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

  Me, rule? Me take control

  Of a state flying to pieces

  When I cannot control myself?

  Such protestations soon become moot because—to everyone’s surprise—Theseus turns out to be alive and about to return. Now Phèdre is tormented by a new fear: what if Hippolytus reveals to Theseus her lovesickness? Once again Phèdre expresses her preference for death to disgrace, and once again Oenone comes up with a solution: “Accuse him first—of the same crime.”

  When Theseus arrives home, Oenone follows through on her own suggestion and accuses Hippolytus of attempting to seduce Phèdre. In response, Theseus curses Hippolytus and calls down the wrath of the gods. By the last scene of the play, both Phèdre and Oenone have joined Hippolytus in death, but not before Phèdre confesses all to Theseus. And in this last scene she regains some of her lost dignity and honor. With poison in her veins and only a few moments to live, she admits her unrequited love for Hippolytus and affirms his innocence.

  Listen to me carefully, Theseus.

  Every moment now is precious to me.

  Hippolytus was chaste. And loyal to you.

  I was the monster in this riddle.

  I was insane with an incestuous passion.

  As Phèdre expires at his feet, Theseus goes off to honor the remains of his son and to take Aricia as his surrogate daughter.

  How did Racine, a seventeenth-century Frenchman, refashion the subject of love for his time and place? If we compare his Phèdre to the Greek model on which it was based, the first obvious change is that he transferred the leading role from a male to a female. Ten years earlier, Racine’s first major theatrical success, Andromaque (1667), had born the title of its female protagonist, played by the seductive actress Thérèse du Parc, whom Racine secretly married. After her death, he took up with the greatest actress of his day, La Champmeslé, who would play the lead in Phèdre. Even Racine’s last plays, Esther and Athalie, written in 1689 and 1691 when he had become a sage married man and prolific father, would feature a woman as the central character. With Racine’s Phèdre in 1677, and Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves in 1678, the French were getting used to seeing women with top billing.

  A second significant change in Phèdre was the addition of the character Aricia, who did not exist in the Euripides play. She brings another feminine dimension into the drama and one that incarnates normative ideas about love. She is young, beautiful, noble, and a captive. Little wonder that Hippolytus finds her irresistible! Under her sway, the hero, supposedly immune to love’s flame, becomes humanized—one might even say feminized.

  This French feminization of love, with its roots reaching back to troubadour poetry and medieval romance, contrasts markedly with the ancient Greek masculinist ideal. It is true that Euripides and the other great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus and Sophocles—have given us several imposing female characters, such as Antigone and Medea. And it is true that Racine learned from Euripides how to make even monsters like Medea—a woman who murdered her own children!—sympathetic to an audience. Yet Racine goes one step further. He makes Phèdre’s torment understandable and her person not to be despised. A woman who falls in love with her stepson, who resists revealing this love until she is practically dying, who feels guilty for a crime she has not committed, who allows herself to be manipulated by her most loyal confidant, who is rejected and humiliated by the young man she lusts after, and who ultimately atones for her sins through confession and suicide—this woman is not a monster. She is human, all too human, and could exist in any age.

  If we set aside the royal setting with its crowns and swords, it is not impossible to imagine a similar scenario in certain American families today. Stepmothers and stepfathers living in close proximity to the offspring born from their partners’ earlier unions sometimes find themselves sexually attracted to these children. We know that fathers and stepfathers sometimes lust after their daughters and stepdaughters and may even force them into sexual relations, usually with devastating effects on the child. Mother-son incest is considerably less common.

  Incestuous desire always defies societal proscriptions. It would certainly have horrified those brought up in the morally strict Jansenist branch of Catholicism, like Racine. And it is this stern version of Christianity, however disguised under the names of Greek gods, that Racine implants in Phèdre’s conscience and which contributes to her overwhelming sense of guilt. Even if her sin remains hidden in her heart, even if it is not acted upon, it is seen by the eye of God and causes her unbearable anguish. Phèdre’s struggle between the claims of passion and the relentless attacks of her conscience resonate with the moral dilemmas of many historical eras, including our own.

