Part 17 (2/2)
”Edinburgh, 20th of August, 1776.
”Although I am certainly within a few weeks, dear Madame, and perhaps within a few days, of my own death, I could not forbear being struck with the death of the Prince of Conti--so great a loss in every particular. My reflection carried me immediately to your situation in this melancholy incident. What a difference to you in your whole plan of life! Pray write me some particulars, but in such terms that you need not care, in case of my decease, into whose hands your letter may fall.... My distemper is a diarrhoea or disorder in my bowels, which has been gradually undermining me for these two years, but within these six months has been visibly hastening me to my end. I see death approach gradually, without any anxiety or regret. I salute you with great affection and regard, for the last time.
”David Hume.”
Hume died five days after this letter was written.
The last years of her life she spent with her daughter-in-law, at Auteuil, where she lived a happy life and received the best society of Paris. When she died or under what circ.u.mstances is not known. During the Revolution she lived in obscurity, busying herself with charitable work; she was one of the few women of the n.o.bility to escape the guillotine, ”This woman, who had kept the intellectual world alive with her _esprit_ and goodness, of a sudden vanishes like a star from the horizon; she lives on, unnoticed by everyone, and, in that new society, no one misses her or regrets her death.”
In order to fully appreciate the mistress of the eighteenth century, her power and influence, her rise to popularity and social standing, the general and accepted idea and nature of the sentiment called love must be explained; for it was to the peculiar development of that emotion that the mistress owed her fortune.
In the eighteenth century love became a theory, a cult; it developed a language of its own. In the preceding age love was declared, it spoke, it was a virtue of grandeur and generosity, of courage and delicacy, exacting all proofs of decency and gallantry, patient efforts, respect, vows, discretion, and reciprocal affection. The ideal was one of heroism, n.o.bleness, and bravery. In the eighteenth century this ideal became mere desire; love became voluptuousness, which was to be found in art, music, styles, fas.h.i.+ons--in everything. Woman herself was nothing more than the embodiment of voluptuousness; it made her what she was, directing and fas.h.i.+oning her. Every movement she made, every garment she wore, all the care she applied to her appearance--all breathed this _volupte_.
In paintings it was found in impure images, coquettish immodesties, in couples embraced in the midst of flowers, in scenes of tenderness: all these representations were hung in the rooms of young girls, above their beds. They grew up to know _volupte_, and, when old enough, they longed for it. It was useless for women to try to escape its power, and chast.i.ty naturally disappeared under these temptations. The young girl inherited the impure instincts of the mother, and, when matured, was ready and eager for all that could enchant and gratify the senses.
True domestic friends.h.i.+p and intimacy were rare, because the husband given to a young girl had pa.s.sed through a long list of mistresses, and talked--from experience--gallant confidences which took away the veil of illusion. She was immediately taken into society, where she became familiar with the spicy proverbs and the salty prologues of the theatre, where supposedly decent women were present, in curtained boxes. At the suppers and dinners, by songs and plays, at the gatherings where held forth Duclos and others like him, in the midst of champagne, _ivresse d'esprit_, and eloquence, she was taught and saw the corruption of society and marriage, the disrespect to modesty; in such an atmosphere all trace of innocence was destroyed. She was taught that faithfulness to a husband belonged only to the people, that it was an evidence of stupidity. Manners, customs, and even religion were against the preservation of innocence and purity; and in this depravity the abbes were the leaders.
Such conditions were dangerous and disastrous not to young girls only, they affected the young men also; the latter, amidst this social demoralization, developed their evil tendencies, and, in a few generations, there was formed a Paris completely debauched. Love meant nothing more elevated than desire; for man, the paramount idea was to have or possess; for woman, to capture. There was no longer any mystery, any secret; the lover left his carriage at the door of his love, as if to publish his good fortune; he regularly made his appearance at her house, at the hour of the toilette, at dinner and at all the fetes; the public announcement of the liaison was made at the theatre when he sat in her box.
