Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Love in the Eighteenth Century

Love in the Eighteenth Century

(L’amour de dix-huitième siècle)

First Published, 1875.

Edmond de Goncourt

(1822–1896)

Jules de Goncourt

(1830–1870)

LONDON

ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS

1905

Table of Contents

Love in the Eighteenth Century

Cover Image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Le Verrou (The Bolt), 1778.

Love in the Eighteenth Century

Up to the time of the death of Louis XIV France gives one the impression of haying been endeavouring to exalt love to the rank of a deity. She seems to have looked on it as a speculative passion, a dogma enveloped in adoration which had an appearance of worship. She endows it with a sacred language that has all the subtlety of formula and peculiarity of expression devised or adopted by the devotees of a strict and zealous religious sect, full of outward observances. She hides as it were the substance of love behind a veil of sentiments that are unsubstantial—the body behind the veil of the soul.

Until the eighteenth century love speaks as if it had hardly anything to do with the senses; and it makes its declarations as earnestly as if it were a great and noble virtue, possessed only of courage and tenderness. It looks for careful study in the art of pleasing, delicate attentions, sighs of longing, patience, deference, vows, gratitude, and discretion—the strict observance, in fact, of all the proprieties of courtship. It insists upon earnest entreaty and thanks offered on bended knee, and surrounds its frailties with such apparent decorum, its greatest scandals with so majestical an air, that its imperfections, and even its most shameless actions, wear an appearance of refinement and exoneration. During these centuries love is raised to the level of an ideal; an ideal handed down to the fine feelings of France by chivalry; a heroic ideal which developed into an ideal of great dignity. What did this ideal become in the eighteenth century? In the time of Louis XV the ideal of love was nothing more nor less than Desire, and love itself was Voluptuousness.

Voluptuousness!—the eighteenth century in a word: it positively breathes it forth, and emits it like an odour; on voluptuousness it is nourished and quickened; it is its atmosphere and the breath of its life. In it the men and women of the century find their element, their inspiration, and their life; it is their guiding spirit; their hearts, their veins, their heads are pervaded by it; it casts a spell over their tastes, their habits, their manners, and their deeds. It flows from their mouths and from the works of their hands; it escapes from their inmost soul, and appears in all their outward acts. It hovers over society, and possesses it; it is its Genius and its Muse; it is the mark of all the fashions, and the peculiar characteristic of all the arts. Nothing remains of this time, nothing concerning woman survives in this century, which the spirit of voluptuousness has not either created or soiled with its touch, or preserved, like a relic of immortal beauty, in a perfume of Pleasure.

Woman, then, is voluptuousness personified. Voluptuousness clothes her, placing on her feet slippers to aid her in her mincing steps, and sprinkling in her hair a powder which shows forth, as through a mist, the features of her face, with its sparkling eyes and flashing smile. It lights up her cheeks with the delicate colour of the rose, enhancing the beauty of her complexion. It buries her arms in lace; it peeps over the top of her dress, subtly suggesting her whole body; it uncovers her throat, not only in the drawing-room in the evening, but even when out walking in the street, where she is to be seen, day by day and at all hours, invitingly ‘décolletée’ and redolent of that seduction of fair white skin which calls up to jaded town eyes images of fragrant flowers and shafts of sunlight.

Voluptuousness fashions the woman’s dress in all its details, and it enforces the adoption of that dress; design and pattern are created by it, and so cunningly adapted to the service of love that temptation is seen lurking even beneath the folds of its outer cloaks. By christening her smart clothes by such names as finery and frippery, it looks to strike man’s fancy and anticipate the desires of his senses.

Decked out thus by voluptuousness, the woman finds its image reflected on all sides of her, and sees its elegant shapes multiplying beneath her eyes as in a mirror-lined gallery. Voluptuousness sings, it smiles, and it makes its seductive power felt even in the inarticulate and ordinary surroundings of the woman’s private life—in the ornaments in her rooms, in the dim light of her bed-chamber, in the luxuriousness of her boudoir, in the softness of her silks, and in the shimmer of the black satin curtains of her bed, the canopy of which is a large mirror. It paints on the panels of her rooms pictures whose subjects are always of a happy nature, and seem to banish all sense of severity even in painting; and, surrounding her with the fragrance of amber, it makes her spend her days, dream, and wake up, in the midst of tenderness and seclusion, surrounded by furniture inviting languor and soft idleness, with sofas, couches, easy-chairs, on which she can prettily assume seemingly unstudied attitudes of weariness, her skirt caught up just enough to reveal a glimpse of an ankle or a dainty stocking. The imagination of all the craftsmen who work for women is a voluptuous imagination, and it finds its expression in all the luxuries created expressly for their pleasure. And when the woman leaves this dwelling where all is so tender and suggestive, so soothing, caressing, and clandestine, voluptuousness is at her heels, in the shape of one of those small carriages cunningly devised to reassure the timid, one of those ‘vis-à-vis’ in which the occupants sit face to face, breath mingling with breath, and knees touching knees.

And when she goes into society, the spirit of the time, hiding its cynicism under a mask of flattery, dins into her ears all the various sounds of gallantry—chitchat and lively gossip, quibbles, compliments and anecdotes, charades, and the conundrums in vogue at the moment—and makes as it were the echo of gallantry resound in her very soul. The spirit of the time besets her senses and arouses them at every hour of her life; it litters her dressing-table and fills her hands with books which it has inspired and applauded; bedside leaflets and trifling little volumes to pass the time; short stories in which allegory frolics gaily before a background of licentiousness, and dances, as it were, on an elegant dunghill; fairy-tales enlivened with all manner of looseness and coarseness; pictures of light manners; amorous fantasies, which resemble an Arabian Nights Entertainment conjured up in a strange Eastern land for the relief of the boredom of a Sultan of debauchery in his Parc-aux-Cerfs. In addition to this, she is surrounded by poetry which flatters and teases her; little verses that ring in her ear like a kiss of Dorat’s muse on the lips of the Goddess of Opera. It is Phyllis, always Phyllis, who is attacked, who does battle, who defends herself ill…from amorous glances, passionate utterances, soft words! ‘I invoke the poetic muse for my sport,’ says the Apollo of Marivaux. Mawkish verses, whose perfume rises to the head! Rondeaus of Marot touched up by Boucher; idylls of Deshoulières revived by Gentil-Bernard; poems in which the rhymes are linked together by a red ribbon, and the sentiment no stronger than the cooing of a dove! It is as though the eighteenth century, like a flower-girl paying homage to the Queen of France, were on its knees before the woman, holding out these turtle-doves to her in a basket of posies.

If the woman seat herself at the harpsichord to sing, this is the poetry she sings: it is ‘With these Shafts the God of Cythera,’ or ‘By a Kiss on Iris’ Lips…’ or ‘No, no, the God who calls up Love’…—songs found on every shelf, and relished by all, dedicated to the Dauphine; and the spirit of the time finds so little fault with them that the refrain of such a song as: ‘En blanc jupon, en blanc corset…’ is put into the mouth of Marie Antoinette.

And this universal voluptuousness, which breaks loose from inanimate no less than from living things, which mingles with the speech of men and women, rustles in their books, and vibrates in their music, and which is the voice, the note, and the essence of their life, is to be found in a more material shape and as it were embodied in the flesh, in the art of the time. The statue and the painting alike invite the woman’s notice by their provoking attractiveness and their diverting and piquant elegance. Out of a cloud of cupids there rises under the sculptor’s chisel or the brush of the painter a regular Olympus, fashioned in marble or pictured on canvas, coquettishness its only claim to divinity. In this century the nude has an appearance of being stripped of clothes, and the beautiful in art, being in this way deprived of modesty, calls to mind that little cupid of Fragonard, who, in the picture ‘The Stolen Garment,’ is seen laughingly making off with woman’s decency.

How ribald are these little pictures! How obscene are the ideas of old mythology here called up! These ‘Nymphs hesitating on a Scruple of Conscience!’ these ‘Mystic See-saws!’ How shameless are the witty pages that came from the hands of the great Baudoin and the little Queverdo, from Freudeberg, Lavreince, and the thousand and one masters who knew so well how to lay bare Collé’s ideas in miniatures after the manner of Correggio! And these ideas are embodied by the engraver with his skilful pen, ready for any naughtiness, in prints and engravings which are sold publicly, and which find their way into the most respectable houses. They find a place even on the walls of a young girl’s room, above her bed, to watch over her as she sleeps—these unclean fantasies, these playful obscenities, these amorous pairs entwined with garlands of flowers, these scenes of tenderness, imposture, and surprise—and at the foot of these prints the engraver often puts some ingenuous title, which only seems to show up the more the real nature of the sport depicted.

What manner of resistance could woman offer to this voluptuousness which she breathed in on all sides and which appealed to all her senses? It might well be asked whether the century, assailing her as it did with all these temptations, did not in mercy leave her that last virtue of her sex—her bodily purity, her chastity—to aid her in combating and overcoming them.

The answer to such a question can only be that the chastity known to the women of a later date was entirely foreign to the nature of the women of the eighteenth century. It was at that time a virtue of little delicacy, treated with but little respect, and it remained in a crude state, when it was not lost altogether amid the mass of impulses, sensations, and disclosures to which the eighteenth century submitted it. The morals of the people, no matter what their rank, were characterised by a certain artlessness, a freedom, and a frank coarseness which could not but have a degenerating effect. Since chastity played no part in the pleasures of society, the virtue was not only not taught to the woman, but she was hardly even given a chance of preserving any instinct of purity that she may have possessed. A girl on the verge of womanhood would always be treated as though she, were still a child, and allowed to romp at will with men; they would often be allowed even to lace up her bodice, and no more be thought of it than of a game. Thus, in one of Cochin’s engravings, a man is shown taking a young woman’s measurements under her clothing. After her marriage the woman would receive her friends in bed, .or when at her toilet, where immodesty would be considered a grace, and openness would degenerate into shamelessness. In words still warm from the lips of outspoken Molière—expressive words, and full of colour, but entirely lacking in delicacy—the vivid sayings of the time would be borne freely to her ears in the echoes of idle gossip and in the lively chatter of her parents. Her reading was hardly less free from levity. Portfolios of questionable matter, Maranzakiniana, written at the suggestion of some great lady by Grécourt, were passed from hand to hand; ‘La Pucelle’ lay openly on her table, and the most self-respecting of women did not conceal the fact that they had read it, nor did they blush to quote from it. Did the woman, in spite of all this, preserve the purity of her soul? The husband of the time, as his memoirs depict him, was hardly the man to leave her any such solace. His manner towards that side of the character of his wife, whom he moulded to be as docile as a mistress, was most cavalier; and if he happened to have dined well he would gratuitously offer his friends a sight of her as she lay asleep, or when she was just awakening. And, moreover, if the woman had recourse to friendship, she found it in the company of some notorious woman like Madame d’Arty, whose gallant confidences and worldly conversation tore the veil from romantic illusions. She would go to see performances of improper plays at fashionable theatres; some such rollicking piece as ‘Truth in Wine,’ or even one of those prologues sullied with exhibitions of la Guimard, which decent women usually viewed from behind the bars of closed boxes. She went through the ‘lovely horrors’ of fashionable supper-parties, braving the licentious songs in the manner of Boufflers which were in vogue towards the end of the century. And then, to complete the removal of all prepossessions in favour of any lingering delicacy, Philosophy stepped in:—prevailed upon to sup with some notorious actress, at the table of a Quinault, in the riot of sayings of Duclos and of Lambert, amid paradoxical nonsense fuddled with champagne, wit and eloquence mingling in a fine drunken frenzy, the woman would hear her modesty spoken of as ‘a brave virtue, fastened on with pins!...’

It was, then, the combined attack of all these various forces—the absence of any difficulties in the way of meetings, the sights offered to the senses, the lack of respect on the part of the man, the corrupt state of the relationship of marriage and of society in general, and the promptings of nature itself—that gradually served to undermine woman’s innocency and tear to pieces even the last scraps which remained—that innocency which in the young girl is the frank candour that springs from her chastity; and in the wife, the purity that is begotten of her virtue. In the same way, when the time came for love to enter her thoughts, the woman found that she had no reserve of strength within her upon which she might call to aid her in checking its advances; she appealed in vain to the native purity of her body to defend itself and rebel against the temptations of the word ‘love’ and the images which it conjured up. And in the case of a wife neglected by her husband, how great was the effort soon required of her, if she would preserve what she imagined she still possessed of her moral purity, in the face of so many public examples of social laxity, in the face of so many men and women agreeing to live together without any rites save those of love or mere habit, and in the face of the recognition and sanction given by public opinion to such unions as those of Madame Bélot and the Président de Meinières, Hénault and Madame du Deffand, d’Alembert and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Madame de Marchais and M. d’Angivilliers, etc.—and even of Madame Lecomte and Watelet, whom no one seemed surprised to find together, even in the presence of strict Madame Necker!

Every facility is offered for wrongdoing and the manners, habits, and customs of the time all join in the conspiracy against the woman. Everything with which she comes into contact, all she handles and all she sees, tend to produce feebleness in her will and disturbance and enervation in her mind. Temptation rises up around her on all sides, not merely the temptation of the gross and material which disturbs the peace of her abuses, galls the natural desires of her fancy, and deprives her impulses of innocence, but that more subtle form of temptation—to be dreaded even by the purest and most virtuous—which touches the sensitive region of the soul and strikes at the heart, moving it gently with tender emotions such as bring tears to the eyes.

The eighteenth century will put the purest of women to the test of a spell of love that is redolent of freshness and of poetry—a temptation as it were on a level with their powers. The danger will not any longer appear in the shape of a man but of a child, and its seductiveness will be concealed beneath a childlike innocence. It will almost sport like a child on the knees of the woman, who, although she imagines that in scolding she is doing battle against the charm, will not in reality overcome it until she has once been wounded: just as in the old legend the little child who, drenched and wailing, knocked at the poet’s door, begging to be let in, when admitted, and seated by the fire, with his hands warmed by the poet’s, bent his cupid’s bow, and pierced the heart of his kind host.

The prayers, the tears, and the sufferings of a little child give us the whole history of Madame de Choiseul’s intimacy with little Louis, the musician—he who was so fine a player on the harpsichord, and whose character was so gentle and sensitive, and so interesting. She amuses herself with him, and dotes on him as on a plaything; her passion for him is such as a woman might have for her dog. Then, as the little man grows in intelligence and in ease and dignity of manner, and as his nature becomes gentler and more sensitive, there comes a day when he must needs defend himself from these infantine caresses, for which he is fast becoming too old. And then—no more happiness; indeed, loss of appetite! He finds he cannot eat. But he remains seated at Madame de Choiseul’s harpsichord, with his heart so full of sorrow, and looking such a picture of sadness, that she lets fall on his little head this tender word of comfort: ‘My dear child.’ At this the child in him breaks out; he bursts into tears, sobs, reproaches. He cries out to Madame de Choiseul that she no longer loves him, that she will not let him love her. He weeps, and is quiet; he bursts into tears afresh, and cries: ‘How can I prove to you that I love you?’ He tries to fling himself weeping, into her arms; but she has already fled to conceal her emotion and her tears; the poor little fellow, presenting, in his distress, the appearance of one bagging for the love of a mother or of a queen, is on his knees, striving to kiss the hem of her skirt. And how is it possible to refrain from pitying him and treating him indulgently in the days that follow? He falls ill of a fever, and, as he expresses it to the Abbé Barthélemy, ‘his heart sinks.’ He remains in a state of stupor, half contemplation, half adoration, his eyes frequently filling with tears, which he does his best to hide by going into another room. He draws near to Madame de Choiseul whenever he can, kisses everything she touches, and when checked by her reproachful glances, cries out in supplication: ‘What! Not even that?’ Such was the ingenuousness, such the ardour, such the artless audacity the child displayed in what seemed so natural a way with passion, but with true passion nevertheless—and in the end Madame de Choiseul takes up her pen to give expression to the cry of the woman of her time: ‘It is always well to love, no matter what the object.’ And, perhaps, she was nearer the truth than she knew when she wrote: ‘My amour with Louis is drawing to a close; it will end with his journey to Paris, and I send him thither at Easter; so, you see, I shall soon have nothing to do.’

But in the eighteenth century, side by side with little Louis, we come across older children, who more nearly threaten the husband’s prerogative. These are, indeed, not yet full-grown men, but they are on the borders of manhood, and in them the echo of the departing laughter of the child mingles with the first sigh of the man. The charm of the morning of life, the fire and the impatience of youth, its inconstancy and its giddiness—all are theirs. It is their time of life which renders them attractive—the age when, on giving up the duties of the page, they obtain the command of a Company; the age that covets a pretty mistress and a fine charger. They captivate by a mixture of frivolity and heroism; by the beauty of their skin, soft and white as a woman’s; by the splendour of the soldier’s uniform about to go through a baptism of fire. They joke and banter gaily at a woman’s dressing-table; and as she gazes on them her thoughts are already following them through the squadrons of the enemy, and into the heart of the fray; already she sees them climbing across the breach in the undermined wall with the courage of full-blown grenadiers. And at their departure, what woman does not whisper under her breath: ‘He is going away—he is going to fight, and perhaps to die!’—like Marmontel’s Belise listening to the farewell of the charming young officer: ‘I love you well, dear friend! Think of me a little when I am away: I give you my word that I will return faithful to my promise. If I am killed I shall not return, but my ring and my watch shall be brought to you…’

O you children, you youthful ones of the eighteenth century! there will appear at the end of the century, in Beaumarchais, a poet who will immortalise your loves and their dangers and fascinations; and, causing the tears of little Louis to drop on Lindor’s uniform, will leave us that image, at once so arch and so artless, in which the witcheries of the child, the young girl, the lad, and the man are united,—in a word, the fascinating Chérubin; the evil spirit of the budding youth of the eighteenth century!

Side by side with this danger, what dangers of another kind, for the woman’s virtue and honour, are concealed in the great change of attitude brought about in France by the eighteenth century towards matters of the heart; in the substitution of desire for love!

When the eighteenth century says: ‘I love you,’ it wishes to be understood to mean nothing more than: ‘I desire you.’ The only ambitions known to this new love, and the only moves in the game it plays, are, on the man’s side, to possess, and, on the woman’s, to delight. Capricious and vacillating, fickle, whimsical, and unquenchable, its part is played in the comedy of manners by a boisterously impudent and triumphant Cupid, who thus addresses the old love of the past:—‘Your lovers were but simpletons, who knew no better than to droop and pine away, to breathe forth sighs and whisper their sorrows to the neighbouring echoes. I have done away with echoes… “Come now,” say I, “I love you. What can you do for me? For time is precious, and men must be quickly dealt with.” My subjects never say: “I am dying”; none so alive as they. There is no longer any question of listlessness, timidity or of the “gentle martyr”—all that belongs to the insipid twaddle of the past. I do not send my subjects to sleep, I wake them up; they are so very much alive that they find no time to be tender; their very looks are desires, and instead of sighing they attack; they never ask for a favour—they take it: and that is as it should be.’