  This is the paradox of Racinian love, and of French love. On the one hand, no people in the Western world understand the claims of passion better than the French. No one extols love more—with the possible exception of the English in their poetry and the Italians in opera. No one better conveys the obsessive nature of romantic love and its tendency to take precedence over all other human relations.

  And yet the French cannot avoid their Catholic heritage, which has had a notably troubled relationship with carnal desire. While the French have difficulty conceptualizing love without a sexual component and are generally much less moralistic about sex than Americans, they are nonetheless imbued with Judeo-Christian beliefs that impose numerous restraints on sexual behavior. The tension between these collective beliefs and an individual’s erotic longings is palpable in many French novels, plays, and films centered on love.

  Which brings us to a second facet of Racine’s Phèdre that is peculiar to the French. The French love to talk about love. For all of Phèdre’s initial silence, once she begins to speak, she is inexhaustible. She evokes every aspect of her seething desire, burning body, and tortured mind, without, of course, ever using a vulgar word. Hippolytus, too, for all his previous career as an enemy of love, suddenly knows how to turn a phrase when he declares himself to Aricia. Like all classical French writers, Racine followed the dictates of linguistic good taste that had become operative in salon and court culture. And he elevated this constrained style to the level of tragedy through his sublime poetry.

  With or without the craft of poetry, a French man or woman who doesn’t know how to talk the language of love is considered a boor. In the French mind, conversation is almost as essential to love as physical attraction. Of course, Molière made fun of those gentlemen who felt obliged to carry ready-made love poems with them at all times, and he ridiculed those ladies who used so many euphemisms in conversation that you couldn’t understand what they were saying. Still, the tradition of gallant love talk has never disappeared from France. Think of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, who lent his flowery speech to the word-challenged Christian, so that Christian could become an acceptable lover for Roxane, the woman both men adored. Think of the characters in Eric Rohmer’s films, who spend most of their time talking lucidly about the love obsessions that devour them.

  The emphasis on language is ubiquitous in France, from politics and medicine to lovemaking. The late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan categorized human beings as des êtres parlant: “speaking beings.” In France, you are expected to be able to articulate desire. Declarations of love help to define one’s feelings and encourage the loved one to reciprocate in kind.

  When Phèdre begins to talk in the hope of finding release through confession, the opposite occurs: speaking out inflames her ardor. She works herself up to a pitch of erotic excitement in her conversations with Oenone and then with Hippolytus, despite the moralistic self-censure that weaves through her words. Only in her confrontation with Theseus does she learn to curb her tongue, and eventually shut up.

  Theseus is both husband and father figure to Phèdre, as well as king of Athens and father to Hippolytus. He represents ultimate authority in both public and private life. The kings of the ancien régime, the leaders of the French Revolution, Napoleon I and Napo
leon III, the Restoration monarchs, and the French Republic presidents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—they all represented the rule of the father.

  The father is always there lurking in the background of French literature, as he is in traditional life. He may have been a great womanizer, as was Theseus in his early manhood; he may be a foolish dupe or ridiculous arriviste, as are Molière’s fathers, but whatever his foibles, his authority is pervasive. Phèdre cannot loosen Theseus’s hold on her, even when he is away, even when he is presumed dead. Hippolytus, too, must brave Theseus’s sanction if he is to love Aricia.

  Perhaps one source of Phèdre’s uncontrollable lust for Hippolytus springs from repressed rage against Theseus. Preferring a younger edition of the man she had married is one way of throwing off the shackles she has worn as a wife. But let us not get carried away with psychoanalytic investigations into Phèdre’s unconscious, nor apply a patently feminist interpretation to the institution of marriage. Phèdre is an older woman who falls in love with a younger man. This could happen to any woman. The irresistible attraction of youth fuels her desire, and when she hears of Hippolytus’s love for Aricia, jealousy, too, increases her turmoil. In the end, totally distraught, she turns to Theseus to set things right. In the end, the rule of the father prevails.

  Despite the social advances made by Frenchwomen in the seventeenth century, Racine, Molière, and most of their contemporaries had no intention of disavowing male authority. With Louis XIV firmly on the throne, autocratic power was at its zenith. Moreover, Frenchmen would have seen the male principle embodied not only in government and family but also in the mental capacity of reason. Women, they averred, were more given to sentiments, like love, which reputedly clouded their judgment. Witness Phèdre. Nevertheless, it was one of Racine’s fellow writers, a French scientist and faith-affirming Christian philosopher named Blaise Pascal, who came up with the best-known credo for those addicted to love: “The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know.”

  In the three works I have chosen from a wealth of seventeenth-century material—La Princesse de Clèves, Le Misanthrope, and Phèdre—love is always involuntary. It thrusts itself upon us. We do not choose to love or not to love. Call it the consequence of a love potion, or Cupid’s arrow, or “chemistry,” love defies rational explanations. The husband who should be loved in La Princesse de Clèves is never able to inspire within his wife one ounce of the craving she feels for a man she should not love. Alceste is a temperamentally unsuitable suitor for Célimène, and even though he knows it, he cannot free himself from the love trap she has set for him. Phèdre is doubly inappropriate as a partner for Hippolytus, for she is married to his father, which makes her desire both adulterous and incestuous. Such loves cannot have happy endings.

  Still, some lovers do enjoy brief moments of bliss. If they are young, physically well-endowed, and drawn to one another by a robust magnetic pull, all external efforts to pry them apart will fail. Such is the case for the jeunes premiers, the youthful lovers in many of Molière’s comedies. Despite the increasingly problematic picture of human relations that he presents in his later plays (for example, Tartuffe and Don Juan), despite the somber portrayal of illicit or unrequited love found in most of Racine’s tragedies, despite Madame de La Fayette’s sober renunciation of sexual love in her fiction, the ideal of true love remained entrenched within the French mentality. While gallantry often acquired a world-weary tinge and could degenerate into cold-blooded seduction, claims of the heart were never silenced. Both of these currents would find their voice in the following century.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Seduction and Sentiment

  Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos

  YES, MY FRIEND, WE SHALL BE UNITED IN SPITE OF OUR SEPARATION; WE SHALL BE HAPPY DESPITE FATE. IT IS THE UNION OF HEARTS WHICH CONSTITUTES THEIR TRUE FELICITY.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Eloise, Part II, Letter XV, 1761

  SHE IS CONQUERED, THAT PROUD WOMAN WHO DARED TO THINK SHE COULD RESIST ME! YES, MY FRIENDS, SHE IS MINE, ENTIRELY MINE; AFTER YESTERDAY, SHE HAS NOTHING LEFT TO GRANT ME.

  Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, Part IV, Letter CXXV, 1782

  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Happy Lovers,” 1760–1765. Pasadena: Norton Simon Museum. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

  Eighteenth-century French art and fiction are practically synonymous with lovemaking. If we were to judge only by paintings, we would conclude that members of the upper classes had nothing to do other than disport themselves as lovers. The fêtes galantes series of Jean-Antoine Watteau portrayed delicate and wistful figures embarking to the Isle of Cythera—the legendary birthplace of Venus. This pastoral paradise inhabited by dreamy ladies and lazily attentive men acted as prelude to the openly erotic works of Watteau’s celebrated successors, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

  Boucher’s female figures were overtly sexual, sometimes exposing their breasts and derrières to anyone wanting to gape at them. He also painted seductive women, their luxurious clothing enhancing their curves, as in his portraits of Madame de Pompadour, the third of King Louis XV’s official mistresses. Boucher’s sumptuous colors and sensual overtones fulfilled to perfection the libidinous taste of the century.

  Fragonard’s less fleshy creatures kiss tenderly in bucolic settings, send each other love letters, soar in garden swings, and vow to love each other forever. The museums and châteaux of France are filled with the rococo paintings of Boucher and Fragonard, but Americans don’t have to go that far to see their work. Superb examples hang on the walls of many American museums, including New York’s Frick, which contains Fragonard’s magnificent series known as The Progress of Love. Though these paintings were originally commissioned by Madame du Barry, the last of Louis XV’s official mistresses, and intended for her garden pavilion, she never had them installed. Ultimately they wound up at the Frick, where they can be found in a room with delicately carved wall paneling and elegant pieces of furniture from the same period.

  Gallantry was the order of the day, “the taste of our century” according to the Abbé Girard in his 1737 dictionary of French synonyms; these are practically the same words that the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine had used in his 1669 preface to Psyché. Had nothing changed in the dominion of gallantry during the seven decades that separated these two works?

  What had changed was the meaning of the word “gallantry.” More and more, it implied a short-term sexual affair, with little if any emotional depth. The Abbé Girard distinguished clearly between gallantry and love in the following manner:

  Love is more ardent than gallantry. Its object is the person . . . whom one loves as much as one loves oneself. . . . Gallantry is a more voluptuous passion than love; it has sex for its object. . . .

  Love attaches us uniquely to one person . . . so that we feel only indifference for all others, whatever beauty and merit they have. Gallantry draws us to all persons who have beauty and charm . . . gallanteries are sometimes endless in number, and follow one another until old age dries up its source.

  In love, it is mainly the heart which experiences pleasure . . . the satisfaction of the senses contributes less to the sweetness of pleasure than a certain contentment in the interior of the soul. . . . In gallantry, . . . the senses are more eager to be satisfied.1

  This shift in the meaning of gallantry, with its primary emphasis on sexual satisfaction, was due, in part, to the rulers of France who succeeded Louis XIV. After his death in 1715, the underside of gallantry came out in the open. What had been tolerated in secret during his reign no longer bothered to stay hidden. During the scandalous Regency period (1715–1723) when Louis XV was a boy, gallantry gave up the pretense of true love, and openly promoted serial seduction. Under the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, known to sleep with anyone he could lure into his bed, there was little place for heartfelt emotions or moral concerns. What counted was the sheer pleasure of voluptuous lovemaking, not love in any permanent s
ense.

  Certainly Louis XV did little to stop that trend when he took control of the kingdom. Like his predecessors, he enjoyed a long succession of mistresses, among them the Marquise de Pompadour and the Comtesse du Barry mentioned above. But unlike his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, who turned religious at the end of his life under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XV became notorious in his old age for the harem of very young women he bedded on the royal budget. Poor Marie Leszczynska, his Polish wife, was kept busy bearing him children, eleven in all, while in her husband’s quarters, the line between gallantry and debauchery was simply effaced.

  What happened to true love in this cynically gallant world? At best, gallantry accommodated the love of two individuals, as long as they played according to the rules. In polite society, lovers—like everyone else—had to make a show of meticulous manners and clever conversation. Public displays of affection were frowned upon, even between married couples. In fact, among the nobility, it was considered déclassé for married people to demonstrate their love in social settings. Rémond de Saint-Mard wrote in his Lettres galantes et philosophiques: “The Marquis de *** . . . is insufferable: he’s always caressing his wife in public; he always has something to say to her. In short, you would say he acts like a lover.”2 And that, Saint-Mard added, makes the Marquis de *** appear infinitely ridiculous in the eyes of society. Of course in private, far from censorious eyes, lovers of every stripe voiced their feelings and acted out desire. We get a peek into those secret spaces from a series of eighteenth-century novelists, most notably Abbé Prévost, Crébillon fils, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Choderlos de Laclos, whose works opened up new territory on the map of tenderness.

  The novel was the consecrated home of love. Love peopled its pages and set off vibrations in the skins of readers eager to experience romance in all its forms, from gallantry to true love. While love was and is essentially a personal affair between two people, gallantry was and is a social phenomenon with similar rules for everyone. It can easily spend itself in artificial gestures and become a caricature of authentic emotion, as we have already seen in La Princesse de Clèves and Le Misanthrope. During the Regency and the reign of Louis XV, the excesses of gallantry baldly degenerated into libertinage.