Selected Books (1)
Butterflies and Wasps
‘I spent last night with the great ladies of the eighteenth century, the du Barry, the Pompadour, and the Duchess of Châteauroux, and it occurred to me to offer the dispenser of destinies sixty years of my life for a single day of Louis XV’s. To tell oneself that all that is gone for good is to fill one with eternal remorse for having come too late.’ Thus wrote the author of Poil de Carotte, who was a Socialist in politics. The author of Love in Five Temperaments would scarcely agree with him. However, only two of the five ladies he has chosen to portray possessed a certain greatness: Mademoiselle Clairon the actress and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse the salonnière. The other three, Madame de Tencin, Mademoiselle Aïssé, and Madame Delaunay de Staal, revolved around the great like a couple of wasps and a butterfly, and represented the least agreeable aspects of the eighteenth century.
‘It was not as a study in social history that this book was written but simply as an essay in biography,’ we are apprised in the preface, yet Mr Herold’s models were all the products of social circumstances that he has sketched in a lurid light. Madame de Tencin was so odious that she nearly poisons his rococo bouquet. No, one suffers from no remorse whatever after reading this book. The letters of Horace Walpole and Grimm and Galiani introduce us into a similar world, with what a difference! And more recently Lytton Strachey has evoked in appropriate prose la douceur de vivre before the French Revolution. Above all one admires and envies the talent for friendship of Mesdames du Deffand, Geoffrin, d’Epinay, and the fastidious few who ruled over various circles of polished Parisian society and manipulated the slippery ‘commerce of mankind’. How bitterly Galiani regretted that society when he was recalled to Naples! Mr Herold is more concerned with the personal passions of his models as we might expect of the sympathetic biographer of Madame de Staël: he is still under the thrall of his former heroine. Each had a singular history to which he does ample justice. Searchers after film scenarios might consult these pages with profit. Some of the incidents described are as fantastic as anything in Candide.
Madame de Tencin contrived to escape from the convent to which her parents had relegated her in early youth and keep house in Paris for her brother the abbé, whose worldly career became her fixed obsession. She was credited with incest, of course. ‘What she loved in him was herself, and she loved nothing but herself,’ as Mr Herold remarks, though this ruthless egotist succeeded in dazzling numerous beaux of high degree — they scarcely deserve the title of lovers— in order to promote her unworthy brother’s advancement. Mr Herold has summed up all that is known about this flinty character, the more than unnatural mother of d’Alembert, whom she never deigned to acknowledge. He reminds us that ‘to expose unwanted infants was a widespread practice in her times’, and that the pillar of romantic sentiment, Rousseau, indulged in it ‘with motives far more specious than hers’. Madame de Tencin continued to help her brother to climb over every hurdle in the hierarchy, and one is delighted that he failed her in the end. Louis XV was never so genial as when he sighed: ‘The very mention of Madame de Tencin makes my flesh creep.’ She even caused the over-indulgent Regent to exclaim: ‘I don’t like whores who talk business between the sheets.’ Whatever charm she possessed fails to percolate through this particular biography.
Mr Herold’s next model, Mademoiselle Aissé, was bought in a Constantinople bazaar at the age of four by a French gentleman who required a docile mistress for his old age, and she is the most virtuous and vapid character in the book. ‘I cannot separate love from affection or hot desire from paternal tenderness,’ her purchaser informed her. The flowering of this Circassian lily in the sophisticated atmosphere of the Hôtel de Ferriol is full of pathos, but what would have been the alternative in Turkey? Seduced by a selfish roué, she was forced to suffer for her weakness by a moralistic mentor, the tiresome Madame Calandrini, who ‘convinced her that she had sinned’ and that it behoved her to pay the penalty, but not by retiring to a convent as she wished. ‘Too many fair sinners were retiring into comfortable abbeys as soon as sinning ceased to be practicable.’ So the poor creature pined away, tormented by guilty love and remorse for not sufficiently repenting her susceptibility.
The vicissitudes of Madame Delaunay de Staal, who discovered bliss in the Bastille, are less strange but more entertaming. Mr Herold is perhaps a trifle too serious to appreciate the Firbankian frivolities of Sceaux where the Duchesse du Maine held her in gilded captivity. ‘What must be deplored,’ he comments upon her fate, ‘is a society which forced a person of such exceptional ability and integrity to spend her life in servitude, and gradually take on some of the professional deformities that servitude inevitably must inflict.’ But Madame Delaunay had more than one chance of leaving her tiny tyrant and failed to do so. She revenged herself richly in her Memoirs.
It was also at Sceaux, as Lytton Strachey pointed out, that Madame du Deffand established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved. Mr Herold devotes one of his best essays to her secessionist rival Mademoiselle de Lespinasse who (to revert to the Iapidary Strachey) ‘was the younger generation knocking at the door’. The famous quarrel between these two striking examples of different generations is related with a strong bias in favour of the younger woman, but it was the blind Marquise who had introduced her into the brilliant society of the age, and the Lespinasse proved as ungrateful to her as to her own adorer d’Alembert, whom she shamelessly exploited until her demise in 1776. Her morbid love affairs with Mora and Guibert were part of a premeditated campaign to live as intensely as possible after an excess of intellectual conversation. To Guibert she surrendered on a sofa at the Opéra: those were the days! D’Alembert could not satisfy her: instead of attempting a little self-control she wallowed in her emotional agonies like a sex-starved spinster of inferior wit. The salonnière who, without wealth or beauty, could muster such luminaries as Diderot, Condorcet, Hume and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in her drawing-room, became a Tennessee Williams heroine intent on self-destruction.
Mademoiselle Clairon, who survived the century of which she was such an accomplished ornament, was the least paradoxical of these ladies in spite of Mr Herold’s headline, for she was consistently an actress from first to last. Even when she retired from the so-called legitimate stage and, at the ripe age of forty-nine, accompanied the thirty-seven-year-old Margrave she had bewitched to Anspach, Mademoiselle Clairon was acting the rôle of ‘Melpomene changed into Minerva’. Her wholesome influence over the feeble German prince and his court was appreciated by his long-suffering people — all the more so since her departure. It is rearettable that she was ousted by the flighty Lady Craven, but it is amusing to contemplate her in her seventies as the Dulcinea of Madame de Staël’s husband, some twenty years her junior. Among Mr Herold’s galaxy her long career was certainly the most surprising, and we close the book with an enhanced admiration for her rare personality and achievements.
Mr Herold deserves the English reader’s gratitude for reviving these interesting characters whose paths crossed so frequently as to create an elaborate pattern, as of lace somewhat frayed but still glistening with eighteenth-century dew. If only his writing were better attuned to his subjects! It is puzzling that so conscientious a student of that elegant age should have remained impervious to the qualities of its literary style. He makes Madame de Tencin ‘team up in partnership’ with Cardinal Dubois and he makes Mademoiselle Clairon employ the word ‘swap’; he writes of ‘the lovers on Clairon’s roster’; Baron de Staël, we are told, took ‘lodgings in a flat’; Mademoiselle de Lespinasse ‘teetered on the edge of her private abyss’; the Duc de Gesvres ‘developed into an outrageous pansy’; and the Maréchal d’Uxelles is described as an ‘unappetizing sodomite’. What, one is tempted to inquire, would an appetizing sodomite signify? Such expressions appear to have been culled from Time magazine. ‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ as Madame du Deffand was said to have exclaimed about the Bible. (Maybe Mr Herold would dub the present reviewer ‘prissy’, like those historians of whom he disapproves.) But we should not complain, for in other respects Mr Herold has fulfilled his primary purpose, which was ‘to present the reader five quite extraordinary though little remembered personalities whose lives make very good stories’.
Page(s) 73-76
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The