How the French Invented Love (15 page)

Today Rousseau’s literary reputation rests more on his posthumously published memoirs than on
La nouvelle Héloïse
. We recognize in his
Confessions
the ancestor of all the self-revealing autobiographies that have proliferated for the past 250 years. As for
Émile
, his treatise on education, today’s critics have faulted him primarily for his treatment of women, who were, according to Rousseau, created solely to serve the needs of men and children. You can imagine how that sticks in the craw of feminists, like me.

But
La nouvelle Héloïse
is ambiguous enough to provoke differing interpretations of how men and women should interact. We shall have to judge for ourselves as we examine it. Then, by comparing Rousseau’s novel with Laclos’
Liaisons dangereuses
, we shall see two very different faces of eighteenth-century love, one sentimentally sacred, the other perversely profane.

A
mong the letters that were saved from my time at Wellesley College, there is one from my sophomore year dated October 29, 1951, written to my future husband, Irvin Yalom, then a premed student in Washington, D.C. In those days, a train ride from Boston to Washington took eight hours or more, so Irv and I, sweethearts since high school, saw each other only on holidays and during the summer. That Sunday night in the autumn of 1951, as I was reading
La nouvelle Héloïse
for a course on French romanticism, I was inspired to translate for Irv a passage from one of Saint-Preux’s letters to Julie, which seemed applicable to our situation.

    When I have pleasure, I don’t know how to enjoy it alone, and I call you to share it with me. Ah, if you knew how terrible my torment is when we are separated, you should certainly prefer your position to mine. Think, think, Julie, that we are already seeing years lost to pleasure. Think that they will never come back. And that the years of the future, when age will have calmed our first fires, shall never be the same as those of today.

Hmm. I won’t check over my translation with the original to see how I would have done it differently today. What matters is that Rousseau’s words expressed my very feelings. Two centuries after Rousseau had captivated an astonishing number of readers, I became one of those women who embraced Julie and Saint-Preux as kindred spirits. Like them, I felt a thwarted desire to share my pleasures with my soul mate, and I suffered from the sense that our best years were passing us by. Such is the intensity of youthful love.

What made
La nouvelle Héloïse
such an unparalleled success? Why did women in particular become its devotees? Rousseau told his contemporaries that true love was pure and ennobling. He managed to infuse a jaded society with his own fierce belief in the virtue of feeling. His vision of love was irresistible, especially to women, because it validated the rights of the heart. He authorized men and women to express themselves in heated declarations that imitated his own ecstatic style, and to cry tears of joy at every opportunity.

First, a word about the title. You’ve already met Héloïse in the prologue to this book. The reference to her love affair with Abélard would have been recognized by any eighteenth-century French man or woman with a smattering of education. Even today, a novel titled
Bélard et Louise
(2010) about a university professor and one of his students recalls the medieval couple for a French audience. Saint-Preux acknowledged the parallel of his situation and Abélard’s in one of his early letters to Julie, while at the same time dissociating himself from the man he called a “vile seducer.”

    I have always pitied Eloise. She had a heart made for love, but Abelard has ever seemed to me only a miserable creature who deserved his fate and who was a stranger as much to love as to virtue.
⁶

At this stage in his relationship with Julie, Saint-Preux can pride himself on the dissimilarities between his passion and Abélard’s, for he and Julie have not yet crossed the line between “virtue” and “vice”—they have not yet consummated their love. But they cross that line very quickly. Within a few letters, Julie writes to Claire, her friend, cousin, and confidante, that she is “ruined,” that she now lives in “disgrace” brought about by “that cruel creature” Saint-Preux, and that “vice” has corrupted her soul. Then she accuses herself as well.

