LOVE

Of all loves, the rarest in high society under the reign of Louis XV. is conjugal love. Well-bred married couples are on the footing of polite and courteous strangers with each other. The husband calls his wife Madame. The wife calls her husband Monsieur. They live in the same house, but have separate apartments and do not visit each other without being previously announced. Never do they ride in the same carriage. Never are they met in the same salon. A husband who should follow his wife would be treated as a jealous provincial. A woman who should have the singular idea of being in love with her husband would be thought ridiculous. Such a passion in good society would be indecorous. Conjugal love is altogether out of fashion. Baron de Besenval considers that though morals may suffer from this, society is an infinite gainer, adding that, “freed from the embarrassment and chill always caused by the presence of husbands, there is extreme liberty,” and that “the coquetry of men and women maintains its vivacity and daily supplies piquant adventures.”

Piquant adventures are what is specially sought for. Passion, people care little about; what they are looking for is pleasure. Listen to a great lady saying, in 1764, to young Lauzun, the future Lovelace, whose erotic education is not yet quite finished: “Believe me, little cousin, to be romantic doesn’t succeed nowadays; it makes you ridiculous, and then it is all up with you. I have had a great fancy for you, my child; it is not my fault if you have taken it for a grand passion and persuaded yourself that it would never end. What does it matter to you, if this fancy is over, whether I take one for somebody else or remain without a lover? You have many advantages for pleasing women; use them for that purpose, and rest assured that the loss of one can always be repaired by another,—that is the way to be happy and amiable.”[13] Such was fashionable morality. Chamfort defined love as “the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.” People take and leave each other in precisely the same way. As Prince de Ligne said, one was happy _to have_, one was enchanted _to have_ no longer.

Where is the time of profound passions, trembling avowals, of sighs and tears and fond despairs? Where is the time of heroic loves with their chivalrous respect, their long waiting, sublime devotion, eternal oaths, their tried devotion and tender gratitude, their virtues of grandeur and generosity? Look at the Cupid of the reign of Louis XV., the noisy, insolent, victorious Cupid, who scoffs at the love of former times as a malicious and ill-bred child mocks at an old man. Listen to him saying in a gibing tone: “Your lovers were mere blockheads, who only knew how to languish, say alas! and tell their troubles to the surrounding echoes. For my part, I have suppressed the echoes.... My subjects do not say: I am dying; nothing is half so much alive as they are. Languors, timidity, sweet martyrdom, are out of the question; all that is tame, a platitude of other days.... I don’t put my subjects to sleep; I wake them up; they are so keen that they have no leisure to be tender; their glances are desires; instead of sighing, they attack; they do not say: Be propitious to me; they seize, and that is what is needed.”[14] Listen to Madame d’Epinay, who speaks of modesty as a “beautiful virtue which one fastens on with pins.” Listen to the century which boasts, like Crébillon the younger, of “having arrived at the truth of things,” of having suppressed what it calls “exaggerations, affectations, grimaces.” Do you see, in the picture of _La Chemise Enlevée_, Fragonard’s little love who smilingly carries off the decency of woman? Do you hear Buffon himself, the grave, majestic Buffon, employing this materialistic language? “Why does love create the happy estate of all creatures and the misery of man? It is because only the physical side of this passion is good; because the moral side is good for nothing.”[15]

Hence it is an understood thing, proclaimed by the great savants of the century, that the prime essential is to suppress the moral part of love. Love is no longer represented except under the image of a pretty little naked god, flying about, and free. The enemies of constraint and waiting form a sect called the _anti-ceremonious_. Another aphrodisiacal corporation entitles itself the _Society of the Moment_. To choose the moment well is the tactics, the supreme art. “How many liaisons begin briskly by insolence in a carriage the coachman of which is particular about taking the longest road, to play deaf and to make the horses go slowly. The brutal style of gallantry ends by having principles, a sort of philosophy and means of excusing itself.... It finds wits to decide that a temerarious man has at bottom more deference for the woman than a timid one and really respects her more by sparing her the long torment of successive concessions.”[16] To the lover who remains on his knees too long, the eighteenth century cries: “Get up, and take your mistress in your arms.”

It is very perverted, very frivolous and guilty, this society of the time of Louis XV. They are very immoral, these gay grand ladies, these _patriciennes_ of libertinage, who love scandal for scandal’s sake, and take a haughty pleasure in the loss of their reputation. Nevertheless, we must do them the justice of admitting that for the most part they retain, amid all their disorders, a quality lacking to many fashionable beauties in democratic times,—disinterestedness. One asks of the grand ladies of the eighteenth century, if not the virtues of the honest woman, at least her qualities. In the high society of these times love is immoral, indecent, full of effrontery, but still there is love. Doubtless it is not the lofty, magnanimous, inspired love of the heroines of the great Corneille or the tender Racine. It is not the ideal passion, purified by the spirit of sacrifice, by the ardent flame of enthusiasm. No, it is no longer that love. Nevertheless, it is still love, or, if it is so in appearance only, at least it is not a vile traffic.

Let us add, in order to be fair, that towards the close of the reign the level of sentiment begins to rise a little. The _Nouvelle-Héloise_ has created something new in the erotic manners of France; and if this novelty is at times declamatory, one cannot avoid recognizing also that it has a touch of spirituality.

No one now approves this remark of Buffon’s: “Man in desiring to base himself on sentiment simply abuses his being and hollows out in his heart a void which nothing is able to replenish.” The fashion has changed. The affectation of passion has been substituted for that of indifference. The man of sensibility, the lover to excess, makes his appearance in the isle of Cythera. Sensibility is the watchword, the word which expresses everything. In a gathering at the house of the Duchess de Chartres, the Countess de Blot declares “that unless of superior virtue, a woman really _sensitive_ could refuse nothing to the passion of Rousseau.” Irony, scepticism, were once the rule, but now it is enthusiasm. Declarations of love are either philosophic theses or tragic tirades. Every lover is an actor who declaims his part with emphasis, with attitudes, inflections of voices and attitudes studied beforehand. Henceforward the salon stage is monopolized by comic lovers, practised Don Juans, virtuosos of sentiment. “Before everything else they seek their own applause and are prouder to make their exit content with themselves than content with the woman. There are some who falsify their whole person, who paint their faces, unpowder their hair, who deprive themselves of wine in order to grow pale, and all in the hope of moving and affecting. There are even some who for a decisive rendezvous put on despair as one would put on rouge; they simulate the marks of half-dried tears on their cheeks with diluted gum arabic.”[17] They boast of returning to nature, of admiring the country, of being compassionate and humane. Formerly it was the negation of love, now it is the parody of it.