How the French Invented Love (18 page)

The disastrous episode with John Taaffe eventually receded from Julie’s psyche, especially when d’Alembert, after years of silence, finally managed to convey his sentiments to her. D’Alembert was Madame du Deffand’s most intimate friend, a man with an international scientific reputation but little in his physical appearance or finances to recommend him as a lover or husband.

Surely Julie admired him. He had shown such loyalty to her benefactress, such devotion to his work, such disinterest in societal advancement, such modesty and independence. How could one not admire a man who was solicited by Catherine the Great of Russia and King Frederick II of Prussia? In 1763, Julie encouraged him to spend three months at the king’s court. While there, he wrote her every day. These were letters that Julie did not share with Madame du Deffand.

Upon his return, d’Alembert got in the habit of visiting Julie in her separate quarters before presenting himself to the marquise. There they could spend an hour or two in guarded intimacy. Yet, unlike lovers in novels, they also began to share that time with some of the other salon regulars, a few of d’Alembert’s closest friends who enjoyed a light conversational prelude to Madame du Deffand’s more formal program. When the marquise got wind of the goings-on in Julie’s rooms, she became enraged. How dare Julie usurp the position of salon leader that belonged exclusively to herself!

The break between them was immediate and permanent. It was not so much a matter of the liberties Julie had taken in the social world but of her ascendance over d’Alembert. The marquise forced the issue by asking him to choose between her and Julie. He chose Julie. Many of her other friends also chose to follow Julie, rather than stay behind in Madame du Deffand’s now reduced circle. Julie managed to rent two floors in a small house not far away, using the income of 300 pounds left by her mother and several other small pensions obtained by friends. This was the beginning of a new life following her own star.

Although this new life would be Julie de Lespinasse’s time of glory, it began very badly. She came down with a severe case of smallpox. Remember, this was before inoculations were common, and many people either died from the disease or survived with disfiguring facial marks. Julie hovered for days between life and death. D’Alembert stayed at her side, feeding her, encouraging her, taking upon himself the duties of nurse, husband, and faithful friend. With his support, Julie slowly recovered, though she would bear on her face the pockmarks that wounded her vanity as much as her appearance. They did not daunt d’Alembert, who wrote to the philosopher David Hume: “She was rather marked by smallpox. But, without being disfigured in the least.”
³

No sooner did Julie get her strength back than d’Alembert fell sick as well. Now it was her turn to nurse him. He, too, lingered near death, and she exerted every effort to bring him back to life. When he began to recover, she insisted on one thing: that he move out of the small quarters he still shared with his old nurse. She could take care of him better in more comfortable rooms, first at the home of a friend and then in her building where he rented rooms on the floor above hers. Let the world talk, and they did! David Hume referred to Julie as d’Alembert’s mistress, while others—the philosopher Marmontel, for example—maintained that their relationship was innocent. While rumors circulated, d’Alembert continued to insist that he and Julie were linked only by mutual esteem and friendship, not by love. As for marriage, he asked Voltaire rhetorically: “My God! What would I become with a wife and children?”
⁴

There are two different motivations at work here. On the one hand, d’Alembert was trying to protect Julie’s reputation. A woman known to have a lover was censured by a hypocritical society that looked the other way for married women but came down hard on single women. Our morality today goes in the opposite direction: an unmarried woman has the right to take as many lovers as she pleases, while married women are expected to remain monogamous.

D’Alembert had another reason for denying his love for Julie. He saw himself in a tradition, going back to Socrates in ancient Greece and Abélard in the Middle Ages, that considered marriage incompatible with philosophy. He did not want to be ridiculed as a “married philosopher,” even if certain other well-known
philosophes
, like Helvétius and the Baron d’Holbach, had taken that perilous step.
⁵

While d’Alembert and Julie did not wed, there is no doubt that he loved her deeply and exclusively. The bonds established between them in the intimate circle presided over by Madame du Deffand had only been strengthened by their break with her. Then the care they had taken of each other during their illnesses added a new layer of meaning to their intimacy. They became family to one another. Henceforth, d’Alembert’s first loyalty was to Julie de Lespinasse, whom he would serve with the legendary dedication of a medieval knight.

Julie also loved d’Alembert, if not passionately, then certainly with respect and gratitude. Their shared interests in literature, philosophy, and science brought them closer together every day. She read Racine to him; he countered with Montesquieu. They enjoyed the same music, the same plays, and the society of their peers who received them as a de facto couple. The wealthy and highly influential Madame Geoffrin, whose salon rivaled Madame du Deffand’s, took them under her wing. With d’Alembert at her side, Julie shared the spotlight with France’s most illustrious
salonnières
. D’Alembert had reason to believe that Julie loved him: in his letter of July 22, 1776, written after her death, he remembered that ten years earlier she had said she was actually afraid of being so happy.

The honeymoon period of their relationship lasted about three years. Then the arrival of the Marquis de Mora, son of the Spanish ambassador, would open Julie’s heart in a new way. Gonçalve de Mora was young, handsome, well built, personable, and, like Julie, passionate. He captivated everyone not only with his winning appearance but also with his open mind. Here at last was a Spaniard who would bring the spirit of the Enlightenment back to his conservative country. In a letter of introduction, d’Alembert wrote to Voltaire: “I have seen few foreigners of his age who have a more sound mind, more exact, more cultured, and more enlightened. You can be sure that, as young, and as
grand seigneur
, and as Spanish as he is, I am by no means exaggerating.” Irony of ironies, it was d’Alembert who helped pave the way for Mora’s brilliant success among Paris intellectuals, including Julie de Lespinasse.

She was thirty-six, while Mora was about ten years younger. Let me pause to reflect on this difference of age. If he had been ten years older than she, no one would have said a word. But a woman ten years older than the man set the gossips’ tongues in motion: the philosopher Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, probably echoed public sentiment when he wrote that “she had passed the season for love affairs.” When a woman is older than a man, or when a man is much older than a woman—say twenty or thirty years—there is usually a power differential in favor of the younger person. The older man may be taken for his wife’s father and mocked behind his back or, worse yet, made a cuckold. The older woman, comparing herself to her young lover’s female contemporaries, often finds herself wanting. And even if she isn’t prone to jealousy, she fears he will lose interest in her as her physical charms fade. In most love relations, there is often one person who loves more, and when there is a significant age discrepancy, it is often the older party.

And yet, in the case of Lespinasse and Mora, it seems as if the passion was mutual. Even in public, their attraction to each other was visible to all. The historian Marmontel wrote in his memoirs that she inspired a passionate feeling in Mora, who made no effort to hide his adoration for her. Only d’Alembert was blind to what everyone else saw so clearly.

Like many of their contemporaries in the 1760s, Julie and Mora were marked by Rousseau’s
Nouvelle Héloïse
. They saw themselves as reincarnations of Julie and Saint-Preux, destined to love madly and suffer excruciatingly. Mora was in every way the noble figure worthy of her passion, especially with the tragic demeanor he took on after the death of his only son. By his midtwenties, Mora had lost the sickly wife he had married at the age of fifteen, a daughter, and a son, and he was about to lose his mother. He was also beginning to experience the symptoms of tuberculosis, which would end his life in 1774. Mora threw himself into his relationship with Julie and never looked back. Despite his father’s attempts to separate them—a grandee of Spain simply didn’t marry a bastard woman with no fortune who was already living publicly with another man—Mora refused to abandon the one woman whose cultural sophistication and passion equaled his own.

Much of the time they were separated, either by Mora’s career and family obligations or by his worsening health. While he was away, they wrote each other almost daily. Here is how Lespinasse described a separation of ten days when Mora was at the French court in Fontainebleau.

    I regularly received two letters a day from Fontainebleau. He was away ten days: I had twenty-two letters; but even while he was in the middle of the dissipation of the court, having become a fashionable object and the craze of the most beautiful women, he had only one occupation, he had only one pleasure: he wanted to live in my thoughts, he wanted to fill my life. And, indeed, I remember that during those ten days I did not go out a single time: I waited for a letter and then I wrote one. [Letter CXLI]

These twenty-two letters must have been among the multitude that broke d’Alembert’s heart.

Since most of Julie’s letters were burned, how is it that we know so much about her intimate relationship with Mora? The answer, adding another layer of duplicity to Julie’s love life, lies in the letters she wrote to Guibert, whom she met in May 1773. Yes, even while Mora was still alive—he would expire a year later, in May 1774—Julie was fatally drawn to another man. It is not for us to judge Julie but to try to understand how she balanced three major relationships: (1) daily life with her honorary husband, d’Alembert; (2) her great passion for Mora, which began around 1767; and (3) the intense attachment to Guibert that consumed the last three years of her life.

Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert was a military man and a writer. His 1772 treatise,
A General Essay on Tactics
(
Essai général de tactique
), was the talk of Paris among intellectuals and courtiers and would in time inspire the young Napoleon. What’s more, he wrote tragedies that he read aloud with a captivating voice, and one of them would even be performed under the patronage of Marie-Antoinette. With Gonçalve de Mora’s deteriorating health causing Julie endless torment, she turned to Guibert for consolation.

From the start, Julie found in Guibert an empathic confidant. She poured out her heart to him about her liaison with Mora—that perfect creature who loved her without reserve, just as she loved him. Guibert reciprocated with the story of his attachment to Madame de Montsauge, a worldly mistress lacking the passion and perception he discovered in Julie. Shared confidences can bring people together in unexpected ways, especially when the confidences concern romantic love. Talking about love can easily become love talk.

Mora left Paris in the summer of 1773 with the hope that the weather in Spain would be better for his health. Julie waited impatiently for the biweekly courier that would bring news of her beloved. And in the meantime, she fell under the spell of Guibert, an increasingly fashionable figure in the circles they both frequented. Julie added her assent to the voices lauding him as a military genius and the next Corneille. Guibert basked in his newfound glory among the
Encyclopédistes
and their acknowledged muse, the oh-so-engaging if not so pretty Julie de Lespinasse. He was also a great hit in aristocratic homes and at court, especially among the ladies.

Yes, Guibert was a ladies’ man, already known for his amorous conquests by the time he met Julie, and with many more to come. Yet we should not think of him as a seducer in the coldhearted manner of a Valmont; he seems to have been considerate of Julie’s feelings, responding as best he could to her increasing passion. But as she herself realized: “I love you madly . . . and something tells me that you should not be loved in this way” (Letter XXXIV).

Let’s back up and see how this came about. After their first meeting in the spring of 1773, Julie and Guibert were constantly in contact with one another. He would arrive a little before her open salon in the afternoon when, according to custom, the doors were not shut to her numerous friends. Guibert usually balanced two or three other social engagements—lunches, dinners, the theater, country outings. Occasionally they met at the home of a mutual friend or at the opera, where Julie rented a box for the year. Oddly enough, it was at her box in the opera that they could enjoy the greatest privacy, and, strange as it seems, it was here that they became lovers.

Try to imagine a large loge with an adjoining salon, to which one retired for refreshments. On the evening of February 10, 1774, exalted by music and deferred pleasure, Julie surrendered to Guibert’s persuasive advances and became his mistress. A year later, on the anniversary of this date, she would write to Guibert: “It was on the tenth of February last year that I became intoxicated by that poison, the effect of which still endures. . . . By what fatality is the most intense and sweetest feeling of pleasure linked to the most overwhelming misfortune” (Letter XCII). Why does she speak of this event as both a poison and a pleasure? Because the pleasure she experienced with Guibert was linked in her mind to the tragedy of Mora’s death in May 1774, as he was returning to France from Spain in a final effort to see her once more. By then, Julie was already madly in love with Guibert, and she considered herself guilty of betraying Mora. It was as if she had transferred her passion
in toto
from Mora to Guibert, even though she felt from the start that he would never love her as Mora had.