The century has embraced the ‘realities,’ it has restored ‘activity to the senses.’ Its boast is that it has done away with all exaggeration, sham, and affectation. With this new love there is no more mystery, no more dancing attendance out in the cold, disguised in wall-coloured cloaks. The lover wakes the quarter where his mistress lies with his lackeys’ loud double knock, and he leaves his carriage at the door to proclaim his good fortune. Secrecy and discretion are things of the past, and men learn to use no more of the latter than is wise for their own protection. We hear no more of ‘grand passion’ and ‘delicacy of feeling’—such phrases are pointed at with scorn. How this free and hardy ‘trooper’s’ love, as it was called, would gibe at an exhibition of love of the languishing kind, and especially at the stilted phraseology which was so strong a characteristic of the language of courtship in former times! What mockery is contained in the words ‘attachments based upon respect’ when applied to any of those unions in which lust takes the place of delight, and which, while they last, shock the society they disturb! Respect for the woman? No, indeed—sin, rather, for her charms; an object for man’s ridicule! To tell her at first sight that she is adored; to let her see plainly what an impression she has made; to launch a declaration at her head—where is the danger? Is it not a saying on everybody’s lips, is it not a fully attested fact, that a woman must be told that she is pretty three times, so that, at the first telling, she may thank you; at the second, believe you; and at the third, reward you? Initial difficulties being thus removed, the proprieties soon follow in their wake, and love makes the acquaintance for the first time of those friendly arrangements so cleverly called by Chamfort: ‘The exchange of two fancies, sealed by the touch of two pairs of lips’; a new kind of traffic, disguised under such euphemisms as a ‘short stay,’ a ‘passing fancy,’ an ‘experiment’; intimacies contracted with little inclination on either side, where the parties are content with the small amount of love they have to offer; unions of which the last day is foreseen on the first, and which are saved from any anxieties, or fear of jealousy, from boredom, vexation, or seriousness; engagements in which the mind is under no lasting obligation, and into which considerations of time do not enter at all. These unions have their beginning in the whispering of a few words into a woman’s ear, in a room full of people, by some pretty gentleman who, in the course of some sprightly banter, gains permission to come again—a permission readily and thoughtlessly granted. On the very next morning he pays her an informal visit, and, whilst idling by her dressing-table, he very soon surprises her, and touches her self-esteem, by his flattering remarks on her beauty in the morning. Then comes the sudden question: ‘Has she made her choice among her friends?’ followed by the pitiless ridiculing of all the men she has ever met. ‘Yet, here you are, a free woman,’ says he at his next visit; ‘what do you mean to do with this liberty?’ He speaks to her of the necessity of forfeiting her liberty when the proper time comes: ‘If you do not at that time give your heart freely, it will surrender itself of its own accord.’ And then he dwells on the advantage of finding a lover who shall be at the same time a guide and a friend, a sound adviser, and a man well versed in the ways of the world. Thereupon he declares himself, adding carelessly: ‘I should suit you well enough, if once freed from all these people who beset me.’ Meditating on the woman whom for a brief period he thus favours, he writes: ‘She invited me to pay her certain attentions, to show some cordiality; it would not have been fair to refuse her, so I fell in with her views. She wished, in order to add distinction to our little adventure, to take a small house: it hardly seemed worth while for the short time—a month at the most—which I was able to allow her; but, unbeknown to me. she took the house, and had it furnished too—most tastefully…’ And he goes on to describe the supper given there with such an air of mystery; a supper which would have been ‘tête-à-tête,’ had it not turned out that he had invited five people, and his lady five others. ‘I was courteous and attentive, and only stayed half-an-hour after the others left, long enough, however, to establish her in the fashion,’—and he adds that he can bid her farewell without fear of a single reproach. Now at this juncture he does not fail to talk of his good qualities, his fine manners, and the difference between him and other men: he boasts of the delicacy of feeling which he imagines he shows when, out of regard for the woman’s vanity, he allows it to be understood that it is he, and not she, who is abandoned; and he recounts, as the one noble deed of his life, how he shut himself up for three days on end, so that the woman, from whom in reality he was releasing himself, might enjoy the reputation of having broken off the intimacy. And should she exclaim against the impertinences with which he thus attempts to stupefy her, he will pay no attention to her cries and continue with: ‘Upon my word, the more I think of it, the more could I wish that for your own sake you might find someone like me.’ And when she declares that, if she had any intention of making a choice, she would only consider a union of a strong and lasting nature, ‘Really?’ says the pleasant fellow quickly, ‘If I thought that, I could almost be capable of doing a foolish thing: I could almost bring myself to be steady, and attach myself to you. My declaration is but ill expressed, I admit. It is the first I have ever made, for, up to now, my friends have spared me the first advances, But I know only too well that I am growing old...’ Upon this there comes a smile from the woman, who pardons him, and tows that, although she finds in him elegance and wit, an interesting person and a fine bearing, yet she would like to have a deeper knowledge of his character, and more intimate reasons for belief in his sentiments. To this the man may reply, with mock seriousness, that although he is the most sought after of all the men in France, and a little weary of the fashionable world and its exactions, yet in consideration of the fact that the matter may end in his being satisfactorily ‘settled,’ he is quite willing to grant the woman time to think it over—say twenty-four hours. ‘I believe that is quite fair; I have never granted so much before.’ And this agreement, which with little exaggeration is a fair specimen of the agreements of the time, ends with these words from the lover: ‘Indeed madam, I had not thought the matter between us so serious. It is true we pleased each other: you have done me the honour of finding me to your taste, and you, I must say, were from the first very much to mine. I have unfolded my ideas to you, and you have told me yours, while neither has made any mention of an enduring love. Had you spoken of such a love to me, I should have desired nothing better; but, as it is, I have looked upon the favours you have in your goodness bestowed on me as the outcome of a passing fancy; I have acted accordingly.’

The women lent themselves to this revolution in the state of love almost without resistance. They very soon lost their right to their former epithet of ‘the merciless.’ As soon as she entered the society of her time, and began to breathe its air, the woman quickly forgot the novels of la Calprenède, his ‘Pharamond,’ ‘Cassandra,’ or ‘Cleopatra,’ which filled the pockets of young girls of fifteen, and formed their ordinary reading—books which had helped to mould her heart and mind from her earliest days. The world by which she was surrounded, the force of example, the scoffs of her older and more experienced friends, soon removed any taste for, or remembrance of, the love stories of heroes. Their tardiness and their trembling vows, their noble vexations, their transports of joy on the bestowal of innocent favours, their delicate shades of feeling, and their fine sense of generosity and gallantry—all were blotted from her memory. She quickly lost all her romantic illusions; the tender reveries and soft languor by day, and the sleeplessness and fever of the night; the exquisite torment of first love which, on the days when the loved one (always, by the way, seen in the general reception-room) was away, tore from her such doleful sighs; and after the sighs an invocation of her ‘dear Pyramus’; then a soliloquy in which she calls herself ‘unhappy maiden’!—then fresh sighs, followed by more invocations, of the night, of her room, and the couch on which she lay—a grand Romance at which she played till daybreak. How was it possible for a girl to preserve a child’s imagination such as this, or to continue to be inflamed with such a playing at passion, in the midst of a people who cared only for the material and pleasant sides of the passions, rejecting their grandeur and strength, their ingenuous power of exaggeration and their tedious poetry? The woman sees on all sides those attributes which she had always thought were love’s excuse—its veils, its integrity, and its virtuousness—being hunted and torn to pieces by ridicule. The world teaches her by all its masters, by its multitude of voices and by its silent lessons, to understand that there is nothing but hollowness in fine words, nothing but foolery in fine sentiments. She sees modesty, virtue, and love being neglected as if they were no longer held to be sacred; she finds herself blushing at the .natural emotions of her heart, at the tender yearnings which had carried her young girl’s soul into the dreamland of old romances; and, with feelings of shame mingling in her mind with the fear of ridicule, she rids herself so thoroughly of the prejudices and sillinesses of her youth that, meeting again the lover of her convent days, the thought of whom had caused her for the first time such happiness and such a bashful confusion, she receives him with the playful air of a coquette, the saucy manner and the easy laugh of an entirely ‘finished’ woman. She would seem by her whole attitude to wish to make him understand the phrase of a young woman in Marivaux, who says: ‘I allow you to come back to my chains; but you will not be bored as in former times, and you will find me very good company.’

When the prejudices of youth and of the past had in this way been overridden, and the woman had become well practised in the art of coquetry, there remained very few scruples for her to cast away, and she was not far from the state of mind which, in the woman of the period, was inducive to an ardent search after that excitement which was called an ‘intrigue.’ Soon enough, dancing attendance on her when at her toilet, when out walking, or at the theatre, there was to be seen a man who became more attentive every day, and whom she asked to all the supper-parties to which she was invited; for in the first ‘affair’ the woman still bore a resemblance to an over-scrupulous young maiden who cannot bring herself to any decision at the end of a fortnight, and with whom a whole month is sometimes not enough for her overthrow. Yet an end would certainly come sooner or later: one night she would show herself in her box at the Opera with her cavalier in attendance, and would thus, in the way usually adopted by women of the world officially to introduce a lover to the public, proclaim her intimate relationship. But after a short time the inevitable disillusion would come; she would find that she had been deceived in her choice; she would fail to discover a sufficient number of those pleasing qualities which to her mind were necessary to bind her to the agreement upon which she had entered, and she would bid the man farewell in the same way as, a little earlier, we saw him bidding farewell to the woman. She would use to the young man with whom she thought she had been in love practically the same words as Madame d’Esparbès used to Lauzun, a man whose education was not quite completed: ‘Believe me, my young friend, the romantic man no longer prospers,—he only succeeds in making himself ridiculous. I have had a decided liking for you; it is not my fault if you have mistaken it for a grand passion and persuaded yourself that it would last for ever. What is it to you if this liking be gone, if I have looked favourably on another, or if I remain without a lover? You have many qualities to recommend you to woman’s fancy,—use your gifts for her pleasure, and be assured that the way to be happy and agreeable is to take advantage of the fact that the loss of one can always be repaired by another.’

They said good-bye as they had said good-day. They had been happy in ‘being possessed,’ and were equally happy in ‘being possessed no longer.’ Then a career of adventures began to unfold itself before the woman. She entered upon it by eagerly throwing herself into her new experiences, wallowing in them on her downward path, and in the end demanding love from freaks, whims, and fantasies, from everything, in fact, which deceives love, from everything which stupefies it and wears it away; she felt more flattered in engendering desire than respect; at one time she would be releasing, at another being released; and she would choose a lover as if he were a piece of fashionable furniture;—we seem to hear her heart’s true confession in the answer Gaussin gave when she was asked what she would do if her lover left her: ‘I would find another,’ said she. And, after all, who would think of asking more of her at this time, when a man really capable of love was so astonishing a rarity; at a time when a man of ‘simple country prepossessions’—a man, in a word, who asked for ‘true feeling’—was unheard of? It is openly admitted that at thirty a woman might be considered to have ‘drunk of every cup of shame,’ and that there ought to be nothing left for her to do but to wear her indecency with some show of elegance, to display an easy grace in her fall, and after her fall to exhibit a playfulness—possibly tender, at any rate genuine,—which might save her from entire degradation. The merest vestiges of dignity still remaining after a time of such utter self-neglectfulness would be the only substitute for chastity left her in her dissolute life.

Very soon, through this freedom from restraint and the changes brought about by it, the intrigues of the woman in this century followed the lines of the dissolute life of a man. Soon enough, in the phrase of one of her sex; she began ‘to enjoy the loss of her reputation.’ The women would keep up little establishments such as are kept by rakes, wherein to house their pleasure—establishments for which they would themselves do all the purchasing, for which they would themselves choose the doorkeeper, so that all within might be at their disposal and nothing hinder them from going to and fro, and, if they wished, deceiving even their lover.

The morality of the time looked with a lenient eye on these customs. It encouraged openness in intrigue and audacity in questionable behaviour by making its principles fall in with woman’s instincts. From out of the ideas then current, out of the reigning philosophy, out of the habits and general opinions which conspired against every possible kind of early prejudice, out of the great change in those spirits who, in any society of people, are wont to unsettle or transform moral truths, there arose a theory whose object was to ‘stretch’ the woman’s conscience, and lift her out of the ‘littlenesses’ of her sex. It formed entirely new rules for her honesty, and, as it were, unseated her honour, making it independent of her modesty, her worth, or her duty. The eighteenth century strove to free the woman from the so-called meagreness of a modest and seemly bearing. Instead of all the virtues up to that time imposed on her character and demanded of her nature, it asked no more of her than principles such as were held by a well-bred man.

At the same time, the man began to put before the woman an idea of happiness which should leave her no chains to break at a later time. He put before her a theory of love which is expounded with great clearness, and summed up in its title in the tale ‘Point de lendemain.’ There were, if we are to believe this new doctrine, no true engagements, philosophically speaking, ‘except such as are contracted with the public when we allow it to penetrate our secrets, and when we have been guilty of any indiscretions towards it.’ Beyond these there were only a few regrets, set off by a happy memory; but, in point of fact, pleasure had been enjoyed without any of the usual weariness, and without any of the anxiety and tyranny attendant on the conventionalities.

Convenient sophisms, ready excuses for scandal, and lessons in shamelessness float about at this time, and worming their way through the intellect to the heart, they gradually steal away all feelings of remorse from the woman, already, in the process of enlightenment, hardened and benumbed. And, moreover, she was encouraged in her readiness in giving way by the systems and the ideas which were propagated by the highest and most celebrated in the land—ideas and systems which were harboured in the souls of the greatest and in the natures of the most worthy. And the love promulgated by naturalism and materialism, professed by Helvetius before his marriage with Mademoiselle de Ligneville, and extolled by Buffon in his famous phrase: ‘The only side of love worth considering is the physical side’—bodily love ended in assuming the shape of a brutal passion, even on the part of the woman.