    Without knowing what I was doing, I chose my own destruction. I forgot everything but love. Thus, one unguarded moment has ruined me forever. I have fallen into the abyss of shame from which a girl never returns, and if I live, it is only to be more wretched. [Part I, Letter XXIX]

It may be difficult for a contemporary reader to swallow such passages. Today, most of us do not think of an unmarried woman as ruined if she goes to bed with a man. Indeed, in both France and the United States, we have come to accept nonmarital sex as a norm. This was not the case in eighteenth-century France (not to mention colonial America), nor would it be until the late twentieth century. The theme of the “fallen woman” would continue to be a constant in literature until the post–World War II period, when sexual fulfillment began to be accepted as a good in itself. How can we empathize with literary figures who define virtue and vice so narrowly? Did Rousseau, following the dictates of continental and British culture, believe that it was enough for a woman to remain chaste for her to be virtuous? No, he did not. Though he used the vocabulary of virtue so dear to his contemporaries, it took on a new meaning with his pen.

Virtue, for both men and women, was a question of character. The “virtuous” person was imbued with a heightened sensibility that made him or her more compassionate than the ordinary lot of humankind. Virtue became synonymous with sensibility: you had to have the capacity to feel, and hence to suffer, in order to empathize with the misfortunes of others. Only the person who had experienced suffering could put himself or herself in the place of others in distress. Sensibility was a prerequisite for suffering, and suffering was a prerequisite for acts of charity. Here and elsewhere in Rousseau’s oeuvre, the heart was to be trusted over the head in creating a moral life.

Virtue was also linked to a sense of awe before the wonders of nature and a rejection of socially constructed artifice. Like Rousseau himself, notorious for his plain attire and rustic manners, Saint-Preux rejected the witticisms and formalities of high culture in favor of simplicity and sincerity. All the characters in
La nouvelle Héloïse
, with the exception of Julie’s father, are supreme examples of virtuous individuals. They create an ideal community of generous souls ensconced in a bucolic setting, far from the corrupting influences of big cities like Paris and London.

When reduced to the plot,
La nouvelle Héloïse
does not shine among works of fiction. For modern readers, it probably lacks the suspenseful turn of events and subplots featured in today’s best-sellers. It is long, too long, and sometimes frankly boring. What saves
La nouvelle Héloïse
, even in a condensed version, is its dithyrambic style. It is hard not to be carried away by its poetic language. Every page has a passage worth reading aloud. Try this one from Saint-Preux after he receives a letter from Julie.

    I lose my reason, my head strays in continual delirium, a devouring flame consumes me, my blood takes fire and boils over, a frenzy causes me to tremble. I imagine I see you, touch you, press you to my breast . . . adored object, enchanting girl, source of delight and voluptuousness, seeing you, how can one not see the angelic companions created for the blessed? [Part II, Letter XVI]

And here is Saint-Preux after Julie has sent him her portrait.

    Oh my Julie! . . . Once more you enchant my eyes. [ . . . ] With what anguish the portrait reminded me of the times which are no more! Seeing it, I imagined I was seeing you again; I imagined I found those delightful moments again, the memory of which now creates my life’s unhappiness. [ . . . ] Gods! What torrents of passion my avid eyes absorb from this unexpected object! [Part II, XXII]

What torrents of words Saint-Preux unleashes in describing his feelings for the incomparable Julie—his pupil, friend, mistress, and lifelong love! How can she resist such an emotional onslaught? She cannot.

    It is too much, it is too much. Friend, you have conquered. I am not proof against so much love; my resistance is exhausted. . . .

    Yes, tender and generous lover, your Julie will be yours forever; she will love you always. I must, I will, I ought. I resign to you the empire which love has given you; it will be taken from you no more. [Part III, Letter XV]

Saint-Preux’s spirits are revived, at least temporarily.

    We are reborn, my Julie. All the true sentiments of our hearts resume their courses. Nature has preserved our existence, and love restores us to life. Could you doubt it? Did you dare think you could take your heart away from me? No, I know it better than you do, that Heart which Heaven created for mine. I feel them joined in a common existence which they can lose only in death. [Part III, Letter XVI]

Can you stand such hyperbolic language? It is likely that you are used to more reticent lovers. Living in an age of casual sex, serial commitments, and frequent divorce, we are all in danger of becoming as jaded as
ancien régime
aristocrats. Does the notion of undying love still have any meaning for us today? It does when brides and grooms vow to love each other forever, even if subsequent reality cuts short their vows. Who does not treasure the belief in a soul mate? Who does not wish to find someone to love, with the hope of being loved in return? If we still hold on to those hopes, it is partially due to
La nouvelle Héloïse
, which showed us what it felt to be alive at a time when the “divine union of virtue, love, and nature” captured the French imagination.