There came a period when so-called love fell so low that woman no longer questioned a man's birth, rank, or condition, and vice versa, as long as he or she was in demand; a successful man had nearly every woman of prominence at his feet. The men planned their attacks upon the women whom they desired, and the women connived, posed, and set most ingenious traps and devised most extraordinary means to captivate their hero. As the century wore on and the vices and appet.i.tes gradually consumed the healthy tissues, there sprang up a cla.s.s of monsters, most accomplished _roues_, consummate leaders of theoretical and practical immorality, who were without conscience. To gain their ends, they manipulated every medium--valets, chambermaids, scandal, charity; their one object was to dishonor woman.
Women were no better; ”a natural falseness, an acquired dissimulation, a profound observation, a lie without flinching, a penetrating eye, a domination of the senses--to these they owed their faculties and qualities so much feared at the time, and which made them professional and consummate politicians and ministers. Along with their gallantry, they possessed a calmness, a tone of liberty, a cynicism; these were their weapons and deadly ones they were to the man at whom they were aimed.”
There were, in this century, superior women in whom was exhibited a high form of love, but who realized that perfect love was impossible in their age; yet they desired to be loved in an intense and legitimate manner. This phase of womanhood is well represented by Mlle. a.s.se and Mlle. de Lespina.s.se, both of whom felt an irresistible need of loving; they proclaimed their love and not only showed themselves to be capable of loving and of intense suffering, but proved themselves worthy of love which, in its highest form, they felt to be an unknown quant.i.ty at that time. Their love became a constant inspiration, a model of devotion, almost a transfiguration of pa.s.sion.
These women were products of the time; they had to be, to compensate for the general sterility and barrenness, to equalize the inequalities, and to pay the tribute of vice and debauch.
All the customs of the age were arrayed against pure womanhood and offered it nothing but temptation. Inasmuch as the husband belonged to court and to war more than to domestic felicity, he left his wife alone for long periods. The husbands themselves seemed actually to enjoy the infidelity of their wives and were often intimate friends of their wives' lovers; and it was no rare thing that when the wife found no pleasure in lovers, she did not concern herself about her husband's mistresses (unless they were intolerably disagreeable to her), often advising the mistress as to the best method of winning her husband.
It must be admitted that this separation in marriage, this reciprocity of liberty, this absolute tolerance, was not a phase of the eighteenth century marriage, but was the very character of it. In earlier times, in the sixteenth century, infidelity was counted as such and caused trouble in the household. If the husband abused his privileges, the wife was obliged to bear the insult in silence, being helpless to avenge it. If she imitated his actions, it was under the gravest dangers to her own life and that of her lover. The honor of the husband was closely attached to the virtue of the wife; thus, if he sought diversion elsewhere, and his wife fell victim to the fascinations of another, he was ridiculed. Marriage was but an external bond; in the eighteenth century, it was a bond only as long as husband and wife had affection for one another; when that no longer existed, they frankly told each other and sought that emotion elsewhere; they ceased to be lovers and became friends.
A very fertile source of so much unfaithfulness was the frequent marriage of a ruined n.o.bleman to a girl of fortune, but without rank.
Giving her his name was the only moral obligation; the marriage over and the dowry portion settled, he pursued his way, considering that he owed her no further duty. Very frequently, the husband, overcome by jealousy or humiliated by the low standard of his wife who injured or brought ridicule upon his name, would have her kidnapped and taken to a convent. This right was enjoyed by the husband in spite of the general liberty of woman. A letters-patent was obtained through proof of adultery, and the wife was imprisoned in some convent for the rest of her life, being deprived of her dowry which fell to her husband.
At one time, the great ambition of woman was to procure a legal separation--an ambition which seems to have developed into a fad, for at one period there were over three hundred applicants for legal separation, a state of affairs which so frightened Parliament that it pa.s.sed rigid laws. A striking contrast to this was the custom connected with mourning. At the death of the husband, the wife wore mourning, her entire establishment, with every article of interior furnis.h.i.+ng, was draped in the sombre hue; she no longer went out and her house was open only to relatives and those who came to pay visits of condolence. Unless she married again, she remained in mourning all her life; but it should not be understood that the veil concealed her coquetry or prevented her from enjoying her liberty and planning her future. Then, as to-day, there were many examples of fanaticism and folly; one widow would endeavor to commit suicide; another lived with the figure of her husband in wax; another conversed, for several hours of the day, with the shade of her husband; others consecrated themselves to the church.
This all-supreme sway of love and its attributes, left its impression and lasting effect upon the physiognomy of the mistress; in the early part of the century, the mistress was chosen from the respectable aristocracy and the n.o.bility; gradually, however, the limits of selection were extended until they included the _bourgeoisie_ and, finally, the offspring of the common _femme du peuple_. A woman from any profession, from any stratum of society, by her charm and intelligence, her original discoveries and inventions of debauch and licentiousness, could easily become the heroine of the day, the G.o.ddess of society, the goal and aspiration of the used-up _roues_ of the aristocracy. Under Louis XIV., such popularity was an impossibility to a woman of that sort, but society under the Regency seemed to have awakened from the torpor and gloom of the later years of the monarchy to a reign of unrestrained gayety and vice.
The first woman to infect the social atmosphere of the n.o.bility with a new form of extravagance and licentiousness was Adrienne Le Couvreur, who was the heroine of the day during the first years of the Regency.
She was the daughter of a hatter, who had gone to Paris about 1702; while employed as a laundress, she often gave proof of the possession of remarkable dramatic genius by her performances at private theatricals. In 1717, through the influence of the great actor Baron, she made her appearance at the Comedie Francaise; the reappearance of that favorite with Adrienne Le Couvreur as companion, in the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, reestablished the popularity of the French theatre. Adrienne immediately became a favorite with the t.i.tled cla.s.s, was frequently present at Mme. de Lambert's, gave the most sumptuous suppers herself, and was compelled to repulse lovers of the highest n.o.bility.
Her princ.i.p.al lovers were Voltaire, whom she nursed through smallpox, spending many hours in reading to him, and Maurice of Saxony; she had children of whom the latter was the father, and it was she who, by selling her plate and jewelry, supplied him with forty thousand francs in order to enable him to equip his soldiers when he proposed to recover the princ.i.p.ality of Courland. She was generous to prodigality; but when she died, the Church refused to grant consecrated ground for the reception of her remains, although it condescended to accept her munificent gift of a hundred thousand francs to charity. Her death was said to have been caused by her rival, the d.u.c.h.esse de Bouillon, by means of poisoned pastilles administered by a young abbe. In the night, her body was carried by two street porters to the Rue de Bourgogne, where it was buried. Voltaire, in great indignation at such injustice, wrote his stinging poem _La Mort de Mademoiselle Le Couvreur_, which was the cause of his being again obliged to leave Paris.
The popularity of the Comedie Francaise declined after the deaths of Baron and Adrienne Le Couvreur, until the appearance of Mlle. Clairon, who was one of the greatest actresses of France. Born in Flanders in 1723, at a very early age she had wandered about the provinces, from theatre to theatre, with itinerant troupes, winning a great reputation at Rouen. In 1738 the leading actresses were Mlle. Quinault, who had retired to enjoy her immense fortune in private life, and Mlle.
Dumesnil, the great _tragedienne_. When Mlle. Clairon received an offer to play alternately with the favorite, Mlle. Dumesnil, she selected as her opening part _Phedre_, the _role de triomphe_ of her rival.
The appearance of a debutante was an event, and its announcement brought out a large crowd; the presumption of a provincial artist in selecting a role in which to rival a great favorite had excited general ridicule, and an unusually large audience had a.s.sembled, expecting to witness an ignominious failure. Mlle. Clairon's stately figure, the dignity and grace of her carriage, ”her finely chiselled features, her n.o.ble brow, her air of command, her clear, deep, impa.s.sioned voice,” made an immediate impression upon the audience.
She was unanimously acknowledged as superior to Mlle. Dumesnil, and the entire social and literary world hastened to do her homage.
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