Volume II Part 23 (2/2)

Et toi, qui m'as choisi pour embellir ma vie, Doux rpos de mon coeur, aimable et tendre amie!

Toi, qui sais de nos champs admirer les beauts: Drobe toi, Doris! au luxe des cits, Aux arts dont tu jouis, au monde o tu sais plaire; Le printemps te rappelle au vallon solitaire; Heureux si prs de toi je chante son retour, Ses dons et ses plaisirs, la campagne et l'amour!

Sophie de la Briche, afterwards Madame d'Houdetot, was the daughter of a rich _fermier general_; and destined, of course, to a marriage de convenance, she was united very young to the Comte d'Houdetot, an officer of rank in the army; a man who was allowed by his friends to be _trs peu amiable_, and whom Madame d'Epinay, who hated him, called _vilain_, and _insupportable_. He was too good-natured to make his wife absolutely miserable, but _un bonheur faire mourir d'ennui_, was not exactly adapted to the disposition of Sophie; and there was no principle within, no restraint without, no support, no counsel, no example, to guide her conduct or guard her against temptation.

The power by which Madame d'Houdetot captivated the gay, handsome, dissipated Saint-Lambert, and kindled into a blaze the pa.s.sions or the imagination of Rousseau, was not that of beauty. Her face was plain and slightly marked with the small-pox; her eyes were not good; she was extremely short-sighted, which gave to her countenance and address an appearance of uncertainty and timidity; her figure was _mignonne_, and in all her movements there was an indescribable mixture of grace and awkwardness. The charm by which this woman seized and kept the hearts, not of lovers only, but of friends, was a character the very reverse of that of Madame du Chtelet, who would have deemed it an insult to be compared to her either in mind or beauty:--the absence of all _pretension_, all coquetry; the total surrender of her own feelings, thoughts, interests, where another was concerned; the frankness which verged on giddiness and imprudence; the temper which nothing could ruffle; the warm kindness which nothing could chill; the bounding spirit of gaiety, which nothing could subdue,--these qualities rendered Madame d'Houdetot an attaching and interesting creature, to the latest moment of her long life. ”Mon Dieu! que j'ai d'impatience de voir dix ans de plus sur la tte de cette femme!” exclaimed her sister-in-law, Madame d'Epinay, when she saw her at the age of twenty. But at the age of eighty, Madame d'Houdetot was just as much a child as ever,--”aussi vive, aussi enfant, aussi gaie, aussi distraite, aussi bonne et trs bonne;”[148] in spite of wrinkles, sorrows, and frailties, she retained, in extreme old age, the gaiety, the tenderness, the confiding simplicity, though not the innocence of early youth.

Her _liaison_ with Saint-Lambert continued fifty years, nor was she ever suspected of any other indiscretion. During this time he contrived to make her as wretched as a woman of her disposition could be made; and the elasticity of her spirits did not prevent her from being acutely sensible to pain, and alive to unkindness. Saint-Lambert, from being her lover, became her tyrant. He behaved with a peevish jealousy, a petulance, a bitterness, which sometimes drove her beyond the bounds of a woman's patience; and when ever this happened, the accommodating husband, M. d'Houdetot would interfere to reconcile the lovers, and plead for the recall of the offender.

When Saint-Lambert's health became utterly broken, she watched over him with a patient tenderness, unwearied by all his _exigeance_, and unprovoked by his detestable temper; he had a house near her's in the valley of Montmorenci, and lived on perfectly good terms with her husband. I must add one trait, which, however absurd, and scarcely credible, it may sound in our sober, English ears, is yet true. M. and Madame d'Houdetot gave a fte at Eaubonne, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage. Sophie was then nearly _seventy_, but played her part, as the heroine of the day, with all the grace and vivacity of seventeen. On this occasion, the lover and the husband chose, for the first time in their lives, to be jealous of each other, and exhibited, to the amus.e.m.e.nt and astonishment of the guests, a _scene_, which was for some time the talk of all Paris.

Saint-Lambert died in 1805. After his death, Madame d'Houdetot was seized with a sentimental _tendresse_ for M. Somariva,[149] and continued to send him bouquets and billets-doux to the end of her life.

She died about 1815.

To her singular power of charming, Madame d'Houdetot added talents of no common order, which, though never cultivated with any perseverance, now and then displayed, or rather _disclosed_ themselves unexpectedly, adding surprise to pleasure. She was a musician, a poetess, a wit;--but every thing, ”par la grce de Dieu,”--and as if unconsciously and involuntarily. All Saint-Lambert's poetry together is not worth the little song she composed for him on his departure for the army:--

L'Amant que j'adore, Prt me quitter, D'un instant encore Voudrait profiter: Felicit vaine!

Qu'on ne peut saisir, Trop prs de la peine Pour tre un plaisir![150]

It is to Madame d'Houdetot that Lord Byron alludes in a striking pa.s.sage of the third canto of Childe Harold, beginning

Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,[151] &c.

And _apropos_ to Rousseau, I shall merely observe, that there is, and can be but one opinion with regard to his conduct in the affair of Madame d'Houdetot: it was abominable. She thought, as every one who ever was connected with that man, found sooner or later, that he was all made up of genius and imagination, and as dest.i.tute of heart as of moral principle. I can never think of his character, but as of something at once admirable, portentous and shocking; the most great, most gifted, most wretched;--worst, meanest, maddest of mankind!

Madame du Chtelet and Madame d'Houdetot must for the present be deemed sufficient specimens of French poetical heroines;--it were easy to pursue the subject further, but it would lead to a field of discussion and ill.u.s.tration, which I would rather decline.[152]

Is it not singular that in a country which was the cradle, if not the birth-place of modern poetry and romance, the language, the literature, and the women, should be so essentially and incurably _prosaic_? The muse of French poetry never swept a lyre; she grinds a barrel-organ in her serious moods, and she sc.r.a.pes a fiddle in her lively ones; and as for the distinguished French women, whose memory and whose characters are blended with the literature, and connected with the great names of their country,--they are often admirable, and sometimes interesting; but with all their fascinations, their charms, their _esprit_, their _graces_, their _amabilit_, and their _sensibilit_, it was not in the power of the G.o.ds or their lovers to make them _poetical_.

FOOTNOTES:

[148] Mmoires et Lettres de Madame d'Epinay, tom. 1. p. 95.

[149] M. Somariva is well known to all who have visited Paris, for his fine collection of pictures, and particularly as the possessor of Canova's famous Magdalen.

[150] See Lady Morgan's France, and the Biographie Universelle.

[151] Stanza 77, and more particularly stanza 79.

[152] In one of Madame de Genlis' prettiest Tales--”Les preventions d'une femme,” there is the following observation, as full of truth as of feminine propriety. I trust that the principle it inculcates has been kept in view through the whole of this little work.

”Il y a plus de pudeur et de dignit dans la douce indulgence qui semble ignorer les anecdotes scandaleuses ou du moins, les revoquer en doute, que dans le ddain qui en retrace le souvenir, et qui s'rige publiquement en juge inflexible.”

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