When, at the close of this new philosophy of love, we lift the veil of the century, we catch a glimpse of a little naked god, flying hither and thither, to whom masked worshippers pay court in the shade; and we discern vaguely the initiatory ceremonies, the mysteries, and the uniting bonds of secret brotherhoods, in a temple where, reminding us of Dorat’s tale, a statue of love turns round, and reveals to us the countenance of the god of the gardens. From the watchwords and countersigns of the associations, and from their rolls, we are able partially to understand their language. By studying the various societies, and in particular that of the ‘Anti-Formalists’—the enemies of any kind of form or ceremony, who used to meet once a month on a certain prearranged day—we are able gropingly to follow the thread of this strange freemasonry to its very heart, to the ‘Isle of Bliss’ itself. There we find a colony settled under the auspices of the grand order, the ‘Order of Bliss,’ which borrows all its forms, ceremonial, and dictionary of metaphor, its songs of welcome and its invocations to Saint Nicholas, from the language of the sea. Petty-Officer, Captain, Rear-Admiral, Vice-Admiral—such are the various grades of promotion held out to intending members, who, on admittance, promise to carry the anchor fast moored to their hearts; to contribute to the general happiness as far as in them lies; to work for the comfort and advantage of the men and women knighted by the order; to allow themselves to be led into the ‘Isle of Bliss,’ and to conduct other sailors thither when they themselves know the way. The society of the ‘Aphrodites,’ which bestowed on its male members names taken from the minerals, on its women names from the vegetable kingdom, was of a more secretive nature, more jealous of its grand mysteries and of its great oath, which was not disclosed even to probationary members. This society was in the habit of going about from one place to another, and it would often disband altogether for the purpose of purifying itself: it has, together with its secrets, now disappeared almost entirely. But of one other ‘society of bliss,’ that which was called by a name that clearly showed its nature—‘The Society of the Moment’—there remain to this day manuscripts giving the rules, a description of its characteristic signs of recognition, the register of members and their fancy names, a code, a formulary, and a constitution, from which we can gain some idea of the lengths to which the members in the higher ranks of society, following the custom of their age, would go in totally neglecting or removing those ideas of love with which until then the gallant had been wont to surround it in order that it might at least retain a certain politeness and diffidence, and even kindness.

Over against these societies of cynics, and at the other extremity of the ideas of the world of gallantry, there sprang up in one comer of high society a sect which advocated the banishment of desire from the region of love altogether. By a natural reaction from the excesses committed by sensual love, and the brutal passions of licentiousness, a few delicate souls, of a refined if not noble nature, were thrown back on platonic love. A group of men and women, half hidden in the discreet shadows of their salons; were gradually drawn back towards a state in which the emotions of the heart are spoken of in whispers, the region in which the spirit sighs forth its love—almost to a state of true tender-heartedness. This little world meditated on the idea of, and drew up plans for forming, an ‘Order of Perseverance,’ which should have a temple with three altars—one to Honour, another to Friendship, and the third to Humanity. Thus at the beginning of the century, when its earliest Excesses were at their height, we find that the court assembled round Sceaux had endeavoured to restore the goddess Astraea, and had lodged its protest against the supper-parties at the Palais-Royal in the shape of a discourse on its ideas of love, and by the institution of the romantic order of the Honey-Bee. ‘Tender-feeling’ is the name given to the new order, and several men and women of note attached themselves to it. Here and there, at considerable intervals, are revealed figures of people of lofty sentiments, Who claim to possess a peculiar delicacy in manners and principles and in all matters of tone and taste, and who, by the aid of traditions of the refined and graceful manners of the great century, are striving to keep alive as it were the parting flowers of chivalry in love. Amongst them are to be found the woman who refrains from painting her face in order that she may receive the homage of a passion that is wholly pure; the woman with pale cheeks and sentimental looks who, when stretched on her couch, seems to be made for being adored from afar and courted with reverence and respect. In this brotherhood we see Madame de Gourgues setting the fashion with the languishing grace of her indolent poses. By her side hovers that charming young cavalier, de Jaucourt, got up to be a woman’s dream of perfection, with his black eyes, his pale face, and his rough, unpowdered hair—the true hero of a touching romance. Cramful of ghost stories as he was, the century aptly called him by the name of ‘Moonshine,’ an epithet which seems exactly to portray him. He is the beau-ideal of the order; and he has but one rival, M. de Guines, a man who proclaimed so plainly, but at the same time in such reserved terms, and in so gallant a manner, his ‘spiritual’ affection for Madame de Montesson. It was but a small sect after all, and its attempt to restore love to its former state was but a fashionable movement. We cannot even be sure if its enthusiasm was genuine; and many are the doubts that arise with regard to the sincerity of the convictions of the adherents of this praiseworthy attempt on the part of Platonism in the midst of the eighteenth century when we see what was the end of the last of these platonic attachments: Madame de Montesson becoming the wife of the Duc d’Orleans, and M. de Guines, after absolutely renouncing his love, chosen through her influence to serve on an embassy.

He, however, who would wish to discover, with any degree of accuracy, the true nature of love in the eighteenth century—its normal features and general characteristics—must look beyond the region of the exaggerated and the exceptional traversed by every pamphleteer and satirist of the day, who always somewhat overstep the truth. The love of that time is by no means to be seen in its true colours in those flights of fancy and those extravagant pictures, nor will it be understood by studying those extreme cases in which chance meetings and attachments fostered on pure sentiment play an important part. Its nature lies in a certain easy compliance on the part of the woman, who, though she may be powerless; and though she may reserve the right of choice, enters, without any idea of constancy, upon a union which promises no permanence, desiring only that she may be carried away by the passionate impulse of the moment, by a mere ‘appetite’; it lies in that singular temperament, so often possessed by women, with which virtue seems to experience as great an incapability of existing as life itself, to the dying Fontenelle, seemed to experience; it lies in an inherent apathy, feebleness, and lack of control, and the note of these features is struck in the confession of the woman who wrote: ‘What was to be done? He and I were there together; we were living more or less in solitude; I saw him every day, and I saw no one else…’

Love in the eighteenth century finds its measure and its image in the woman of the period; it is not any greater, deeper, or more elevated. And what is this woman of the time? To be understood she must be questioned and studied. The essence of her nature and her typical qualities will be found, by deduction, in reconstituting her moral character and her physical constitution. The woman produced by the society of the eighteenth century differs little from the woman formed by the civilisation of the nineteenth. She is a Parisian—and a Parisian who has grown up in an atmosphere so exciting as prematurely to force her youth, to bring her body too soon to maturity, and to produce those languid and nervous constitutions which are forbidden the blessedness of healthy senses and a healthy temperament.

It seems that we shall not arrive at any final conclusion from considerations such as these. Let us then look into the heart of the woman: its instinctive impulses will be found to be similarly lacking in virility, warmth, and vehemence of feeling. She is not a woman whose whole being is ruled by the irresistible calls of a passion which, as it gradually reveals itself, charms her and lifts her in transport to offer herself on the altar of love. Her heart is kind and charitable; often enough, when the mood seizes it, pitying itself; happy in being gently stirred by tears, and giving itself up to meditative sentimentalism, to that pensive sadness which soothes like doleful music, heard in the distance. It is possessed far more by imagination than by passion, by ideas far more than by love. A looker-on, who observed the woman of the eighteenth century at close quarters, has not failed to remark on this. Galiani has said, and said truly: ‘The women of this time do not love with the heart, but with the head.’ Love throughout the whole century shows the signs of a curiosity and a waywardness of fancy which are purely intellectual. It seems to have meant to the woman an ardent search for happiness, or at any rate the keen pursuit of an imaginary pleasure; and while the visionary quality of it bewilders her, the want of it leaves her in anguish. Instead of affording her the satisfaction of sensual pleasure, and delighting her with voluptuous charms, love fills her with restlessness, and excites her into making experiment after experiment and venture after venture. As step by step she descends the paths of shame, it holds up before her the temptations of intellectual depravity, with illusions existing only in the imagination, and covert fancies that are born in the dreams of a mind at riot.

And it is this firing of ardour in the brain which has been the cause of the greatest exposures and the most violent frenzies—an ardour tempered by a motive in which sensuality plays no part, that of vanity. Often enough may women resist the attractions of a youthful Chérubin on his knees at their feet, and the winning qualities of a man whose person pleases from head to foot; they may be proof against the snares of familiarity, of intimate friendship, of beauty, strength, elegance, and even genius; proof, indeed, against all the manifold attractions by which man has ever been formidable to woman. But there is one kind of attraction against which they seem hardly to attempt to defend themselves, a fascination from which they seem to feel there is no escape—the man of fashion. Let such a one but present himself and they will hardly let him suffer the trouble of stooping to pick up the hearts thrown at his feet—to such depths does vanity under the name of love carry the woman of the time! Let a man of fashion present himself and they instantly deliver themselves into his hands; they help him with loving friendship, intriguing for him, using their influence on his behalf, and introducing him into the best society of the court. They take a pride in serving him, and ask no thanks for their service; they are as proud to be cast off as they were proud to be taken up; it is even on record that a circular letter, sent by Letorière on the same day to all the ladies with whom he was not yet acquainted, was hailed by them as a declaration of love. How different, by the way, is this from that time of elegant and graceful letter-writing, when the mother of Montcrif made so great a success with the delicate, loving pen which she borrowed from her gifted son. If this irresistible man, this man of fashion, should set himself to effect a conquest, he is soon to be seen crying mercy of the purest and most virtuous of women—even of those who until then had always maintained the peace of their happiness and their virtue in the face of every attempt and at all encounters. Madame de Tourvel herself would fall a victim to such a wooer!

If he bear the name of Richelieu, his career throughout the century will be as triumphant as that of a god. He will be woman’s idolised lord, and at sight of him modesty will have nothing but tears to show for itself! She will positively invite scandal, if only it be on his account; she will intrigue, simply for the glory of being submitted to exposure through him; there will be honour in the shame of his begetting. The coquette and the prude, the duchess and the princess—all alike will yield to him. The youth and beauty of the court of the Regent and of Louis XV will go out to meet him like women of the streets. Women will fight for him for passion’s sake, like men who fight in anger; and it will be on his behalf that Madame de Polignac and the Marquise de Nesle exchange pistol shots in the Bois de Boulogne. He will have mistresses who will aid him even in his acts of infidelity, their jealousy stifled by their desire to please; mistresses upon whom he can never heap too many indignities, and whose patience he can never tire. When he abuses them they kiss his hand; when he drives them away they come back. He will no longer count the portraits, the locks of hair, the rings and trinkets, and he will forget to whom they belong: they will lie jumbled together in his drawers, as they are jumbled in his memory. Every morning he awakens to homage; when he rises, prayers greet him from a heap of letters. They are thrown away unopened, with the words ‘Letters which I have not had time to read,’ scribbled over the superscription. At his death will be found five notes, with unbroken seals, all bearing the same date, from five great ladies, each begging an appointment of him for an hour of the night! Or it may be that he will deign to open them, and then, glancing hurriedly through them, he will yawn over the burning lines of supplication, and let them fall from his hands as a minister lets fall a petition.

And if not a Richelieu, then someone else. It matters little to the woman where this man comes from, or what his descent may be. His birth, his rank, and. even Ids calling, are to her but matters of small moment; if only he be embraced by fashion his attentions will be welcomed as an honour. He may be an actor or a singer, with the rouge of the theatre still on his cheeks; if he has scored a success he will be the man, a veritable conqueror. The ladies of the land, from the oldest to the youngest, will attempt to win his attentions by their appeals and supplications,, and will cast at his feet their friendly advances, their humility, and their gratitude. They will love him to the extent of shutting themselves up in their rooms; they will almost die for love of him, after the manner in which the Comtesse de Stainville loved Clairval They will force themselves upon his notice like the two marquises who publicly quarrelled in a box at the Comédie Italienne on Michu’s account. They will desire him with the shameless fury of the notorious Comtesse who called out before everybody: ‘After him, after him!’ or again with the fixity of purpose, the resolute infatuation, and the calm steadfastness of Madame de Jully, the sister-in-law of Madame d’Epinay. What a revelation there was in the words she let fall when—on her asking Madame d’Epinay to countenance her amours with Jélyotte and upon the latter exclaiming: ‘My dear sister, you must not think of it for a moment. What! a mere opera-singer, a man on whom all eyes are centred, and who could not in decency pass as your friend.…’—she replied: ‘Not so fast, if you please; I told you that I loved him, and you reply as if I had asked you if I were doing right in loving him.’

But the defilement attendant on disgrace was not. enough. It was reserved for the eighteenth century to commit further blasphemy and sacrilege against love, which had already come to mean the struggle of the man for mastery over the woman, by treating it as a comedy, with all the falsenesses and the pleasures and satisfactions of a comedy. Love became an affair of tactics, passion an art, tenderness a snare, desire itself a pretence, with the result that whatever vestiges remained at that time, either of moral scruples in the heart or of sincerity in the affections, were smothered under the wholesale mockery of burlesque.

It is in this mimic war, this game of love, and on this stage where passion makes a public exhibition of itself, that the century reveal, perhaps, its most characteristic qualities, its most secret resources, and, as it were, a genius for duplicity quite unlooked for in the French character. What great diplomatists, what great politicians, more cunning than Dubois and more insinuating than Bernis, are brought to light in the little band of men who made the seduction of women the whole purpose of their thoughts and the sole object of their lives, who made it, in fact, the ideal to which they devoted their careers! How much study, application, knowledge, thought, was brought to bear upon it! What a complete mastery of the art of the comedian! What genius in the various parts they played, and in their disguises, the recollection of which is preserved by Faublas, and which concealed M. de Custine so well that, attired like a hairdresser, he was able, without being recognised, to cut the hair of the woman with whom he was in love. What a union of the talents of the novelist and the strategist! Never does one of them make an attack upon a woman without first mapping out what he calls a plan of campaign, or without first passing a night in walking up and down and turning over the position in his mind like an author weaving a plot. And, when the attack has once begun, they continue to be to the end nothing but extraordinarily gifted comedians, resembling the books of the time, where there is no single expression of sentiment that is not either feigned or sham. All the effects they produce, all the steps they take, are governed by rule. If they desire to play a pathetic part they arrange beforehand the particular moment in which to swoon away. They know how to pass, by gradations of most remarkable delicacy, from respect to tenderness, from melancholy to delirium. They excel in the art of hiding a smile beneath a sigh, of writing what they do not feel, of putting .fire into words written, in reality, in cold blood, and of setting them down confusedly, as if under the influence of passion. They have at their command looks, gestures, and cries of love which seem spontaneous, but which they have carefully thought out beforehand in their closets. They are so clever in making their emotion seem to tremble in their words and in their voices, in causing their speech to sound as though it came from the soul, and to such an extent have they acquired artificial feelings by continual practice, that they speak like men really in love, and their hearts seem to be actually breaking as they make their declarations. ‘Do not leave out anything’ is the motto of one of these men; and, in truth, they do not forget anything that may cause the woman’s feelings to thrill or captivate her mind; anything that may move her to a state of lassitude and enervation, and touch the most delicate fibres of her being.

In calculating their chances, they take into consideration the very atmosphere in which they envelop the woman—an atmosphere of relaxation, which laps her senses in the soft air of a rainy day or in the melancholy and languorousness of a grey twilight. They are precise, exact, assiduous. They not only keep the woman in view, but, in order that they may play their part well from the first scene to the last, they also keep themselves in view. Above all, their desire is that they may satisfy and applaud themselves; they are prouder to carry through their part and remain content with themselves, than content with the woman; for in time these virtuosi in the art of seduction have succeeded in introducing into their play an artistic egoism. They have done more: they have brought to it the conscientious attention to details of the true comedian. There are some who, in order to complete the illusion, and to aid them in calling up troublous emotions, adapt their faces to the lie of their whole person, who paint and bedaub themselves, who powder their hair, and even make themselves pale by going without wine. And there are even some men who, before going to some important rendezvous, will put despair on their faces as one puts on rouge; with a mixture of gum and water they will leave on their cheeks the marks of unwiped tears!

Others will go more directly to the point. From the day when man found that in order to please he need no longer be amorous, he came to think that in urgent cases he need not even be decently agreeable. With this thought, woman’s last scrap of honour fell to the ground, dragging with it the respect which had surrounded her; and outrage no longer caused love any shame. Insolence and abuse, which took her unawares, became the order of the day; and the man who used the woman in this way was not written down as base or infamous, but, on the contrary, if he were successful, he won for himself a certain kind of glory. The woman herself even, no matter how brutally insulted, could find a flattering humiliation in these vile methods of seducement. What rough assaults did she not pardon, and how extraordinary are those attachments, often, indeed, of a lasting nature, which had a hasty beginning in a coach whose driver was very careful to go the longest way round, to turn a deaf ear, and let his horses trot slowly! ‘An adventure…the sort of thing one hears of every day…a mere trifle,’ is all the world says on the day after one of these brazen feats. Did not outrage also found a school among the nobler ranks? One day it even dared to lay hold of the robe of the Queen of France; and against one victim, against one Lauzun hunted down, you may, from the confessions of the century, reckon all the happy heroes of escapade.

Passing from triumph to triumph, from cynical refinement to fastidious impurity, these brutal gallants ended by adopting certain principles, by embracing a sort of philosophy, and by finding a means of palliation. They made a learned theory of the art of seizing the moment; and ready wits there were who were capable of deciding that at bottom a bold man showed the woman a greater consideration than a timid man, and respected her feelings more thoroughly, in that he spared her the protracted torture of granting concession after concession, and the shame of feeling that she might fail, and of saying so to herself with useless iteration.

But there is one form of conquest especially coveted by the man, and deemed superior to all others, and that is the conquest through the mind. It is in this that past masters in the art of winning find an ever-fresh source of entertainment and experience the joys of thorough dominion over the woman, finding themselves surfeited by the constant practice of, and the success always attendant on, acts of violence and of outrage, and on acts of deceit which appealed only to the senses, they wagered that they would find a way to the woman’s heart without even attempting to touch her and that they would absolutely subdue her without addressing themselves for one moment to her feelings. It is her head, and only her head, which they will work upon and disturb; they will cram it with capriciousness and temptation until they have brought her whole body into a state of unexpected and almost involuntary complaisance. To such men, a ‘tête-à-tête’ meant a struggle; a struggle without violence, it is true, but entirely pitiless, and one out of which the woman was to emerge completely humiliated by their intellect, tamed and subdued by the superior excellence of their powers of duplicity,—in no way a loving woman, but a conquered one. Only grant them an interview, only give them an opportunity for a conversation, and they seem, in their attack on the woman, to combine the cool head of a hunter with the correct eye of a captain. They will persecute her, tease her, belabour her with phrase after phrase, with words on words; they will beat down one defence after another, and, having quietly narrowed the circle of attack, will press her hard, bring her to a stand, overpower her, until at length, at the end of the conversation, they hold her quivering in their hand, her heart beating breathlessly like a bird caught in its flight. It is an almost appalling sight to see them gaining the mastery over a flirt or a thoughtless girl by means of their effrontery and their chaff. Hark at them! observe their wonderful manoeuvring! Never have impudent ideas been do prettily wrapped up in such circumspect terms. Out of regard for the lady of the dialogue they place hardly anything between their thoughts and their words but a shimmer of equivocation, a thin veil, which is not unlike the fine silk of the morning-gowns in which, in country houses, men would visit the ladies in their rooms.

At the outset the man apologises for being tiresome, pretending that he is afraid he disturbs a lady who is busy; while, in his heart, he considers her a fortunate woman, he makes a show of refusing to admit it; then does admit it, and demands the secret of her good fortune, for he is bashful on the subject; he arouses her curiosity about some other woman of his acquaintance, and describes her minutely from head to foot; he is careful in the indiscretions he commits, as if he were half afraid, pledging himself to discretion in the future by his reticence. He talks philosophically of forgetting, and mentions the name of a woman who recently was forced to remind him that he had once loved her dearly; he protests that he respects her, and at the same moment fails to do so; he is amazed at the lovers the world has given to the woman with whom he is speaking, and proceeds to give as it were a limelight display of their peculiarities, and explains how great a difference there is between loving a woman and possessing her. He expatiates on the benefits of the modem philosophy; on the blessedness of having reached the stage in which humbug and all affectation of prudery in women have been done away with; on the advantage of that convenient arrangement whereby one can adopt a course when it pleases and neglect it when it bores, take it up again, and yet again neglect it, without ever getting on ill terms with anybody. He points out how greatly love has gained in ceasing to be a thing of exaggerations, in losing its grand air of virtue, in being quite simply that passing gleam, that momentary caprice, which was known as a ‘fondness’; and, by the tone in which he says all this, by the quaintness and freedom of the expressions he uses, by the superior smile which he casts over all these fancies, he succeeds in stupefying the woman so completely that a single bold stroke finds her unresisting. Such is the great art, and such its grand manner! It is a method of seduction truly flattering to the vanity of the man who, throughout the whole of his short-lived intrigue, has had recourse only to the intellect for means of attack and defence. If the man but preserve his ironical spirit to the end, if he but keep a tinge of irrelevance even for his avowal, he will enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the woman rouse herself from her state of abandonment with the shameful cry, ‘Tell me at least that you love me!’ so free has he kept from the least suggestion of tenderness. And even this declaration, which she asks of him that her degradation may be excused, he will refuse, gaily making fun of that sentimental fancy of hers which has come into her head so inopportunely, of the folly of a woman of intellect setting so much by such trifles, and of the unseemliness of asking him, in the position in which he now finds himself, for a confession which he has not needed to make in order to get there. The egoism and conceit of the man of the time finds its supreme satisfaction in withholding from love, or rather the apology for love, the word which is its last illusion and its last mark of respect.

