
I paid her many attentions, from the mere promptings of my affection, not because of the propriety by which, in friends.h.i.+ps, we are bound. I was a.s.sured, too, that I was her dearest consolation--which, for forty years past, had been the case.”
Shortly before her death, she wrote to Mme. de Sevigne: ”Here is what I have done since I wrote you last. I have had two attacks of fever; for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged twice; the day after the second time, I sit down at the table; oh, dear! I feel a pain in my heart--I do not want any soup. Have a little meat, then? No, I do not wish any. Well, you will have some fruit? I think I will. Very well, then, have some. I don't know--I think I will have some by and by. Let me have some soup and some chicken this evening.... Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken; I don't desire them. I am nauseated, I will go to bed--I prefer sleeping to eating. I go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep either. I call--I take a book--I close it. Day comes--I get up--I go to the window. It strikes four, five, six--I go to bed again, I doze until seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve--to no purpose, as yesterday.... I lay myself down in my bed, in the evening, to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay, I am in this state for three days and three nights. At present, I am getting some sleep again, but I still eat mechanically, horsewise--rubbing my mouth with vinegar. Otherwise, I am very well, and I haven't so much as a pain in my head.”
Her depressing melancholy kept her indoors a great deal; in fact, after 1683, after the death of the queen, who was one of her best friends, she was seldom seen at court. Mme. de Sevigne gives good reason for this in her letter:
”She had a mortal melancholy. Again, what absurdity! is she not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said; it needed that she should die to prove that she had good reason for not going out and for being melancholy. Her reins and her heart were all gone--was not that enough to cause those fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she without that divine reason which was her princ.i.p.al gift.”
Her liaison with La Rochefoucauld is the one delicate and tender point in her life, a relation that afforded her much happiness and finally completed the ruin of her health. M. d'Haussonville said: ”It is true that he took possession of her soul and intellect, little by little, so that the two beings, in the eyes of their contemporaries, were but one; for after his death (1680) she lived but an incomplete and mutilated existence.”
Some critics have ventured to p.r.o.nounce this liaison one of material love solely, others are convinced of its morality and pure friends.h.i.+p.
In favor of the latter view, M. d'Haussonville suggests the fact that Mme. de La Fayette was over thirty years of age when she became interested in La Rochefoucauld, and that at that age women rarely ally themselves with men from emotions of physical love merely. At that age it is reason that mutually attracts two beings; and this feeling was probably the predominant one in that case, because her entire career was one of the most extreme reserve, conservatism, good sense, and propriety. However, other proofs are brought forward to show that there was between the two a sort of moral marriage, so many examples of which are found in the seventeenth century between people of prominence, both of whom happened to have unhappy conjugal experiences.
French society, one must remember, was different from any in the world; it seems to have been a large family gathering, the members of which were as intimate, took as much interest in each other's affairs, showed as much sympathy for one another and partic.i.p.ated in each other's sorrows and pleasures, as though they were children of the same parents.
In his early days, La Rochefoucauld found it convenient, for selfish purposes, to simulate an ardent pa.s.sion for Mme. de Longueville, of which mention has been made in the chapter relating to Mme. de Longueville. In his later period, he had settled down to a normal mode of life and sought the friends.h.i.+p of a more reasonable and less pa.s.sionate woman. He himself said:
”When women have well-informed minds, I like their conversation better than that of men; you find, with them, a certain gentleness which is not met with among us; and it seems to me, besides, that they express themselves with greater clearness and that they give a more pleasant turn to the things they say.”
Mme. de La Fayette exercised a great influence upon La Rochefoucauld--an influence that was wholesome in every way. It was through her influential friends at court that he was helped into possession of his property, and it was she who maintained it for him.
As to his literary work (his _Maxims_), her influence over him was supposed to have somewhat modified his ideas on women and to have softened his tone in general. She wrote: ”He gave me wit, but I reformed his heart.” M. d'Haussonville has proved, without doubt, that her restraint modified many of his maxims that were tinged with the spirit of the commonplace and trivial. While Mme. de Sable--essentially a moralist and a deeply religious woman--was more of a companion to him, and though his maxims were, for the greater part, composed in her salon, Mme. de La Fayette, by her tenderness and judgment, tempered the tone of them before they reached the public.
Mme. de La Fayette will always be known, however, as the great novelist of the seventeenth century. Two novels, two stories, two historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M.
d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not reliable, because she was so often absent from court; also, in them she shows a tendency to avenge herself, in a way, upon Mme. de Maintenon, whose friend she was until the trouble between this lady and Mme. de Montespan occurred. The latter was the intimate friend of Mme. de La Fayette. As for her literary work proper, her desire to write was possibly encouraged, if not created, by her indulgence in the general fad of writing portraitures, in which she was especially successful in portraying Mme. de Sevigne. Her literary effort was, besides, a revolt of her own taste and sense against the pompous and inflated language of the novels of the day and against the great length of the development of the events and adventures in them. Thus, Mme. de La Fayette inaugurated a new style of novel; to show her influence, it will be well to consider the state of the Romanesque novel at the period of her writing.
In the beginning of the century, D'Urfe's novels were in vogue; these works were characterized by interminable developments, relieved by an infinite number of historical episodes. All characters, shepherds as well as n.o.blemen, expressed the same sentiments and in the same language. There was no pretension to truth in the portraying of manners and customs.--A reaction was natural and took the form of either a kind of parody or gross realism. These novels, of which _Francion_ and _Berger Extravagant_ were the best known, depicted shepherds of the Merovingian times, heroes of Persia and Rome, or procurers, scamps, and scoundrels; but no descriptions of the manners of decent people (_honnetes gens_) were to be found.
The novels of Mlle. de Scudery, while interesting as portraitures, are not thoroughly reliable in their representation of the sentiments and environment of the times; on the other hand, those of Mme. de La Fayette are impersonal--no one of the characters is recognizable; yet their atmosphere is that of the court of Louis XIV., and the language, never so correct as to be unnatural, is that used at the time. Her novels reflect perfectly the society of the court and the manner of life there. ”Thus,” says M. d'Haussonville, ”she was the first to produce a novel of observation and sentiment, the first to paint elegant manners as they really were.”
Her first production was _La Princesse de Montpensier_ (1662); in 1670, appeared _Zayde_, it was ostensibly the work of Segrais, her teacher and a writer much in vogue at the time; in 1678, _La Princesse de Cleves_, her masterpiece, stirred up one of the first real quarrels of literary criticism. For a long time after the appearance of that book, society was divided into two cla.s.ses--the pros and the cons. It was the most popular work of the period.
M. d'Haussonville says it is the first French novel which is an ill.u.s.tration of woman's ability to a.n.a.lyze the most subtile of human emotions. Mme. de La Fayette was, also, the first to elevate, in literature, the character of the husband who, until then, was a nonent.i.ty or a b.o.o.by; she makes of him a hero--sympathetic, n.o.ble, and dignified.
In no fict.i.tious tale before hers was love depicted with such rare delicacy and pathos. In her novel, _La Princesse de Cleves_, ”a novel of a married woman, we feel the woman who has loved and who knows what she is saying, for she, also, has struggled and suffered.” The writer confesses her weakness and leaves us witness of her virtue. All the soul struggles and interior combats represented in her work the auth.o.r.ess herself has experienced. As an example of this we cite the description of the sentiments of Mme. de Cleves when she realizes that her feeling toward one of the members of the court may develop into an emotion unworthy of her as a wife. She falls upon her knees and says: