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

  His friend Chrysalde—the counterpart to Ariste in The School for Husbands—chides him for his narrow-minded views.

  CHRYSALDE: A stupid woman is your delight?

  ARNOLPHE: I would prefer a very stupid ugly woman

  To a very beautiful one with lots of wit.

  Arnolphe has tricked himself into thinking that a chaste adolescent brought up in a convent will be immune to the seductions of society. His major fear, one that haunts him from the beginning of the play, is that the “gallant humor” of the times will corrupt his future wife and force him to wear the horns of cuckoldry. Determined at all cost to prevent this scenario, he outlines to his ward, Agnès, his expectations for her after they are married.

  Marriage is not a light-hearted affair.

  The rank of wife requires duties most severe.

  And you must not attain it, according to my view,

  To become a libertine and live at your ease.

  Your sex is there only for dependence:

  All power belongs on the side of the beard.

  Arnolphe’s long speech to Agnès and “The Marriage Maxims or Duties of the Married Woman” that he makes her read out loud are a parody of patriarchy. To ask an upper-class woman to lower her eyes when talking to her husband and never look him straight in the face; to dress up only for him; to forgo all lotions that embellish the skin, as well as writing equipment—ink, paper, pens; and to make no attempt to please anyone but her husband would come across to Molière’s audience as hopelessly and ridiculously outdated.

  Of course, Arnolphe’s plan to mold Agnès like a “piece of wax” is doomed to failure. Agnès, who leaves the convent wondering whether babies are born through the ears, quickly discovers romantic delights in the person of Horace, and, without tutelage, she surrenders to the force of love. Love helps her pierce the veils of ignorance and stupidity, which had enclosed her since birth, and teaches her to outwit her guardian with the skill of a practiced deceiver.

  But Arnolphe, ridiculous as he is made to appear, is not a one-dimensional stock character. His profound love for Agnès, his anguished jealousy, his fear of becoming a cuckold all ring true and make him more sympathetic by the end of the play than one could have imagined at the beginning. Even knowing that Agnès is in love with Horace, he wants her more than ever and offers marriage on new terms.

  Listen only to my amorous sighs,

  Look at my dying gaze, contemplate my person,

  Refuse this snot-nosed jerk and his proffered love.

  Surely he has thrown a spell over you.

  Surely you will be happier with me.

  As for your wish to be bold and sprightly,

  You will be all that, this I promise you.

  Ceaselessly, day and night, I shall caress you,

  Massage you, kiss you, eat you;

  You can conduct yourself just as you like.

  And he asks himself in a pathetic aside: “How far can passion go?” It is too late. The union of Arnolphe and Agnès was never meant to be. She and Horace, already joined by “mutual ardor,” will marry with the good wishes of all but Arnolphe. It’s a play that ends with thanks to heaven, “which arranges everything for the best.”

  In these early plays, Molière’s vision of love reflected his encounter with high society. After thirteen years in the provinces, he was not immune to the niceties of conversation and the suave exercise of gallantry found among the elite, as well as the freedom and wit of its sophisticated ladies. At the same time, he was not blind to stupidity and silliness wherever he found it: he mocked the affectations and euphemisms of overly purified women and he skewered fashionable men dripping with ribbons, along with their impromptu poems composed days in advance. When his School for Wives provoked heated controversy, he wrote his own Critique of the School for Wives, which ridiculed the prudes who had attacked him. And in his own defense, one of his male characters asserts: “All the ridiculous pictures that one exposes on the stage . . . are public mirrors.” Despite their comic exaggerations, Molière’s plays are indeed “public mirrors” of court and Parisian manners during the reign of Louis XIV.

  In The School for Wives, the scene most criticized by Molière’s detractors was Arnolphe’s passionate declaration to Agnès. His heartfelt sighs and facial contortions and promises to massage and kiss her were judged out of keeping with the stolid bourgeois character presented earlier in the play. But Molière’s defenders argued that “it is not incompatible for a person to be ridiculous in certain things and reasonable in others.” The love of an older man—or woman—for a younger person can be the source of unspeakable desire and torment. Molière gave Arnolphe the heart of a hero for whom we feel compassion, even if the rest of him inspires ridicule. It is this paradox of love that Molière will explore more deeply in his greatest play, The Misanthrope (1666).

  If a twenty-first-century spectator could see only one play from the seventeenth century, I would recommend The Misanthrope. It is at once a comedy of gallant manners and a tragedy of true love unrequited. In the character of the young widow Célimène, we see a woman who has become fatally warped by the fraudulent world around her, and in the character of Alceste, we see a man so opposed to inauthenticity that he can find salvation only by being alone. Given their totally opposite natures, Alceste’s love for Célimène is destined for defeat, but not before it has run the gamut of every emotion in the lover’s book. He is captivated by Célimène’s beauty and charm, jealous of her constant attention to other suitors, appalled by her propensity for bad-mouthing supposed friends, simultaneously willing to believe her private declarations of love and wary that she is as duplicitous with him as she is with everyone else. Smitten as he is, Alceste condemns society for Célimène’s flighty behavior, and he lives with the illusion that she can be changed by his love. For he does indeed love her with an irrational force that borders on madness. (The lover, the poet, and the madman, as Shakespeare reminds us, have much in common.)

  Alceste’s friend Philinthe points out that the rectitude Alceste demands from “the whole human race” is conspicuously lacking in Célimène. Her coquetry and love of scandal, so close to the manners of the age, are faults that Alceste has managed to set aside. Yet he is not blind to her defects:

  I see her faults, despite my ardent love,

  And all I see I fervently reprove.

  And yet I’m weak; for all her falsity,

  That woman knows the art of pleasing me.

  And though I never cease complaining of her,

  I swear I cannot manage not to love her.2

  Alceste’s efforts to reform Célimène through his love are, of course, unsuccessful. While his love for her is earnest and exclusive, her feelings for him are playful and superficial. Their sparring duets reveal her inbred coquettishness, his churlish disposition, and their mutual incomprehension of one another. For example:

  ALCESTE: Shall I speak plainly, Madame? I confess

  Your conduct gives me infinite distress.

  . . .

  CÉLIMÈNE: You kindly saw me home, it would appear,

  So as to pour invectives in my ear.

  Alceste: I’ve no desire to quarrel. But I deplore

  Your inability to shut the door.

  . . .

  CÉLIMÈNE: You’re jealous of the whole world, Sir.

  ALCESTE: That’s true.

  Since the whole world is well-received by you.

  . . .

  Well, if I mustn’t be jealous, tell me, then,

  Just how I’m better treated than other men.

  CÉLIMÈNE: You know you have my love. Will that not do?

  ALCESTE: What proof have I that what you say is true?

  CÉLIMÈNE: I would expect, Sir, that my having said it

  Might give the statement a sufficient credit.

  . . .

  ALCESTE: I make no secret of it: I’ve done my best

  To exorcise this passion from my breast;

  But thus far all
in vain; it will not go;

  It’s for my sins that I must love you so.

  . . .

  CÉLIMÈNE: Yes, it’s a brand-new fashion, I agree:

  You show your love by castigating me,

  And all your speeches are enraged and rude.

  I’ve never been so furiously wooed.

  Despite her worldly ways and skill in repartee, Célimène overplays her hand by sending declarations of love to two other suitors, exposing herself for what she is: une femme galante, a faithless woman who confirms the stereotype of female inconstancy. Even so, Alceste continues to love her. Like Arnolphe in The School for Wives, he gives in to what he recognizes as an ignoble love and offers to marry her, but only if she is willing to renounce her milieu and flee with him to a deserted locale far from the perverting influences of society. Célimène refuses.

  CÉLIMÈNE: What! I renounce the world at my young age,

  And die of boredom in some hermitage?

  ALCESTE: Ah, if you really loved me as you ought,

  You wouldn’t give the world a moment’s thought;

  Must you have me, and all the world beside?

  CÉLIMÈNE: Alas, at twenty, one is terrified

  Of solitude. I fear I lack the force

  And depth of soul to take so stern a course.

  So off Alceste goes to his desert, leaving behind the world of gallantry for which he was so ill suited. Though we have laughed throughout the play—at Alceste’s monomaniacal fits, at Célimène’s satirical wit, at secondary characters who embody foolish human weaknesses—we do not laugh at the end. Alceste, however impossible as a social being, has a strain of truth that Molière’s contemporaries were loath to recognize. It would take succeeding generations, those bred on Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and the romantic poets in the nineteenth, to side with Alceste against society’s compromises and betrayals. Gallantry was too firmly entrenched in the 1660s and 1670s for a spoilsport like Alceste to shake up the game of love. However, Molière’s younger contemporary, Jean Racine, would have a different kind of success treating love with gravitas.

  Incestuous Desire in Racine’s Phèdre

  In January 2010, I attended a production of Racine’s Phèdre in San Francisco. A new translation of the play, commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater, had already been workshopped at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival and was now making a rare appearance on an American stage.3

  I went to the play in the company of my husband, hiding my fears from him. How could Racine’s limpid poetry be gracefully translated into English, a language that does not lend itself easily to French verse? How could today’s dual-career couples connect with the patriarchal mentality of seventeenth-century France? How would a sexually liberated audience react to the tortured passion and overwhelming guilt expressed by an author imbued with Jansenism, the most austere form of seventeenth-century Catholicism? Could the audience make the leap back to the requisite formality of court life under Louis XIV and a second leap back to ancient Greece, which furnished the original characters and plot for the play?

  I feared incomprehension, even ridicule. And I was wrong. The audience sat transfixed through an hour and fifty minutes of elegant speech, without explosions or police chases, without even an intermission. My husband was among the first to initiate a standing ovation for a cast that had risen to the level of Racine and forcefully projected Phèdre into our hearts and minds. And I left the theater with the renewed conviction that Racine had given voice to the tyranny and turmoil of primordial passion as known through the ages, even if his voice was intrinsically seventeenth-century French.

  The very first production of Racine’s Phèdre took place in 1677, four years after the death of Molière and one year before the publication of La Princesse de Clèves. But unlike Molière and Madame de La Fayette, whose subject matter was French in every respect, Jean Racine looked to Greek and Roman literature for his subjects, following the example of Louis XIV, who used mythological figures to enhance his own grandeur. Racine took from Euripides’ play Hippolytus the trio of Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus. By the time of Euripides in the fifth century BCE, Theseus was already familiar to every Greek as the legendary king of Athens who had slain the Minotaur—a half-human, half-bull creature—in a maze on the island of Crete. Through this daring act, Theseus had freed his Athenian subjects from paying an annual tribute to Crete in the form of human sacrifices.

  Phaedra was Theseus’s second wife, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, the rulers of Crete. Hippolytus was the son of Theseus by his first wife, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. In Euripides’ play, Hippolytus is the central character, a notoriously celibate young man devoted to Artemis, the virgin goddess of chastity. In Racine’s play, the spotlight is moved to Phèdre, who finds herself in the familiar French triangle of husband, wife, and lover.

  But what happens when the prospective lover rejects the advances of another man’s wife, especially when that other man is his father? What happens when love that is already illicit by virtue of its adulterous nature becomes doubly illicit through connotations of incest? Then all hell breaks loose.

  When Phèdre first appears onstage, she is wasting away from an unknown malady and has resigned herself to an untimely death. Her confidante, Oenone, forces her to reveal her shameful secret: that she, Phèdre, wife of the heroic king Theseus, is madly in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Previously, Phèdre had been able to conceal her passion by treating Hippolytus rudely, by sending him away from the Athenian capital, and by concentrating on the well-being of her own younger son. Publicly, she has played the role of the good mother and the hateful stepmother. As far as her actions are concerned, she has nothing for which to reproach herself. But ever since her husband Theseus took off six months earlier on one of his long uncertain voyages, she has been obliged to reside in the coastal city of Troezen under the protection of Hippolytus, and carnal desire has returned with a vengeance. She describes herself, in one of the most famous lines of the play, as the victim of “Venus attached to her prey.”

  Venus, the Latin name for Aphrodite, is an implacable goddess. If she seizes you, you are doomed to love, no matter how tragic the consequences. In the world of Greek and Roman mythology invoked by Racine, to be caught in the claws of Venus has the same effect as a medieval love potion. Passion of this order is irreversible.

  Phèdre has certainly struggled mightily against her incestuous desires, for she is not the remorseless pagan of ancient legend, nor the proud adulteress of medieval romance, but a Christianized version of woman subject to a guilty conscience. And how Phèdre’s guilty conscience eats away at her! By the time she appears onstage, she is already in a state of extreme frailty and mental disarray, which makes it easy for Oenone to pry out a confession. Once Phèdre has described her torments, there is no going back. Speaking out is in itself an irreversible act. In Racine’s world, one talks one’s way into a state of exultation and into the sequence of tragic events that follow.

  The situation is further compounded by the fact that Hippolytus is secretly in love with Aricia, the only surviving offspring of an enemy dynasty with pretensions to the throne of Athens. Theseus has spared her under the condition that she remain in captivity and never marry. In both cases—Phèdre’s and Hippolytus’s—the love object is forbidden fruit, and in both cases, the smitten parties reveal the secret to a trusted confidant before confessing directly to the persons they love. Hippolytus unburdens himself to his friend Théramène, who encourages him to try his luck with Aricia. By the time Hippolytus declares himself to Aricia, and by the time Phèdre admits her longings to Hippolytus, the spectator is tense with anticipation.

  We experience the emotions of the characters onstage as if they were our own. First, we witness Hippolytus’s embarrassed tenderness toward Aricia and her dignified, yet subtly flirtatious response. At that moment, we are all young lovers susceptible to the charm of budding romance. For a moment we forget the dark clouds gather
ing in the background, the fate of kingdoms and empires and smaller nations doomed to destruction. We forget the catastrophic harm inflicted by evildoers and even the well-intentioned. We open our hearts to the possibility that love will conquer all when Hippolytus declares to Aricia:

  My love speaks crudely, but do not reject it.

  Without you, I never could have known it.4

  After that bright interlude, the meeting between Phèdre and Hippolytus evokes an entirely different set of emotions. Believing her husband Theseus to be dead, Phèdre allows herself to be persuaded by Oenone that her love for Hippolytus is no longer unspeakable. We cringe with the knowledge, unknown to Phèdre, that Hippolytus loves Aricia. We are embarrassed as Phèdre works her way up to a declaration by invoking the physical similarities between Theseus and his son. Having unsealed her lips, she permits the words so long repressed to spill forth in an ardent tirade where love and guilt are inextricably interwoven.

  I am in love.

  But do not suppose for a second

  I think myself guiltless

  For loving you as I love you.

  . . .

  You know too well how I have treated you.

  I not only shunned you.

  I acted like a tyrant, I had you banished.

  I wanted you to hate me. . . .

  Yes, you hated me more. And more and more—

  But my love never lessened.

  Phèdre’s interior struggle between her passion for Hippolytus and her sense of guilt are now acted out onstage. Condemning herself as “utterly corrupt,” she begs Hippolytus to punish her, to kill her, or lend her his sword so that she can kill herself. Instead, he flees to join his friend, Théramène, and depart for Athens, where turmoil has broken out at the news of his father’s death.

  At the beginning of act 3, Phèdre is at the nadir of despair. She has uncovered her love to an incredulous, horrified Hippolytus and realized, too late, that she should have kept her feelings to herself. Oenone advises her to try to find peace in the obligations now imposed on her by the power vacuum in Athens, to which Phèdre responds: