POLITICAL WOMEN

At Versailles, Paris, and throughout the realm, the women are playing a part which constantly increases in importance. At Versailles they dominate Louis XV. and his ministers; at Paris they are the recognized arbiters of fashion, literature, and the arts. Throughout the realm they avenge themselves for the Salic law. In 1770 Collé wrote in his Memoirs: “The women have taken the upper hand so completely among the French, they have subjugated the men so completely that they no longer think or feel except in accordance with them.” Not all the influential women are coquettish, light, superficial, the women of Marivaux. Some of them are frivolous, but others are serious. There are religious women, mothers in Israel, friends of the Jesuits, irreconcilable enemies of the Encyclopædia—such women as the Princess de Marsan, who in association with Madame de Talmont, Madame de Noailles, and the Duke de Nivernais, directs what is called the devout party. There are philosophical women, eaten up by the new fanaticism of irreligion, who plunge head foremost, with all the enthusiasm and passion of their sex, into the abyss of novel doctrines. There are scientific women, who assimilate with curious facility the surface of the most arduous sciences, and manage a compass as easily as a fan, who place dictionaries of natural history and treatises on physics and chemistry in their boudoirs beside a little altar dedicated to Benevolence or Friendship, and who no longer have themselves painted as alluring goddesses on clouds, but as grave and meditative muses sitting in a laboratory amidst squares and telescopes. There are political women, pupils of Rousseau, admirers of the _Contrat Social_, who dream of being the Egerias of future Numas, of changing their armchairs into tribunes, and their salons into clubs, who ardently praise the parliamentary system of the other side of the Channel, and declaim like good citizenesses—the word begins to be in fashion—against the excesses and turpitudes of the absolute régime. They want to pass for energetic women (energy is another word becoming acclimated in the language of high society). They pose as patricians of ancient Rome, impassioned for liberty. Grave accents proceed from their delicate mouths. Eloquent protests against despotism issue from the depths of boudoirs hung with satin. These liberal great ladies, a new type in French society, make Gustavus III. of Sweden the confidant of their wrath against Louis XV. Read the letters of the habitual correspondents of the Swedish monarch, Mesdames d’Egmont, de La Marck, de Croy, de Boufflers, de Mesmes, de Luxembourg, and see with what vigor of thought and vehemence of style these ladies express themselves.[12]

The beautiful and spiritual Countess d’Egmont, as grave as her father, Marshal de Richelieu, is frivolous, a charming woman, fated to an early death, whose melancholy and whose sufferings inspire such interest, how violent, bitter, indignant, is her language concerning the Du Barry’s aged lover! “How can one endure,” she writes to Gustavus, “that he who has enjoyed the celestial happiness of being passionately adored, and who would still be so if he had left us the least illusion, should please himself by destroying every one of them and look on such a change with coolness?” Again she writes to the King of Sweden, June 27, 1771: “Sire, they say you have asked for a portrait of Madame Du Barry. They even go so far as to say that you have written to her. I have denied it at all events; but it has been maintained against me so positively that I entreat you to authorize me to deny it again.... No, that could not be.” And November 26, 1771: “I ask again for an answer about Madame Du Barry’s portrait. Deign to give me your word of honor that you have not and never will have it, for I am greatly pressed to offer you mine.” Madame de Boufflers wrote such sentences as these to Gustavus: “Absolute power is a mortal disease, which by insensibly corrupting the moral qualities, ends by destroying states.... The actions of sovereigns are submitted to the censure of the universe.... France is ruined if the present administration lasts.”

The Countess de La Marck draws this picture of society in a letter to the King of Sweden: “Our young women are bursting with wit; as for reason, it is hardly mentioned. They are all initiated into State secrets, they meddle with everything, and make love by way of pastime.... Certain bureaus of wit where people mock at God and religion, and consider those who believe imbeciles, such, in short, Sire, is a sketch of our situation. No more emulation, no more principles; even to the theatres everything is going wrong. We still have one or two sculptors and three or four painters. The jeweller’s trade prospers of course; but it will soon come to a standstill, for no one buys anything now but brilliants; to be sure, they do not pay for them. In a word, we are as low down as we can get, and shall be lucky if no one attacks us, for I do not know what would become of us.”

The impulse is given. Henceforward the women will be in opposition to power. It is the current; one must go with it. The principal salons of Paris are so many clubs hostile to the King. Politics invades everything. Besenval says: “Assemblies of society and pleasure have become petty States-General, where the women, transformed into legislators, lay down maxims on public law and settle principles with the audacity and assurance imparted by the wish to dominate and make themselves observed, a desire heightened still further by the importance of the matter and its celebrity....” It must not be believed, however, that the majority of these eloquent stateswomen, descanting at random on the respective rights of the throne and the magistracy, on absolute power and liberty, renounce on that account the ways and habitudes of coquetry, of what is called love. Suspect these women, serious only in appearance. Politics is the pretext. The gist of the business is gallantry.