THE FAMOUS SALONS

The principal salons of Paris are celebrated throughout all Europe. They lead the fashion. They are the arbiters of style. In them the women are sovereigns, guiding conversation and consequently opinion. The old style becomes the elegant interpreter of new ideas. What strikes one first of all in fashionable life at the close of Louis XV.’s reign is the increasing intimacy between the nobles and the men of letters. “The haughty Maréchale de Luxembourg always chooses La Harpe as her cavalier; he gives his arm so well, in fact. Not only does the plebeian enter the salon if he has good manners, but he lords it there if he has talent. The first place in conversation and even in public consideration is for Voltaire, the son of a notary; for Rousseau, the son of a clockmaker; for D’Alembert, a foundling picked up by a glazier.”[18] Walpole considers that literature is taking up too much space in familiar conversation. “Literature is an excellent amusement,” he writes, “when one has nothing better to do; but in society it becomes pedantry, and is tiresome when paraded in public. The authors one meets everywhere are worse than their books, which is complimentary to neither. Usually the tone of conversation is solemn and pedantic, and people hardly seem to be amused unless they are disputing.” This judgment is a trifle severe. After all, from the worldly point of view, it is still Paris which holds the sceptre, and foreign princes on their travels esteem it an honor to enter these salons whose prestige and brilliancy are universal.

The Maréchale de Luxembourg, whose first husband was the Duke de Boufflers, the heroine of the famous chanson,—

“Quand Boufflers parut à la cour, On crut voir la mère d’Amour; Chacun s’empressait à lui plaire, Et chacun l’avait à son tour,”[19]—

the Maréchale de Luxembourg settled down as she advanced in years. “Aided by a great name, plenty of audacity, and especially by a fine house, she has succeeded in making people forget her light conduct and has established herself as sovereign arbiter of decorum, good taste, and those forms which make up politeness. Her empire over young people of both sexes is absolute. She restrains the giddiness of the young women, forces them to a general coquetry, and obliges the young men to be prudent and respectful; in fine, she maintains the sacred fire of French urbanity; at her house the tradition of noble and easy manners which all Europe comes to Paris to admire and strives in vain to imitate, is strictly preserved. Never was a Roman censor more useful to the morals of the republic than the Maréchale de Luxembourg has been to the charm of society.”[20] By wit and authority, by making herself listened to, and especially by making herself feared, the Maréchale has ended by inspiring more than consideration; to wit, respect. She exerts over the aristocratic, and even over the literary world, a redoubtable and despotic domination. A presentation at court no longer suffices. One must also be received by Madame the Maréchale de Luxembourg. Jean Jacques Rousseau himself, the irascible, morose Jean Jacques, is fascinated, as it were, by this veritably great lady. “Hardly had I seen her,” he writes, “when I was subjugated. I found her charming, with that charm which is proof against time, the one most calculated to act upon my heart. I was expecting to find her conversation caustic and full of epigrams. It is not that, but something much better. The conversation of Madame de Luxembourg does not sparkle with wit. It has no sallies, and strictly speaking no subtlety, but it has an exquisite delicacy which never strikes and always pleases. Her flatteries are all the more intoxicating the simpler they are. One would say they escape her unawares, and that her heart overflows simply because it is over-full.”

Another superior woman whose salon is an aristocratic and intellectual centre of the first order, firstly at Paris and Versailles and afterwards at Chanteloup, is the clever and virtuous Duchess de Choiseul, wife of the celebrated minister. “At a time when each coterie has its philosopher, who is as it were its director, Madame de Choiseul thinks for herself. Neither the irony of Voltaire nor the declamations of Rousseau disturb her sound sense and correct intelligence. She judges men and things sanely without permitting herself to be carried away by fashion or prejudice. One always finds in her an instructive taste for the grand and the beautiful. Hers is a noble nature, lovable at first sight, and in which one discovers every day some motive for loving it more.”[21]

The Duchess de Choiseul will never be Rousseau’s dupe. “He preaches a good morality,” she writes concerning the author of the _Nouvelle-Héloise_, “a morality which we were acquainted with, for that matter, because there is but one; but he has drawn suspicious and dangerous conclusions from it, or has put us in a position to do so by the way in which he has presented them. Always suspect metaphysics applied to simple things; happily for us, nothing is more simple than morality, and what is truest in this matter is what is nearest to us. _Do nothing to another that you would not have him do to you._ Everybody knows that, every one understands that.... There is no need of fine dissertations on moral good and evil, the origin of passions, prejudices, manners, etc., and the rest of that fine rigmarole with which these gentlemen fill the journals, the shops, and our libraries, in order to teach us what virtue is.”

The Duchess de Choiseul considers Rousseau equally dangerous as a moralist and as a political publicist. “I admit,” she adds, “that errors must necessarily creep into prejudices, as abuses do into laws; but to wish to destroy everything in order to correct them is as if one wanted to cut off a man’s head to rid him of a few white hairs.... The employment of wit at the expense of public order is one of the greatest villainies.... That sort of crime is a seed, it is positively the bad grain of the Gospel. A true citizen would serve his country as best he could by his wit and talents, but would not go to writing about the social compact so as to make us suspect the legitimacy of governments and overwhelm us with the weight of chains which we had not felt as yet.” Madame de Choiseul thus concludes this fine letter of July 17, 1766: “I have always been suspicious of this Rousseau, with his singular systems, his extraordinary accoutrement, and his chair of eloquence resting on the roofs of houses. He has always seemed to me a charlatan of virtue.”

The Duchess de Choiseul is a type as venerable as sympathetic. If one suffers at beholding a Madame de Boufflers, the _idol_ of the Temple, doing the honors of Prince de Conti’s house, conjointly with Mademoiselle Auguste, the danseuse of the Opera, or a Maréchale de Mirepoix sitting on the front seat of Madame de Pompadour’s carriage, and afterwards on that of Madame Du Barry, one is happy at meeting a woman worthy of her rank and fortune, a woman who, everywhere and always, gives the example of what is good, beautiful, and true. There is such purity in her whole existence, such virtuous and simple grace in her pleasing person, such a great mind in her little body.[22] “The Duchess of Choiseul is not very pretty,” writes Horace Walpole, “but has fine eyes, and is a little model in waxwork, which not being allowed to speak for some time as incapable, has a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which the Court has not cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the most interesting sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn and propriety of expression. Oh! it is the gentlest, amiable, civil little creature that ever came out of a fairy egg.”

The salons of the Maréchale de Luxembourg and the Duchess de Choiseul are above all aristocratic circles. From the literary point of view, the three principal salons of Paris are those of Madame Geoffrin, the Marquise Du Deffand, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The first is situated in the rue Saint-Honoré, the second in the rue Saint-Dominique, in a small house belonging to the Convent of Saint Joseph,[23] the third in the rue de Bellechasse.

Madame Geoffrin’s power is a sign of the times. Does this very influential woman belong to the nobility? No. She is of very obscure birth. What is her husband? One of the founders of the manufactory of glass, a very rich but very ugly commoner, and so far as cleverness goes, a nullity. It is pretended that one of the lady’s friends, returning to her one day after a rather long absence, said to her in speaking of her recollections: “But what has become of that old gentleman who always sat at the end of the table and never said anything to anybody?”—“Ah!” responded Madame Geoffrin, “I know whom you mean.... He is dead.”—“Really! And who was he, then?”—“My husband.” Is Madame Geoffrin literary? Not the least in the world. She is ignorance itself. She does not even know how to spell. Apropos of instruction she says: “I have got along so well without it that I have never felt the need of it.” Very well! at the close of Louis XV.’s reign this commoner, without youth,[24] beauty, talent, or education, this old woman who would have passed unnoticed at another epoch, is one of the principal authorities of France, one of the sovereigns of opinion. Her salon, celebrated throughout Europe, may be considered one of the institutions of the eighteenth century. The greatest nobles pay court to her. Even crowned heads render her a real homage. When, in June, 1766, she goes to visit her friend, I might almost say her protégé, Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland, her visit is considered by all the courts as a political event. The King receives her at Warsaw as a mother, with all imaginable respect, joy, and tenderness! At Vienna the Empress Maria Theresa overwhelms her with courteous attentions. A princess of the blood would not receive a more flattering welcome. The Czarina Catherine II. takes pleasure in writing affectionate letters to her, and values this correspondence most highly. Why was this prodigious success, this exceptional importance, accorded by France and foreign countries to a woman who must herself have been astonished at playing such a part? Why? Because Madame Geoffrin has had the talent to create by herself a literary salon, because artists and authors have dined and supped with her, because she is one of the stockholders of the Encyclopedia, because she has probably contributed more than any other person to the establishment of a real sympathy between the two aristocracies of birth and talent. Such a vogue as hers is always susceptible of some explanation. Madame Geoffrin understands better than any one else how to manage the difficult, vain, irritable race of artists and men of letters; she has, if not wit, at least a great deal of tact, finesse, cleverness, blended with good-nature.[25] “Madame Geoffrin’s manners,” says Baron de Gleichen, “may be compared to La Fontaine’s style. There is a good deal of art in them, but this art is not apparent. Everything in her seems very ordinary, and yet no one could equal her by trying to imitate her. Everything in her house is well arranged, easy, commodious, useful, and simple. Her bourgeois tone and common language impart a certain piquancy to a discourse full of wisdom and good sense.” Horace Walpole is also an admirer of this woman who excels in the art of holding a salon. He writes to Lady Hervey, October 13, 1765: “Madame Geoffrin is a marvel of good sense, good information, good advice, and timeliness. She has a way of finding fault with you which charms me. Never in my life have I seen a person who can so quickly seize the defects, vanities, and deceits of any one, who explains them to one with such precision, nor who had the art of convincing one so easily. I have never liked being corrected to my face. Well! you cannot imagine what pleasure I find in it with her; I take her both as confessor and director, and begin to believe that in the end I shall become a reasonable creature, which I have never had any pretension of being. The next time I see her I think I shall say: O common sense, seat yourself there!... If she could give herself the trouble, I assure you, Madame, she would govern me like a child.”

The rival salon to that of Madame Geoffrin is that of the Marquise Du Deffand. Madame Du Deffand is as much a great lady as Madame Geoffrin is a commoner. Madame Du Deffand is as learned as Madame Geoffrin is ignorant. While one does not know how to spell, the other writes as well as the most illustrious authors. Both are old at the time when their salons exercise a preponderating influence at Paris. They are of nearly the same age. Madame Geoffrin was born in 1699, Madame Du Deffand in 1697, a year later than Madame de Sévigné, whose tradition she was to continue and to repeat her glory. The Marquise Du Deffand is not merely old; she is blind. Her eyes, once so beautiful, which had made, people say, so many ravages, are extinct. But, lacking the eyes of the body, she has those of the spirit, and with those she sees everything. Sitting, day and night, in that famous armchair which she calls her tub, the witty blind woman is a power which must be reckoned with. Her salon is an areopagus whose decrees are to be dreaded. To be admitted there is a great distinction, a high favor. To cross its threshold one must be a somebody, either in the book of heraldry or the golden book of literature.[26] A procession of influential people, celebrated persons, well-informed newsmongers, defiles there at all hours. It is a centre of information which has the word of every enigma, the clue to every intrigue, the earliest hint of all ideas. It is a salon at once diplomatic and literary, political and diplomatic; it is the almost official rendezvous of foreign diplomatists, who come hither to find the daily materials for their correspondence with their governments. It is there that all pressing questions in France and elsewhere in Europe are treated in a remarkable manner by well-bred men who chat, who do not argue, and who, seeking above all things to be agreeable, know how, according to Boileau’s precept,—

“To pass from grave to gay, from lively to severe.”

The sarcastic dowager presides at all their interviews with a sort of magistery. The prestige of her reputation, the verve and eloquence of her speech, the superiority of her style and language, her rank, her relations, her marvellous wit, so keen, so subtle, so piercing, make her a woman whose domination is felt by the most recalcitrant. She has the talent of making herself feared. Woe to him whose whims she takes it into her head to ridicule. She is, as she has been called, the female Voltaire, the high-priestess of irony. In her slim and nervous little hands the sceptre of wit is like a ferule. She is often amiable, but a trifle is enough to irritate, to embitter her, and then her redoubtable armchair is like a tribune whence she launches invectives, whence she discharges all the shafts of satire. Hers is the chief salon of Paris. Her letters are models of style, marvels of precision, lucidity, subtlety. No classic writer has a more irreproachable form. Madame de Sévigné has personified the seventeenth century. Madame Du Deffand is like the incarnation of the eighteenth. Voltaire himself, Voltaire, who considers her as the arbiter of renown, is so afraid of her that, in order to pay court to her, he tries to persuade her that he is blind like herself. There is one man, however, who dares to brave the vengeful thunderbolts of the Marquise Du Deffand, and who must have many reasons to fear her, for he is a savant, an academician, a man of the world, and a philosopher: D’Alembert. But that can be explained: D’Alembert is in love with the enemy of the Marquise,—Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.

The two rivals had begun by being friends. They lived under the same roof for ten years, from 1754 to 1764. The illegitimate child of the Countess d’Albon, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, born in 1732, had many trials to undergo. Poor, without any support, she had at first been happy to accept a shelter with Madame Du Deffand. Pleasing, though not pretty, intelligent, instructed, talking and writing well, concealing a restless mind and an ardent imagination under an apparent calmness and reserve, her inferior position, her species of social and literary servitude, caused her at last keen suffering. The companion made her _coup d’État_. She slyly installed in her little room a sort of intimate circle reserved to certain initiates coming to spend a few moments there in secret before the hour when the salon of the Marquise opened. But some backbiter betrayed the secret. The blind old woman learned of the conspiracy. Exasperated by such an act of rebellion, she pitilessly banished Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The quarrel between these two women has divided Parisian society into two camps, one defending the Marquise, the other pitying her companion. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse has not remained without resources. Her faithful adherents—D’Alembert, Turgot, the Chevalier de Chastellux, the Abbé de Boismont, the Archbishop of Aix—have clubbed together to assure her a modest but independent position, and have hired an apartment for her in the rue de Bellechasse. Her salon is not large, but it is animated by a flame of intelligence, sympathy, and passion. The restricted and chosen circle which frequent it find more charm there than in the great intellectual gatherings of a Marquise Du Deffand or a Madame Geoffrin.

These celebrated salons which are the admiration of all Europe are very attractive, very agreeable on the surface. But what contradictions, what pettinesses, there are in this society of those privileged by birth, wit, or fortune! What hours of discouragement, ennui, and chagrin are the lot of all these people who are amusing themselves, or, better, who have the hope, the pretension, of doing so! Madame Geoffrin herself, in spite of her good health, her good sense, and good humor, contemplates at times with inquietude, with alarm, the work of these Encyclopedists to whom she renders continual services. She receives and protects them, she gives large sums to these artisans of disorder, these demolishers of the throne and the altar, and yet, by one of those inconsistencies so frequent in the eighteenth century, she is at bottom a royalist and a devotee. The friend, confidant, and counsellor of the most incredulous philosophers, the most dangerous materialists, the woman whose largesses contribute greatly to the publication of the Encyclopedia, goes to confession to a Capuchin, is assiduous at Mass and Vespers, always in her seat at the church of Saint Roch, and careful to have a priest brought to the death-beds of her friends. At times a secret instinct warns this aged woman, who likes repose and discriminating conservations, that her house, apparently so reserved and tranquil, is the accursed laboratory where the poisons which will inflict death on individuals and society are being silently prepared under the light of a salon lamp, by a restricted and chosen circle.

Madame Du Deffand herself has at times ephemeral inclinations toward religion and piety. It happens to her at certain hours to aspire vaguely to the devout estate, “the state,” she says, “which seems to her the happiest in life.” She bitterly regrets that peace of heart given by the faith, and which is such a force, such a consolation, in our valley of tears. In spite of all her wit, she succumbs under the burden of an incurable ennui, and her letters breathe sometimes the accents of despair. In this worldly society, the sublimity of frivolity, she expresses here and there, with sinister eloquence, thoughts which make one shudder. Then her reflections, profound and full of anguish, are as striking as the soliloquy of Hamlet. Her armchair, which she calls her tub, she might also call her tomb. In it she is like a dead woman who might have the sentiment of life. To the man who said: “Go lightly, mortals, don’t bear on too hard,” to the superficial Voltaire, this poor old woman, blind both morally and physically, addresses with doleful anxiety questions concerning the terrible problems of human destiny. She writes to him, April 1, 1769: “Tell me why, detesting life, I dread death. Nothing indicates to me that all will not be at an end with me; on the contrary, I perceive the dilapidation of my mind as well as that of my body. All that is said for or against makes no impression on me. I listen only to myself, and I find nothing but doubt and obscurity. _Believe_; says one, _it is the safest_. But how can one believe what one does not comprehend? What one does not comprehend may doubtless exist; therefore I do not deny it; I am like one born deaf and blind. He admits that there are sounds and colors; but does he know what he is admitting? If it were enough not to deny, it would be all very well; but that is not enough. How can one decide between a beginning and an eternity, between the full and the empty? Not one of my senses can teach me; what can one learn without them? Meanwhile, if I do not believe what ought to be believed, I am threatened with being a thousand times more unhappy after my death than I am during my life. On what shall one decide, and is it possible to decide? I ask you, who have a character so true, that you ought, by sympathy, to discover the truth, if it be discoverable. I must have tidings of the other world and be told whether we are destined to play a part there.”

To crown her misfortunes, Madame Du Deffand is at the same time a victim to the tortures of both mind and heart. She who had never known real love, falls into a sort of ecstatic passion when she is nearly seventy. She conceives for a man twenty years younger than herself, and who fears ridicule above all things, the caustic and witty Englishman, Horace Walpole, a strange, vague, yet violent and exclusive affection which is not friendship, which cannot be love. As if by the irony of fate, she loves for the first time at an age when it is no longer permissible to love for the last one.

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is possibly still more unhappy than Madame Du Deffand. This demoiselle, apparently frivolous, loves like Sappho, like the Portuguese nun, like the new Heloise. She is a type of hot-headed, feverish, frenetic love. She loves to madness, to frenzy, a brilliant officer who cares nothing for her,—M. de Guibert. She lives by this love and she dies of it. Her poor body and her poor soul are as if enveloped in a shirt of Nessus. One might call her a victim of the ancient fatality. In her despair, in her agony, she writes to her insensible lover: “Ah! how cruel men are! Tigers are kind in comparison to them. I ought naturally to have devoted myself to hating; I have fulfilled my destiny badly. I have loved much and hated little.... I have no longer the strength to love; my soul fatigues, torments me; I am no longer constant to anything.... I have a fever every day, and my doctor, who is not the most skilful of men, tells me constantly that I am consumed with chagrin, that my pulse and my respiration announce an active suffering, and he always goes away saying, ‘We have no remedy for the soul.’” And you, O philosophers, do you think you have any? Men of the Encyclopedia, habitués of the celebrated salons, if you want to know what philosophy is, and what religion, compare the death of one of your adepts with the death of a Christian woman!