How the French Invented Love (19 page)

Like Mora, Guibert was ten years younger than Julie, and in his case, the rule of the older lover loving more held firm. When we read her letters, it seems that Julie loved enough for both of them. She was constantly writing to Guibert “I love you” or “I adore you” and suffering agony for that love. “My friend, I love you as one must love, with excess, with madness, violent emotion, and despair” (Letter XX). Since she burned his first batch of letters on June 2, 1774, when she received the news of Mora’s death and tried to kill herself with an overdose of opium, and since few other letters from Guibert have survived, we cannot fully judge his feelings, but from her letters to him, it is clear that she was much more invested in their affair than he was. Indeed, he would still see his former mistress from time to time, and, during the last year of Julie’s life, he would marry another.

And where was d’Alembert in all this? Just as he had blindly suffered Julie’s passion for Mora, he closed his eyes to her affair with Guibert. Worried mainly about her health, for she too would die of tuberculosis before long, he looked in on her regularly, was at her bedside during her illnesses, ran her errands, and continued to believe that he was as essential to her as she was to him. They were still a couple in the eyes of the world, so much so that he himself wrote letters to Mora’s family inquiring after the young man’s health, and when Mora died, the renowned philosopher composed a moving funeral oration at Mora’s father’s request. Both d’Alembert and Julie were in tears when he read it aloud to her.

Julie closed the doors of her salon to all but her most intimate friends. And while she genuinely mourned the sublime Marquis de Mora, she was tormented by her ineradicable love for Guibert. She now lived exclusively for his visits and his letters as she had previously lived for those of her former lover. Her letters to Guibert are one long cry of the heart, begging him to assuage the feelings that were tearing her apart:

    Oh, my friend, commiserate with me! Have pity on me! You alone in nature can penetrate my mortally wounded soul with feelings of sweetness and consolation. [Letter LIV]

    Oh my friend, my soul is aching. I have no more words, I have only cries. I have read, I have reread, I shall read your letter a hundred times. Oh my friend, how many boons and how many ills are joined together. [Letter LVI]

    I hate myself, I condemn myself, and I love you. [Letter LVII]

    I am waiting for the hour of tomorrow’s post with an impatience that you alone can perhaps understand . . . of course, it would be sweeter to be in a dialogue, but a monologue is endurable. [Letter LXV]

Months later she is still crying out: “My God! How I love you!” (Letter XC) even as she implores him: “My friend, deliver me from the misfortune of loving you” (Letter CII). Julie conceptualizes herself as a creature whose entire being is given over to “loving and being loved” (Letter CIX). And however sick she becomes, with a wracking cough and high fever, it is always some sign from Guibert that brings her back to life. “My friend, I live, I shall live, I shall see you again; and whatever fate awaits me, I shall once more have an instant of pleasure before dying” (Letter CXIX). “I am condemned to love you as long as I shall breathe” (Letter CXX).

As I made my way through her letters, I asked myself: Could this be the same woman known for her charm, intelligence, and culture? Love had turned her into the slave of overripe passion, like Racine’s Phèdre, whom she often cited in her letters to Guibert. At times hysterical, at times calmed by opium, often reproachful, but steadfast in her declarations of love, Julie must have become a burden to Guibert long before she died. How many times does a man want to hear that he is madly loved, without being able to reciprocate in kind? How many times does he want to be reproached for his neglect or coldness or interest in other women?

And yet, even amidst what she called her
sottes écritures
(her stupid writing), we espy the sophisticated woman who merited the esteem of her contemporaries. She critiques Guibert’s paper in praise of Catinat, which he will submit to the Academy of Sciences for a prize and lose out to La Harpe. She goes almost daily to the opera to hear
Orphée
by Gluck, her favorite composer. She cites the great classical authors—Racine, La Fontaine, Molière, Boileau—often finding lines that are applicable to her present reality. She mingles with the best-known Enlightenment figures of her day—Condorcet, Holbach, Voltaire, Marmontel, Grimm, La Harpe—and dines with the upper crust of Parisian society. It is breathtaking to see her shift from the self-abasing stance she takes in voicing her unhappy love for Guibert to accounts of her social calendar, without even opening a new paragraph.

There are moments when she regains her dignity, asking Guibert to refrain from visiting. In September 1775, when he marries a young aristocrat with a sizable fortune, she insists they break off their liaison. “Oh my God! The moment has come when I can say, or I must say:
I shall live without loving you.
” She compares the passion she has had for him to “a great sickness” and asks that he return her letters. In October she senses that she is dying and pronounces dramatically, “I must submit to my horrible destiny, to suffer, to love you, and soon to die” (Letter CXXXVI). Still, she languishes for seven more months, during which time she writes Guibert forty-four more letters. Her last written words to him carry her love credo to the grave: “Goodbye, my friend. If ever I return to life, I would like to spend it once more in loving you; but there is no longer any time” (Letter CLXXX).

Julie de Lespinasse died on May 23, 1776. Several hours before her death, she asked d’Alembert to pardon her. In his words: “You asked me for that harrowing pardon, a last testimony to your love, of which the sweet and cruel memory will always remain in the depths of my heart.”

Julie was buried the next day at the Church of Saint-Sulpice. D’Alembert and Condorcet led a crowd of mourners, which included a tearful Guibert. Grieved to the depths, d’Alembert had no way of knowing that worse was yet to come. When he waded through the thousands of letters Julie had left behind, including those from Mora, and the memoir she had written of their affair, he was torn to pieces, lacerated, destroyed. What words can convey the agony he felt?