It is at this stage that we begin to touch the bottom of the love of the eighteenth century, and to taste the bitterness of its intrigues and the poison that lurks beneath them. Does not this unwillingness to allow the woman an excuse in her own eyes, the brazen effrontery of this kind of courtship show the evil impulse of the pleasures of a society in its last stages of corruption? With such a tendency towards irony and ridicule, love very soon makes its point of honour, and finds. its gratification, in wickedness; and this wickedness is of so delicate, so exciting, so exquisite a nature that it finds its way to the very roots of the intercourse of the time. It is not enough for the coxcomb’s vanity that he ruin the woman’s reputation; he must be able to break off from her, saying lightly: ‘All is quite over between us—quite over.… I forced her to do homage to my merits! I have enjoyed very many pleasures with her, and I have left her, after putting her self-esteem out, of countenance.’ The prevailing idea of the time was to win a woman in so light a manner that she might be abandoned without question. There is one source of evil appetites open for the squire of dames, whence he seeks not only to dishonour, but also to torture the woman. To pursue his jesting to the point of wounding, to leave a scar where he set a kiss, and to allow what vestiges of remorse her weakness has left her to bleed to death, are forms of amusement which delight him. And as soon as ever the woman has become infatuated, and he has, to use the slang of the gallants of the day, ‘drained her by soft sawder,’ it is his pleasure to make up a jealous quarrel, and, on her attempting to clear herself, to fly into a passion, and leave her. A pitiless sport, in which, surrounded, one might almost say, with a charm which only revolts, is revealed the intellectual cruelty of the men of that time, and the depths to which their licentiousness carried them. What could be more caustic than to speak to a woman of a lover she has had, or whom she still has, at a moment when she would wish to forget him; to call to mind her obligations, so-called, when they no longer exist; to see her knit her brows and look severe, and her eyes fill with tears at the picture which he conjures up of the man who adores her and whom she is deceiving? Or again, should the woman have but recently buried the man whom she has loved, how charming a trick, after having exulted over her still fresh sorrow, to bring up the subject of the dead man, to deplore his loss, to say in a tender tone: ‘What a terrible thing for you!’ and to harass the poor, dismayed woman with her dead love’s ghost. Only after such trials does he feel that he has earned the right to her flattering compliment: ‘In truth, you are a singularly wicked man!’—and he will consider it almost indecent to leave her without having merited some such words, and without having had them vouchsafed to him.

As day by day the century grew older, and its character was more completely established; as its passions came to be more carefully sifted and its appetites more critical; as it grew more callous and became more and more jaded in its intellectual lusts, it sought in the mind more assiduously than ever for the gratification of I know not what vitiated senses—senses which found pleasure in nothing but the most evil practices. The wickedness which once served only as a zest to love now became its all-pervading spirit. Black crimes became the fashion, and villainy broke forth everywhere. Something like a merciless policy, something like a regular system of destruction, insinuated itself into the relations between man and woman. Corruption practised arts as full of cruelty, faithlessness, and betrayal as the arts of tyrants. It was dominated and governed by gallants of a Machiavellian order. We speak of the time when Laclos wrote his realistic ‘Liaisons dangereuses,’ a book at once so excellent and sp execrable, which is to the morality of the love of France on the eighteenth century what the ‘Prince’ was to the political morality of Italy in the sixteenth.

In the troublous times which preceded the Revolution, and in the midst of a society penetrated to the depths of its soul by the restless uneasiness of a threatening storm, appear the master spirits of the age of depravity, the finished men of pleasure, their heads cramful of theoretical and practical immorality, who now take the place of the gay and impudent coxcombs of Crébillon le fils. These men are strangers to compassion, to remorse, to failure from lack of resource; but they are well acquainted with affability, impudence, hypocrisy, brute force, patience, firmness, constancy of purpose, and the uses of a fertile imagination. They know the power that can be gained by catching at a favourable opportunity; the effectiveness of a well-timed act of virtue or benevolence; the uses to which maids and valets can be put for the purposes of scandal—they know, in short, all the various weapons of dishonesty. They have thought out in cold blood all the atrocities which a man may allow himself to commit, and they stick at none. If one of them is unsuccessful in his raid on a woman’s bureau, in search of her heart’s secret, he regrets that the study of the art of pilfering does not form part of the education of a man who is to take part in intrigues. Never to bring an adventure with a woman to a close without having to hand the means of disgracing her is their guiding principle: they lead her astray for the sake of ruining her, they seduce for the sake of seducing. Their greatest joy and their truest happiness is to ‘cause a woman’s virtue to die out in one long agony, and to rivet her gaze on the sight of its lingering death’; they stop from time to time on their march to victory, in order that the victim may rest at each succeeding stage on the path that leads her to shame and despair, tasting at leisure the full flavour of her disgrace, and in order that her downward progress may be gradual enough for remorse to follow her step by step. A favourite pastime of theirs, which costs them so little that they almost blush at it, is to overpower and gain complete dominion over a young girl, a mere child in fact, by corrupting her with idle trifling, and playfully carrying off her honour. In their eyes it is but a mischievous prank to make the girl laugh at the infirmities of her mother, who lies in the adjoining room with only a thin partition between her and the shame and mocking laughter of her own flesh and blood! In this last atrocity, the eighteenth century has reached, in the way of moral depravity, the farthest limits to which the imagination can stretch.

The woman equalled the man, if she did not surpass him, in this wholesale debauchery. We see in her a new type, in which all the natural adroitness, all the gifts and subtlety, and all the idiosyncrasies of het sex were transformed into a sort of studied cruelty which had a most appalling aspect. Duplicity, in the hands of a few extraordinarily depraved women, became a positively devilish art. An innate insincerity, an acquired hypocrisy, a countenance well under control, the capability of lying without effort, a power of profound observation, a far-seeing eye, a perfect mastery over the senses, an inquisitiveness and an eagerness for knowledge such as led to their being able to see in love nothing but facts to be dissected and gloated over—it was to redoubtable qualities and faculties such as these that women, from their youth upwards, were indebted for attainments and powers of strategy which were worthy of making the reputation of a statesman. They studied the hearts of others in the light of their own; they saw that all hearts were possessed of some hidden secret and they determined that they would find out this universal secret, and so gain power. Having made up their minds to respect outward shows and the opinion of the world, to envelop and cloak themselves in an atmosphere of good report, they applied themselves seriously to searching in the works of moral philosophers for instructions, which they weighed carefully in their minds, as to what they ought to think and how they ought to bear themselves. Fashioned thus, reserved and deep, impenetrable and invulnerable, these women brought to their gallantry, their pleasures, their acts of hatred and of vengeance, a heart without emotion, an ever-active mind, a bold air of freedom, a relentless levity, the cynicism of the great lady, together with her haughty elegance. They, too, ruined for the sake of ruining; they scattered seeds of temptation and debauchery over their frankness and their seeming innocency. They would persecute a good woman if her virtue offended them; and if their attacks proved fatal they would raise over her dead body the viper-like cry of: ‘Ah! when a woman strikes at another woman’s heart the wound is incurable….’ They brought down dishonour on families with a shock like that of a thunder-clap; they urged men on to a quarrel, and put into their hands the sword of death. Weird and fascinating figures indeed, and the thought of them strikes a chill upon the heart! It would be true to say of them that, from a moral point of view, they far outstripped the Messalina of old. In them, indeed, there was revealed and embodied a state of corruption of the vilest order, which one might almost describe as an ideal state of corruption: wickedness given up to debauchery; Evil wallowing in Lust!

It must not be thought that such complete and finished types are imaginary. They do not come from the mind of Laclos; they are not the extravagant fancies of a novelist; they are real personalities of that world, living members of that society. Authorities of the time are there to bear witness to the truth of the likeness, and to put the initials of their names to these portraits. The only difficulty is that there are so many models. Is not Valmont a notorious name? did not M. de Choiseul begin his grand career in the rôle of a squire of dames, a merciless worker of wickedness, a consummate rake, marching onward to his goal with heedless gait, never moving a step nor uttering a single word without having some design on a woman, obtruding himself on her by his sarcasms, threatening her by the force of his intellect, triumphing over her in her fear? But why speak of Choiseul? Had not Laclos before his eyes the prototype of his creation in the appalling Marquis de Louvois, in that Comte de Frise who amused himself in torturing Madame de Blot? And as for the women Laclos has painted, and endowed with such subtle charms and such infernal powers of resource had he not met the originals, had he not studied them in the flesh? Do not the Prince de Ligne and Tilly both affirm, in corroboration of the disclosures of Laclos, that they have only to lay bare the heart of a great lady of Grenoble, the Marquise L. T. D. P. M., and relate the story of her life, to discover in her Laclos’s Marquise de Merteuil?

Now that we have attempted to estimate the shamelessness of love, the depths to which it could descend, and the growing and insatiable appetites of the century, we fain would know the issue of this wickedness which had entered into love. We ought not to leave it before we have in some way gauged its horrible excesses and violence. It would seem that there is an inexorable law, by which the evil passions of humanity are compelled to work themselves through to the end, and to break up in some final positive horror. The voluptuous wickedness of the eighteenth century had received of this law its awful crown. Having become experts, as far as their minds were concerned, in acts of moral cruelty, men passed the knowledge on to the senses. They had played too long with the sufferings of the woman’s heart not to feel tempted to make her suffer more surely and more directly. Why not, after having thoroughly exhausted their powers of torture on her soul, try them on her body? Why not seek without restraint in her blood for the gratification her tears had till then supplied? Herein we see the earliest signs of the birth of a doctrine towards which the whole century was travelling without knowing it—a doctrine which at bottom was the materialisation of the appetites. And when this last word had been spoken, when the vitalisation, as it were, of cruelty had come to be looked on as a principle and almost as a revelation, when the period of refined and gallant decadence had reached its end—after all these preparations for the torture of the woman had been made, was it not inevitable that a de Sade should arise and set up, with the blood of the guillotines, a Reign of Terror in love?

Enough! Let us go no lower, dive no deeper, into the rottenness which surrounds the heart of the eighteenth century. History should stop before the bottomless pit of obscenity. In that pit there is no humanity, only noxious exhalations which we cannot breathe; a pit where the light, in the hands of the man who would look within, goes out of its own accord.

Let us get back to life and daylight and fresh air; back to Nature, Passion, and Truth; to the health, the strength, the charm of human affections. Indeed, having spent so long in unfolding distempers and ignominies of the heart, and in displaying the ugly sores that afflicted love in its decay, we must needs shake off its loathsomeness, and quit an empoisoned atmosphere with what haste we may. That it may breathe freely, the soul must soar on lofty heights; it needs a gentle breeze to take it back to heaven, and, for its redemption, it must have light; it must have an ideal capable of affording consolation, by which it may regain consciousness of true instincts and pure affections, of the tender heights to which it can rise, of its ever-fresh illusions and its glorious vitality. It is now time to try to discover true love, and, when we have succeeded, to show what of honour, sincerity and devotion yet remained to it; to describe, in a century where caprice, licentiousness, and deceit were rife, the sacrifices it imposed upon the frailties of the woman, what sorrow it cost her and what virtues it wrung from her.

Although it did not enjoy the same publicity or the same popularity as gallantry, and although its position among the adventures of the day was a subordinate one and outside the pale of the general morality of the time, its reigning theories, habits of mind, and daily practices, yet true love, nevertheless, did find a place in the eighteenth century. If we consider the man of this time who of all others has most accurately .depicted the shamelessness of the elegant cynicism and polite lusts of the love then in vogue—the author of the ‘Sopha,’ ‘Egarements du coeur et de l’esprit,’ ‘La Nuit et le Moment’—what do we find underlying the whole of his life and work? A mysterious passion; his love for Mademoiselle de Strafford; happiness and devotion hidden in a mist. There, on a small scale, is the century; it made a scandalous parade of its wickedness, but it was also acquainted with love.

At the beginning of the century there is a woman who reaped the tears of love; by her devotion and purity she gave to it poetry and honour. On the threshold of the eighteenth century she left one of those tender memories upon which the human heart founds legends, and to which lovers of every century make pilgrimage. She bequeathed to the future one of those humble romances which outlive time, and which, hidden on the shadowy borderland of history, far from politics and warfare, resemble a little church by the roadside, wherein the imagination, forgetful of the things that perish and pass away, may rest from the turmoil of the world, and, quietly meditating, may relent and refresh itself.

It was, in the very midst of the dissolute life of the Regency that this woman thus surrendered herself to love; during the Regency itself she displayed love’s most noble and touching virtues. Above the scandals of the Palais-Royal, above the songs and laughter of its men of pleasure, rose this moan, this plaintive and tender cry of suffering—a cry as of a wounded dove fluttering in a wood teeming with satyrs. When actually by the side of her friend Madame de Parabère, Mademoiselle Aïssé gave herself up to the Chevalier d’Aydie. She wrote: ‘There are many to whom the satisfaction of loving so truly as to place the happiness of the loved one before their own is unknown,’ and her whole life was one long sacrifice to her lover’s happiness.

Although she was loved by the Chevalier, she courageously imposed upon herself the duty of refusing the hand which he offered her: ‘No! I love the idea of his glorious prospects too well,’ she said, turning her eyes away from the dazzling dream. ‘To make life so kind to her lover that he can find no greater kindness’ was her only care, and the only ambition she knew. ‘Kindness’ was the word which came from her heart and fell from her pen again and again, giving to all her letters the caressing accents which will live for ever. When Madame de Ferriol asked her one day if she had bewitched the chevalier, she answered simply and artlessly: ‘The only witchcraft I have used is that of loving in spite of myself, and of endeavouring to make life the kindest thing in the world to him.’ Her soul, her very life was in this answer; and in this self-abandonment the charm which is attached to her memory. She loved him, she was unable to refrain from loving him, and yet she strove to fling away her love. Born to virtue as she was, the image of virtue first appeared to her in the shape of passionate love, and only did she recognise her duty towards it after her fall. She wrestled with herself, and got the worst of the struggle; then she began to grapple with her feelings once more. She dreaded everything that brought her nearer to the Chevalier, and yet she was wretched when away from him. ‘To cut strong passionate feelings to the quick ... is a terrible thing; death were no worse. ... I doubt but it may cost me my life,’ she wrote to the friend who stood by her and consoled and encouraged her with her advice. Her efforts to overcome her feelings tore her in two, and her heart’s blood seemed to be ebbing drop by drop. Her regrets were so pitiful, and she was so sincerely, so genuinely ashamed, that at times in her remorse she had the appearance of an angel, and her repentance seemed to endow her with a renewed innocency. Her beauty faded, but she never thought of regretting it; she lost strength and health, and she let them go without attempting to retain them. Sickness at last brought rest to her, and in pity laid her low. The sacrifice was killing her; but she had faith in the mercifulness of God: He knew the purity of her heart. What passionate love she lavished on this man from whom she hid her ills, and into whose eyes she dared not look, if they were full of tears, so greatly did they move her; of whom she wrote from her bed of suffering: ‘He thinks to rescue me from death by the sheer force of his generosity; he gives to the whole house, even to my cow, to whom he has made a present of some hay. To one he grants the means of having a child taught a trade, to another he gives money to buy furs and ribbons—he gives to all whom he happens to come across, to all who come under his notice; his generosity amounts almost to folly. Then I asked him what was the good of it, he answered: “To gratify all who surround you, all who take care of you!”’ Then the priest was called in and she prepared to withdraw from earth, smiling as she thought of the happiness of leaving her wretched body, and she stretched out her arms to God, whom she knew in her heart to be all-merciful: it was love that lay dying—dying in a state of grace. It would seem that at the end of the century some emblem of this woman’s soul, wafted up to heaven with the souls of maidens, would reappear on the pure white robe of Virginia.

After displaying itself in Mademoiselle Aïssé in its softer colours as a gentle and restrained emotion, as a kind of impassioned languorousness, love appears with great brilliancy in Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, a woman of an entirely different nature. In her it appears bb a devouring fire, flaming up again and again, returning ever to work upon her and harass her unceasingly. It feeds on action, energy, violence, fury, railing, on all that seemed to the soul of an Aïssé too virile and too tempestuous in passion: it lives in spending itself. Do but study it closely and you will find it throb beneath your hand with beats as fierce as the heart-beats of the eighteenth century itself. For this love of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is not merely the feverish passion of one woman, it is a type of the restless desires of the time. It explains the secret suffering of that handful of worthier women, too richly endowed for the age in which they lived, who, at the first step almost, went through the whole gamut of experience, and in one gulp drained to the dregs the cup of the world’s delights, who tasted to the bottom all that the pleasures, the gaiety, and the activity of society could offer them for the occupation of their minds and the filling of their lives. Having come to the end of everything, and to a distaste for everything, in a step or two, galled in every fibre of their being by the void which had thus been created in all the ordinary aspects of life, they discover in themselves, in this dried-up, egoistic atmosphere, an irresistible and furious necessity for loving, and loving madly, ecstatically, despairingly. They wanted to feel love roll over them like a flood, to plunge head foremost into its waters, and feel it pressing on the heart with all its force. To please, to be thought beautiful or witty, to enjoy the highest honour which the age has to offer, the honour of being .preferred before all others, to delight in the ticklings of vanity, are all no concern of theirs: they openly confess, they proclaim in the market-place that they only desire the triumphs of the heart and that their only pride, their only business is with love. Their sole ambition is to be thought capable of loving and worthy of suffering. They spend their days in repeating: ‘You will see how well I can love; I do nothing but love; I know nothing but love.…’ These souls, in their impatience to escape the coldness of their age, in their eagerness to get rid of the world, and to create within themselves a solitude in which to hide, and live with a single thought as their companion, have one fixed desire—to be stirred, to be touched, and moved by passion. And these women—inasmuch as, generally speaking, they have never known in infancy and early youth the softening influence of the ecstatic joys of religion, and inasmuch as they have shut from their hearts the tender emotions which are begotten of piety, embrace love as they might embrace a creed, and, in their devotions, they prostrate themselves before it. These beings, who take pure reason as the basis of their souls, who have always looked on their intellect as the only guide of their conscience and their moral sense, whose souls are so proud, who are so used to the caresses of affection, and who once were so vain,—these beings, when they are stricken, immediately lose all sense of dignity and of the duty they owe to the opinion of others; they throw themselves with breathless haste into the life of a loving mistress, their only anxiety being to equal Mary Magdalene in acts of humility. They lay their self-respect, that last resource of their being, at the feet of the man they love, and they find a pleasure in letting him trample on it. They bear themselves before him as if in the presence of the very god of their existence, with submission and humility, and with bowed head; they undergo all their suffering with resignation and without a murmur—almost joyously.

This absolute self-surrender is very plainly marked in the case of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse; indeed, it stands out as a much more distinctive characteristic of her love than ecstasy and passion. It is hard to recognise the great lady who presided over one of the most notable salons in Paris in this woman who so far belittled herself in love as timidly and in low tones to beg but the least place in her lover’s heart, thanking him so gratefully for the words of friendly interest he deigned to write to her, excusing herself so gently for writing to him three times in one week. No matter how little was granted her, she took it as an undeserved favour; and she would still deem her thanks cold, though expressed in the most affectionate terms at her command. Nothing could move her from her attitude of humble supplication, and all the various tokens of affection which were bestowed on her did not succeed in rousing that confidence which leads a woman to exact her wishes of the man she loves. Again and again did she humble herself before M. de Guibert, giving herself up to him, and abandoning her will to his so utterly that she soon found herself out of harmony with society, and out of tune with the general tone and feelings of the world. The pleasures, the dissipation, the distractions which she saw around her were nothing to her; the opinion of the world, in the light of this love that filled her whole being, seemed of so little account, that she was quite prepared to brave it, if only she might continue to see M. de Guibert, and go on loving him every moment of her life. She felt a passionate yearning, a lofty exaltation, a constant aspiration after the unknown; and from all her thoughts, from all the deepest and most potent feelings of her soul and of her heart, there escaped this wild and tender cry—a prayer whose very accents were a kiss! ‘At every instant of my life, my friend, I am suffering, I love you, and I wait for you.’ (1774)

There is no better example to be found in modern times of a love totally absorbed in its object than in that of this woman, who related to her lover every feeling she had and every emotion of her soul, telling him all her thoughts, ‘in the propriety of which,’ to quote her own delicate expression, she ‘did not think she could trust without communicating them to him’; denying herself everything in which he had no part, and satisfied in living for him alone, stripped of her own personality, and, as it were, dead to herself; not permitting herself to speak to Diderot, shutting the door against his visits, and breaking off those little talks with him which, as she said, claimed too much of her attention. Thus she lived, without books and without light, a silent and lonely life, giving herself up entirely to the delights of the new soul M. de Guibert had created in her by the three words ‘I love you’; and so deeply was she engrossed in this exquisite pleasure that she lost the power of remembering the past or foreseeing the future. And when the wretched being whom she had exalted by her great love passed from indifference to brutality, of what struggles do we not read, and what suffering; of what temporary revolts—followed immediately by humiliation and pitiful submission! A painful task, to reduce a heart to the level of M. de Guibert’s comforts and convenience, a heart that had risen so far above it. We hear her begging her lover to tell her everything, and boasting, poor woman, that he need not spare her. Truly a hard part to play, a hard life to live! The slow and horrible martyrdom of this woman, who was destined to be so perfect a model of love’s devotion that her agony has come to be looked upon as a transfiguration of passion, can be read in what follows. She asks him to leave her to herself; then she clutches at her passion once more, and asserts that she is mistress of it; she falls again into the throes of despair; night after night she absorbs herself in the music of Orpheus, which harrows her soul; night after night she listens to his ‘I have lost my Eurydice,’ which seems to stir her to the depths, reaching to the very source of her tears, her regrets, her grief; she begs for a word, a word of hate even, promising to trouble him then no further, to ask nothing more; she busies herself in marrying him to a rich woman, someone young and fair; for this man she walks, she runs, she pays visits, she intrigues, in spite of her constitutional weakness and her fits of coughing; she prays on her knees for the fellow’s prosperity; she begs of him whom she was serving in every possible way to bestow in charity the alms that would save her of dying of grief; she attaches herself to him once more, and implores him for his portrait; she tries to find a way of letting him know that she is dying without giving too great a shock to his feelings; she begs him to arrange for a meeting at some dinner-party, reiterating: ‘When may I see you? For how long may I see you?’ She writes to him from what she knew to be her death-bed: ‘Do not love me; only suffer me to love you, and to tell you so a hundred times.’ With a hand already chill with the cold of the grave she writes: ‘My heartbeats, the throbs of my pulse, my breath—all are no more than the outcome of love. That is more evident and more pronounced than ever, not that it has grown any stronger, but that, as it is about to be annihilated, it is glowing with greater fervour, like a flame which flares up and bums brighter just before it is extinguished for ever…’

This is passionate love indeed, and it has left at this time shining examples, and traces beautiful enough to atone for all the barrenness of the century. In some cases it has been singled out as though it were a virtue or an act of holiness; it has excused and atoned for much in many frail souls. How fine are the impulses, and how generous the enthusiasms it inspired, even in those who had yielded to the kind of love then in vogue, and whose misdeeds were notorious even in those days of notorious evil-doing! What lurid pages it has dictated to the adulterer, pages alive to this day, whose yellow ink seems to draw a trail of blood and tears along its path! After the letters of an Aïssé to a Chevalier d’Aydie, of a Lespinasse to a Guibert, it is right that we should listen to two letters from an unfortunate woman who loved with all the immodesty of her time a man whom the time loved also—the letters of Madame de la Popelinière to Richelieu. What burning kisses are there! What incessant repetition of the words ‘my heart’ chanted forever and ever, like some litany that penetrates to the soul, unceasingly, almost mechanically, like the gesture of a dying woman who clings to life! A flame of fire runs through the lines, consuming and purifying them! It is Passion saving Love from the very shame that Love creates.

‘My dear love, my dear heart, why dost thou write so coldly to one who adores thee and draws her breath but for thy sake? My heart, I am unreasonable; well I know that thou art occupied with affairs so numerous that they leave thee no liberty to write to me, who, I fear, nay, I am sure, torments thee, my heart. And yet I find not in the letter the expression of those feelings which come from the soul and give as much pleasure to the writer as to her who reads. I feel as I write to thee, my dear love, an emotion which distracts me, and sends a fever through my blood. I could not hear that the courier was not yet departed without indulging myself so far as to write thee these few words, to make reparation for the cold and angry letter which I wrote thee yesterday. I feel the evil that I do thee more than mine own most bitter pains. I love thee more than I can say, my dear love. My heart, thou canst not love me enough to feel how I love thee; my dear heart, I die if I am not with thee. I am not well; my glands are swollen to twice their size, and I have news for thee at which I begin to be anxious, nay, only a trifle uneasy, for deep down my health has so firm a basis that it knows not what it is to succumb—and it may be naught that I imagine. Do thou, above all, trust in me, and be not anxious thyself. My dear love, thy absence will cost me my life: I am in despair; I have never loved any but thee, O my heart. Alas! I am the most wretched woman in the world. My dear heart, do thou love me too in all sincerity. I cannot believe that thou canst feel as strongly as I—I know thou canst not; but at least love me as well as thou art able….’

‘My heart, can it be true that you love me better than any you have ever loved? I fear ’tis ever the goodness of your heart dictates these words to console me and bid me be patient. My heart, what kisses you are losing—and how great is your loss! I forgot to tell you yesterday that I am having my portrait painted, but, my heart, I cannot send it you. The painter is one Marolle, who works in the house the whole day long. And yet I do not think his picture is like me—you are right, my face has too many readings. The picture is for my brother; but if you like it when you see it on your return he would probably give it to you; he would be glad to make the sacrifice for my sake. But you would have less trouble in getting possession of the original! My heart, how I long for you! I would give an arm to have you by my side; yes, I swear it. How impatiently do I long for you! My impatience increases every day, and I hardly know how to cheat the night of its long hours, or the months of their endless days and nights and weeks. Ah, my heart, what torture! My life is horrible; you cannot imagine how horrible it is. I would never have thought it possible; it knows no solace. But I will say no more, it worries you without consoling me, and nothing will bring you back the sooner. My heart, I flatter myself sometimes that were I to command you to come, whatever the cost, my dear heart, you would come; but I should have to be very ill before I could propose that you leave everything and come to me. I exhort you, on the contrary, to remain away; but, my heart, I beg you to come as soon as you can.’

And even this is not the highest flight of the love of the time, for among the historic amours of the century there is to be found a love which was more passionately felt than that of Madame de la Popelinière, a love more nobly devoted than that of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, a love more chaste indeed than poor Aïssé’s—and this love was felt by one who was of the proud house of Condé!

The Princess Louise de Condé, after a fall which had dislocated her knee, went, in the year 1786, to Bourbon-l’Archambault. The strict observance of the etiquette of formal presentation was suspended in the life at a watering-place in those times, and the princess, who was but twenty-seven years old, chatted, lunched, and walked with any of the bathers who happened to please her fancy. Among the men who offered her an arm to guide her still infirm and unsteady steps across the broken stones of the vineyards was a young man of twenty-one. A remark let fall one day by the princess upon the boredom of a life of high degree was the beginning of an intimacy between the two, and at the end of three days the intimacy had ripened into love.

At the close of the season they separated. The princess wrote letters to her friend, which seemed to come from the heart, and were cramful of pretty and almost childlike speeches, mingled with caresses—letters which seem, in some mystical way, to be endowed with an atmosphere of worship. On every page she complains of the distracting calls of her high station, which ‘prevent her from thinking at her ease on him she loves.’ On every page she tells her beloved: ‘You are ever with me; you do not leave me for an instant.’ At one time she refuses to read Werther, which might encroach upon her interests, ‘all her interests being for her friend, and all her heart and soul’; at another, she is almost angry at being thought pretty, ‘wishing that her face should please her friend alone.’

And ever and again, in the midst of the festivities of Chantilly and Fontainebleau, the remembrance of l’Archambault would return, with the refrain: ‘O those little houses among the vineyards!’

To love from a distance, to love a man whom she could hardly hope to meet more than three or four times in the course of a year, and then always before other people in some crowded drawing-room; to love with a love of so disinterested a nature that mere memories of the past, and the reading of a few letters, were its sufficient reward—this was all that this woman’s pure and lovely nature needed. She wrote: ‘I feel love in my heart; it brings happiness, and to this happiness I give myself up.’ And we see the complete woman in the portrait traced in another letter: ‘I am happy, and my heart has a full knowledge of love—it is all I want.’

A curious spectacle is unfolded in the humility of the love of this princess, in whose veins ran the proud blood of the Condés, in the beautiful and voluntary sacrifice which she made of her rank and nobility, and in the wonderful self-denial with which she placed her happiness in the hands of this young officer, saying to him: ‘My friend, the happiness of your dear friend is in your hands; she is at present dependent on you for it; at the moment when you no longer wish her to rejoice in it she will fall headlong into a bottomless pit of grief.’ She showed in her letters the adorable womanly quality of self-forgetfulness; she practised the art of belittling herself, of lowering herself, as it were, so that her beloved might not seem below the level of a princess.

For two months and a half it lasted, an endless confession, of ‘I love you,’ on which she let fall the dew of happy tears, and during which she exercised neither her intellect nor her mind, but only her heart. Of her intimate thoughts she vouchsafed but a page here and there by chance, as if she were disclosing them without knowing it, as in the following:— ‘…We women are born feeble, my friend, and we need support; our upbringing only serves to make us feel that we are slaves, and that we shall always be slaves. This idea impresses itself strongly on our souls, destined as they are to bear a yoke; the yoke we put on our hearts seems a light one. We have, moreover, but few opportunities for relaxation and enjoyment; thwarted perpetually in our tastes and our amusements by the prejudice, the propriety, and the customs of the world, we know no freedom but that of our feelings, and even those we are obliged to hide up within us—and all this ends, I think, in our clinging more closely to one another, or at any rate more steadfastly.’

Mademoiselle de Condé’s was so true and so sincere a passion, so deep, so pure, and so extraordinary amid the corruption of the century, that those of her family who happened to perceive the absorbing nature of it through her troubled looks and her quick blushes, Condés though they were, secretly felt compassion for her.

One day her brother, the Duc de Bourbon, came to her, and after looking hard at her for some time he wrung her hand, and embraced her, whilst his eyes, red with weeping, showed plainly, without need of words, the depth of his emotion, and of his pity for her. The Prince de Condé himself, notwithstanding the kindly war he had previously waged against the princess’s infatuation, was for one moment almost reconciled to it, and nearly went so far as to admit the young officer of Carabineers into the Gardes-Françaises, a promotion which would have opened to him the Hôtel Condé and Chantilly.

But at the moment when the dream of the two lovers was on the eve of being realised certain suggestions alarmed the timorous princess. Doubts arose, ‘in spite of the extreme innocence of her feelings’ for M. de la Gervaisais. She fell ill from the conflicting emotions of her soul. While in this perturbed state a woman of her own rank came to her, and told her how, for three years, she had loved a man, a near relation; that for two years and a half they both thought their feelings were but friendly feelings, and indulged them freely; but during the last six months the struggles they had undergone showed them how blind they had been to the real nature of the feeling which they shared. She added that she adored the man, that she did not feel she had sufficient courage never to see him again, that she counted on his strength, but… And then she cut the confidence short by suddenly addressing the princess with the words: ‘You are indeed happy, for you know nothing of all this!’

This exclamation, and the consoling advice which she gave at the woman’s earnest request, served to awaken the princess out of her happy dream. Religion whispered in her ear; and the future Superior of the Dames de l’Adoration Perpétuelle, complete mistress of herself, now wrote the letter which began: ‘Ah! what does it not cost me to break the silence I have kept so long! Maybe I am about to wound my friend. Maybe he will hate me. Hate! O heavens! And yet I do now at this moment wish, what I used to dread so much, that he cease to love me, that he forget me, and that he be not unhappy. O my God! what am I going to say to him! Yet I must say it, once and for all.’

She implored him to love her no more, to seek no more to see her, and ended with these supreme lines: ‘This is the last letter you will have from me; send me one word in reply, so that I may know if I may wish to live or die. Oh I how I shall dread to open it! Let it not be too harrowing for a heart so sensitive as that of your dear friend! Take great care, I beg of you, to put a little cross on the envelope; I ask you in mercy not to forget that!’

Such, in this eighteenth century, is the close of a love story which had all the artlessness of the romances of a far younger century.

The End