The romance of Julie and Saint-Preux, however intense, is only one half of the story. The other half concerns Julie’s reluctant marriage to Monsieur de Wolmar and the family she creates with him. Julie and Saint-Preux do not end up marching down the aisle together. Yet her marriage to a man more than twice her age does not turn out to be unhappy. Quite the contrary! Julie discovers that life with a wise husband and two sons can be fulfilling, even without
amour-passion
. A different kind of love based on
amitié
(friendship) proves to be enduring. Wolmar is the antithesis of the stereotypical jealous husband; he has so much confidence in Julie that he even allows her to receive Saint-Preux as a part-time lodger in their country home after his return from a four-year voyage! Julie’s cousin, Claire, completes the idyllic foursome as they all pursue virtue in harmony with the bounties of nature.

What are we to make of this unexpected turn of events? How does the second half of the book complement the first? Has Rousseau rejected his belief in fervent emotion as the source of virtue and felicity? To answer these questions about a novel with a thousand pages would require another book at least half that long, and, indeed, many such critical works have already been written. My advice is to read large chunks of
La nouvelle Héloïse
, if you can’t bear to read all of it. Only then can you decide whether it is merely a literary curiosity or whether its romantic transports and pragmatic solutions still have meaning for inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

O
n the plane to Paris in September 2010, I read in a newspaper that
Les liaisons dangereuses
by
Choderlos de Laclos was still on the required list of readings for what the French call
terminale
—the last year of lycée studies. If ever there were a single example of the difference between French and American attitudes to education and sexuality, this is one! I can’t imagine any American high school allowing, much less requiring, the reading of a book like
Les liaisons dangereuses
in twelfth grade. We would have such an outcry from decency organizations as to make all previous protests seem like a whisper. No one in France thinks to critique this choice, but when I read it as a graduate student in my twenties, it struck me as the most subversive book I had ever read. It taught me the meaning of sexual perversity, albeit perversity with charm. As much as I condemned the leading characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, I was fascinated by them. And, I must admit, their machinations aroused me and filtered into my dreams. By then, I was a married woman with children and able to handle such erotic provocation.

Les liaisons dangereuses
is perhaps the most wickedly erotic book ever written. I defy anyone to read it without feeling the fires of lust. With Madame de Merteuil and Valmont engaged in a contest of seduction that ends catastrophically for everyone, this book has enjoyed a
succès de scandale
since it first appeared in print in 1782, and more recently in French and American films.

In
Les liaisons dangereuses
, two young people, Cécile de Volanges and her music tutor, the Chevalier Danceny, experience the intense delights of first-time love. Modeled on Julie and Saint-Preux, they communicate their timid declarations and high ideals in carefully hidden letters. Their budding love is a world apart from the proprieties that would separate them on the grounds that Danceny lacks sufficient fortune. Though he is of noble birth like Cécile, her family rejects him, just as Julie’s family had rejected Saint-Preux. If this were a sentimental novel in the mode of Richardson’s
Pamela
, true love would win out in the end. But this is no ordinary novel. Instead, Laclos undermines the novel of sentiment; he reverses every feeling held sacred by the author of
La nouvelle Héloïse
and demonstrates how easily lovers can betray their own ideals when led astray by determined seducers.

And what seducers! The Marquise de Merteuil and her former paramour, the Vicomte de Valmont, are utterly enticing, diabolically clever, and pragmatically evil. As representatives of
ancien régime
decadence, they live only for sensual pleasure, moving from one lover to the next with little concern for the person who has been left behind. As long as they are the ones who do the abandoning, their self-esteem will remain intact. Valmont can also boast publicly about his conquests, whereas Madame de Merteuil must keep hers hidden. Even as a widow, she must feign chastity if she is to be received in the best circles. Not so for Valmont. The more women he is known to have seduced, the higher his stock. This difference between the sexes features prominently as the plot unwinds.