Thank God he was spared the knowledge of Julie’s second passion, since those letters were locked in a little writing desk, and d’Alembert followed Julie’s instructions by sending it, unopened, to Guibert. The extent to which he was willfully blind and ignorant of their liaison shows up in the letter he sent Guibert along with the desk. Taking Guibert for a confidant in his discovery of Julie’s love for Mora, he wrote: “Commiserate with me. . . . I was never the first object of her heart; I have lost sixteen years of my life and I am now sixty. Would that I could die while writing these sad words and would that they were engraved on my tomb. . . . Everything is lost for me, and I have only to die.”
⁶

I
f ever there was
une grande amoureuse
—a woman whose existence was synonymous with loving—it was Julie de Lespinasse. Intemperate by nature, excessive by choice, she forces questions about the nature of love itself. What does it mean to love not just one man but three, more or less at the same time? The French have accepted Julie as one of their own, a variant on the theme of
l’amour fou
(crazy love) that reappears in different incarnations from century to century: think of Racine’s
Phèdre
, or the writer George Sand, or the singer Edith Piaf. In France, for all her eccentricity, the woman who loves too much assumes a heroic dimension.

To love excessively, wildly, madly, to sacrifice and even humiliate oneself for love, is a radical but not unrepresentative expression of French culture. It was, after all, the French who invented romantic love with such all-or-nothing characters as Tristan and Iseult, and Lancelot and Guinevere. Julie shares with her fictive predecessors a seemingly inexhaustible fund of passion, but she does not invest it all in a single love object. She loves different men differently—d’Alembert with tender affection, Mora with mutual enthusiasm, Guibert with obsessive passion. She belies the idea that love must always be exclusive.

Julie’s story also exemplifies the pervasive interchange between an individual life and the culture of her time and place. The sentimental novel, popularized in England and France by Richardson and Rousseau, was not merely a literary artifact: it had consequences in the lives of real people. Julie de Lespinasse, Mora, Guibert, and even d’Alembert fashioned their behavior on the models they had discovered in books. In an age that celebrated feelings, they could not appear to be lacking in sensibility. Obviously there were differences in the depth of their emotions and differences in their manner of expression, ranging from Guibert’s studied gallantry to Julie’s overwrought declarations, which resembled professions of faith, but for all of them, the ability to love was considered a reliable measure of worth.

By the 1740s when Julie was a girl and Richardson’s epistolary novels were gaining international celebrity, letters had become a conventional accompaniment to love affairs. The eighteenth century is famous for its correspondences between intellectuals and between lovers. In the latter category, those of Julie rank at the top of the list. They make a stunning contrast with the letters of her transatlantic contemporaries, Abigail and John Adams, who bequeathed to posterity the richest marital correspondence in American history. The Adamses’ enduring love was bound up in the proprieties of marriage, religion, and politics, all of which were firmly grounded in the virtue of subordinating pleasure to duty. We see this principle at work during the many trying years when the couple was separated by John’s public service in Philadelphia, Paris, and the Netherlands, while Abigail raised their children and managed their Massachusetts farm. When she finally joined John in Paris, she was—not surprisingly—uncomfortable with the sexually charged mores enjoyed by the French. She was taken aback by men and women who were physically expressive in public and openly discussed private matters that were not considered fit for polite conversation in her homeland. She was shocked when Madame Helvétius, widow of the famous philosopher, threw her arms around Benjamin Franklin’s neck and bussed him on both cheeks. She was embarrassed and offended when ballerinas showed their ankles at the opera. As representatives of a provincial and still-puritanical American culture undernourished by passion, the Adams family set a tone of domestic harmony that neither Franklin nor Jefferson, unencumbered by wives during their overlapping ministries in Paris, had reason to convey. John and Abigail’s carefully preserved letters document a loving commitment that lasted more than half a century. In contrast, Julie’s love letters to Guibert have the operatic extravagance we have come to associate with a notable current in French literature and life.

A love letter had the task of conveying one’s feelings to its recipient in the hope that such feelings were and would be reciprocated. Letters could create an ongoing dialogue while the lovers were apart, but, as Julie wrote to Guibert, even a monologue was better than nothing. Writing to her lover allowed her to vent explosive emotions, like a bloodletting that ostensibly purged the body of excess humors. Julie’s emotions were larger than life, and the men she found to share them with, albeit their distinction, were rarely as passionate as she. Yet, it is perhaps d’Alembert’s story that I find the most moving. His love for Julie was the one great love of his life. He loved her blindly, sincerely, deeply, loyally. He deserved a better fate than to discover her duplicity after her death.

She, however, had the death she longed for. She died with her reputation intact, beloved and admired by the best of French society. Among the many words of posthumous praise, Guibert’s eulogy would have made her very proud. He wrote of her gift for friendship and her generosity. The friends who gathered around her were united by “the desire to please her, and the need to love her.” He wrote of the harmony that reigned between her thoughts and her manner of expression. “Her letters had the movement and warmth of conversation.” He admitted: “I made a tour of Europe, and her letters followed me, consoled me, supported me.” And in a final personal note that would have touched Julie deeply, he said: “If ever I do anything good or honest, and if I attain something great, it will be because your memory will perfect and still enflame my soul.”

CHAPTER SIX

Republican Love

Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland

N
ATURE HAS GIVEN ME THE GIFT OF A PURE HEART AND GOOD AND TENDER PARENTS, WHO HAVE BROUGHT US UP WISELY AND GIVEN US AN EDUCATION CAPABLE OF MAKING US VIRTUOUS WIVES.

Elisabeth Le Bas, “Manuscrit de Mme Le Bas,” 1842

Republican couple going for a picnic. Circa 1790. Paris: Musée Carnavelet. Photograph by Hubert Josse.