How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance Read online

  Two kinds of loving. Paintings by Edouard Manet and Honoré Daumier. Photograph copyright Kathleen Cohen.

  How The French Invented Love

  Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

  Marilyn Yalom

  Epigraph

  NEITHER YOU WITHOUT ME, NOR I WITHOUT YOU

  Ni vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous

  Le lai du chèvrefeuille, Marie de France, twelfth century

  Contents

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  Abélard and Héloïse, Patron Saints of French Lovers

  Chapter One

  Courtly Love: How the French Invented Romance

  Chapter Two

  Gallant Love: La Princesse de Clèves

  Chapter Three

  Comic Love, Tragic Love: Molière and Racine

  Chapter Four

  Seduction and Sentiment: Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos

  Chapter Five

  Love Letters: Julie de Lespinasse

  Chapter Six

  Republican Love: Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland

  Chapter Seven

  Yearning for the Mother: Constant, Stendhal, and Balzac

  Chapter Eight

  Love Among the Romantics: George Sand and Alfred de Musset

  Chapter Nine

  Romantic Love Deflated: Madame Bovary

  Chapter Ten

  Love in the Gay Nineties: Cyrano de Bergerac

  Chapter Eleven

  Love Between Men: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Gide

  Chapter Twelve

  Desire and Despair: Proust’s Neurotic Lovers

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lesbian Love: Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc

  Chapter Fourteen

  Existentialists in Love: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Dominion of Desire: Marguerite Duras

  Chapter Sixteen

  Love in the Twenty-first Century

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Marilyn Yalom

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Note to the Reader

  How the French love love! It occupies a privileged place in their national identity, on a par with fashion, food, and human rights. A French man or woman without desire is considered defective, like someone missing the sense of taste or smell. For hundreds of years, the French have championed themselves as guides to the art of love through their literature, paintings, songs, and cinema.

  We English speakers often turn to French expressions for the vocabulary of love. We refer to tongue-locked embraces as “French kissing.” We have adopted the words “rendezvous,” “tête-à-tête,” and “ménage à trois” to suggest intimacy with a French flavor. Our words “courtesy” and “gallantry” come directly from the French, and “amour” doesn’t need to be translated. Americans, like much of the world, continue to be fascinated with anything French that promises to improve our physical appearance or our love lives.

  One defining feature of love à la française is its forthright insistence on sexual pleasure. Even older French men and women today cling to a vision of love grounded in the flesh, as indicated by a recent poll of American and French citizens aged fifty to sixty-four. According to a study published in the January–February 2010 issue of AARP The Magazine, only 34 percent of the French group agreed with the statement that “true love can exist without a radiant sex life,” as compared to 83 percent of American respondents. A 49 percent difference in opinion on the need for sex in love is a startling statistic! This French emphasis on carnal satisfaction strikes tighter-laced Americans as deliciously naughty.

  Moreover, the French idea of love includes the darker elements that Americans are reluctant to admit as normal: jealousy, suffering, extramarital sex, multiple lovers, crimes of passion, disillusion, even violence. Perhaps more than anything, the French accept the premise that sexual passion has its own justification. Love simply doesn’t have the same moral overlay that we Americans expect it to have.

  From the medieval tale of Tristan and Iseult to modern films like Mississippi Mermaid, The Woman Next Door, and Leaving, love is represented as a fatum—an irresistible fate against which it is useless to rebel. Morality proves to be a weak opponent when confronted with erotic love.

  In this book I trace l’amour à la française—love French-style—from the emergence of romance in the twelfth century until our own era. What the French invented nine hundred years ago, and have been reinventing through the ages, has traveled far beyond the borders of France. Americans of my generation thought of the French as purveyors of love. From their books, songs, magazines, and movies, we concocted a picture of sexy romance that was at odds with the airbrushed 1950s American model. How did the French get that way? This book was written to answer that question.

  PROLOGUE

  Abélard and Héloïse, Patron Saints of French Lovers

  THROUGHOUT MY LIFE, GOD KNOWS, IT HAS BEEN YOU, RATHER THAN GOD, WHOM I FEARED OFFENDING, YOU, RATHER THAN HIM, I WANTED TO PLEASE.

  Héloïse to Abélard, circa 1133

  Tombstone of Abélard and Héloïse in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Nineteenth-century engraving.

  Abélard and Héloïse are as familiar to the French as Romeo and Juliet are to Americans and Brits. This pair of lovers, living in the early twelfth century, left behind a story so bizarre that it reads like a gothic novel. The astonishing letters they wrote each other in Latin and Abélard’s autobiography, Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), have become charter texts in the history of French love.

  Abélard was an itinerant cleric, scholar, philosopher, and the most popular teacher of his age. He became famous in his twenties and thirties for his speeches on dialectics (logic) and theology. And his good looks didn’t hurt. Like rock stars today, he brought out adoring crowds in his appearances as a public speaker. Before the establishment of universities in France, there were urban schools that rose up around celebrated scholars, and the one Abélard created in Paris brought together students from every part of Christendom.

  Héloïse, the niece and ward of a church canon living in Paris, was already renowned in her teens for her brilliant mind and advanced learning. By then, she had already mastered Latin and would go on to become conversant in Greek and Hebrew. Attracted by her singular talents, Abélard devised a surefire method to seduce her: he would lodge in the canon’s house and give her private lessons. It did not take long for them to fall into each other’s arms and develop a mutual, searing passion.

  During the winter of 1115–1116, when they first became lovers, Héloïse would have been barely fifteen and Abélard around thirty-seven. Yet he claimed to have been celibate before their encounter and was totally unprepared for the overpowering force of their shared entrancement: “With our books open before us, more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.”1

  For Héloïse, their love was a rapturous paradise she could never erase from her mind: “The pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts.”

  But there was a downside
to erotic love. Abélard’s work began to suffer, and his students began to complain of his absentmindedness. More occupied with composing love songs for Héloïse than with making theological pronouncements, he became deaf to the rumors that rose up around them. Finally, Héloïse’s uncle could no longer remain blind to the affair, and the lovers were obliged to separate, but not before Héloïse had become pregnant. Abélard sent her away to his family in Brittany, where she remained throughout her pregnancy, while he stayed in Paris and faced her uncle’s wrath. The men agreed that the lovers should marry so as to repair her dishonor. No one paid any attention to Héloïse’s objections: she would have preferred to remain Abélard’s mistress rather than become his wife, since she knew that matrimony would be disastrous for his career, and she shared the general view that love could not thrive within marriage.

  Nevertheless, soon after the birth of their son, named Astrolabe, Abélard and Héloïse were secretly wed in church in the presence of her uncle and a few witnesses. They wanted the marriage to remain secret so that Abélard’s reputation would not be ruined. But this covert situation did not satisfy Héloïse’s uncle, with whom she was still living. When he began to abuse her with vicious words and unrestrained blows, Abélard decided to place her temporarily in Argenteuil Abbey, the same convent where she had been educated as a girl. Believing that Abélard had sent Héloïse to the abbey to be rid of her, her uncle had him punished by a monstrous act: at night while Abélard was sleeping, servants stole into his room and castrated him. Castrated! Even our worst-taste horror movies are reluctant to portray such a gory crime.

  I probably first heard the names of Abélard and Héloïse in the Cole Porter song “It Was Just One of Those Things” from the 1935 musical Jubilee: “As Abélard said to Héloïse, / Don’t forget to drop me a line, please.”

  That song was popular throughout the mid-twentieth century when sophisticated theatergoers were expected to recognize such references. But the names meant nothing to me until I studied medieval French literature at Wellesley College in the 1950s and read the well-known “Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Times” written by the fifteenth-century poet François Villon:

  Where is the learned Héloïse

  For whom Abélard was gelded

  And made a monk at Saint Denis?

  For her true love he bore those trials.2

  I looked up the word châtré, translated here as “gelded,” though “castrated” is closer to the original, and then I got up the nerve to ask my professor for further explanation. Professor Andrée Bruel, a hulking female who had no problem demonstrating the gestures used by knights in battle, awkwardly explained that Pierre Abélard had indeed lost his testicles at the hands of thugs engaged by Héloïse’s uncle. Then she cut the matter short and referred me to the letters exchanged by the two lovers and to Abélard’s autobiography.

  I somehow managed to read these texts (in a French translation from the Latin) between my regular class assignments and was dumbfounded. How could this teenager—younger than I was—have surrendered so completely to a man more than twice her age, and a cleric to boot! How could they have defied the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church with its known contempt for human passion and its belief that making love, unless performed by a married couple for the purpose of procreation, was sinful fornication? How could they have endured societal and family pressures that penalized unwed mothers and married clerics? How did they survive the pain and ignominy of Abélard’s emasculation?

  I now know that Abélard’s gruesome mutilation would not have prevented him from living with Héloïse as her husband. Having been married within the church, they were legal spouses in every sense of the word, and the church granted annulment only when a marriage had not been consummated. Yet this domestic scenario was not to be. Abélard instructed Héloïse to enter the convent permanently and to take religious vows, which he would also take as a monk. Why did he make this decision and why did she follow his command?

  Long after their separation, Abélard tried to justify his actions in his Historia calamitatum, written in the form of a consolation letter to a friend. He explained:

  I admit that it was shame and confusion in my remorse and misery rather than any devout wish for conversion which brought me to seek shelter in a monastery cloister. Héloïse had already agreed to take the veil in obedience to my wishes and entered a convent. So we both put on the religious habit, I in the Abbey of St Denis and she in the Convent of Argenteuil.

  His letter to a supposed friend was circulated among those who could read Latin and eventually came to the attention of Héloïse. By that time, she was past thirty and had been living apart from Abélard for about fifteen years, first at Argenteuil where she had become its prioress, and later as the abbess of the Oratory of the Paraclete, founded by none other than her erstwhile husband Abélard. Still, her passion had lost none of its ferocity, and she reproached him for having made no effort to contact or comfort her, as he had done for his anonymous friend.

  “Tell me one thing, if you can,” she cried out. “Why after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you? . . . I will tell you what I think and indeed the world suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love.”

  Héloïse zeroes in on a distinction that will be made over and over again as we consider variations on the theme of love. Are men motivated mainly by physical desire and women more by their emotions? Or put more grossly, are men led by their penises and women by their hearts? A combination of physical desire and emotional attachment is what Héloïse felt for Abélard, whereas she thought he had experienced only lust. This sounds like a difference between females and males that is still much debated today. (I’m thinking in particular of the books by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, which point out that a man has two and a half times as much brain space devoted to sexual pursuit as a woman, while the female brain’s empathy system is considerably more active than the male’s.3) Certainly, Héloïse had held onto her “love beyond all bounds” for Abélard long after he had withdrawn from her.

  Fifteen years earlier, she had taken the veil for his sake, without any inclination of her own, and her absolute allegiance to him rather than to God had not changed over time. Even as the abbess of the Paraclete, she still cast him in the role of “master,” “father,” and “husband,” with complete power over her fate. Being a woman in those days meant being subservient to men. This was true in both personal and religious life, though some female religious orders managed to establish considerable autonomy for themselves and some forceful women were able to reign over their husbands. The one place no one could control, not even Héloïse herself, was her unconscious.

  In her letters to Abélard, she confessed to erotic desires that had not disappeared with the years, whereas he had accepted his castration as a form of divine punishment. Fifty-four at the time of the letters and lacking the body parts that contribute to virility, Abélard looked back on their love affair and marriage as past history, which had been entirely replaced by the love of God. He counseled Héloïse to try to follow his example. But Héloïse was then only thirty-two and still pined for lost pleasures. While she fulfilled her role as abbess with outward distinction, she remained in her imagination Abélard’s wife and lover, consumed by lubricious memories:

  Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you.

  Héloïse’s impassioned cry has
echoed through the ages. She speaks for all women who have loved without reserve and then found themselves deprived of the one they loved. Death, divorce, abandonment, physical impairment have reduced countless women, and men, to lives of unquiet desperation. Separated so abruptly and so grotesquely, Héloïse and Abélard lived out their remaining years as members of the religious orders that had taken them in, even if Abélard was constantly at war with fellow theologians and Héloïse was ceaselessly tormented by longings of the flesh. Already, during their lifetime, they were regarded with awe by their contemporaries, and in later centuries they acquired a devoted following who treated them like patron saints. Undoubtedly, Abélard’s castration contributed to their sacred aura, since bodily mutilation of some sort—think of Saint Sebastian’s arrow-pierced chest or Saint Agatha’s amputated breasts—is often associated with sainthood. It was not difficult to consider the famous pair, Abélard with his debilitating wound and Héloïse with her mental anguish, as martyrs to love.

  Following Abélard’s request, he was buried at the Paraclete in 1144, to be joined by Héloïse two decades later, on May 16, 1164. Later, at the time of the French Revolution, when the convent was sold and the buildings demolished, their bones were taken to the nearby Church of Saint-Laurent in Nogent-sur-Seine. In 1817, their remains were transferred to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where they now lie under a soaring Gothic-style tomb. In time, lovers began to make pilgrimages to their grave. The last time I visited it, I saw a bouquet of daffodils and a small card asking the long-dead couple for their blessings.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Courtly Love

  How the French Invented Romance

  IN MY OPINION, A PERSON IS NOT WORTH ANYTHING

  IF HE OR SHE DOES NOT DESIRE LOVE.

  Bernart de Ventadorn, activity circa 1147–1170

  A lover gives his heart to his lady. Weaving, Arras, 1400–1401. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.