How the French Invented Love (8 page)

Madame de La Fayette set her novel in the sixteenth century during the reign of Henri II, specifically during the years 1558 and 1559. In this respect, it is a “historical” novel based on real personages and events. Only the Princess de Clèves herself is entirely fictitious and her story, as it intertwines with the lives of others, is a
roman
in every sense of the word. The seventeenth-century novel still bore the hallmarks of medieval romance in its central preoccupation with the efforts of valorous men to win the hearts of high-born ladies, usually married to someone else. Looking back a hundred years to the time when Diane de Poitiers, the renowned mistress of King Henri II, overshadowed his queen, Catherine de Médicis, the author had found the perfect setting for her tale of nascent love within a web of court intrigue. Yet the shift backward in time fooled no one:
La Princesse de Clèves
held a mirror to the court of Madame de La Fayette’s own king, Louis XIV. Behind the formal hierarchy and stiff etiquette of court events, there lay a hidden world of secret assignations where men and women abandoned their social roles along with their clothes and wigs. There, the young and the old expressed their inner longing for reciprocal love and reciprocal pleasure.

Even Louis XIV had been known to follow his heart in his youthful love for Mademoiselle de Mancini, jeopardizing his projected marriage with Maria Theresa of Spain. Though he was persuaded to make the political marriage, his subsequent libidinous history included a long list of royal favorites, including his first official mistress, Louise de La Vallière, with whom he had two surviving children. Even more influential were Madame de Montespan, who bore him no less than seven children, and Madame de Maintenon, the governess of these illegitimate children, whom he secretly married during the winter of 1684–1685 after his relations with Madame de Montespan had come to an end and after Maria Theresa had died. Maria Theresa had been a loving wife for more than two decades, accepting her husband’s mistresses with astonishing grace. Louis is known to have said upon her death: “This is the first chagrin she has ever caused me.”

As we have seen, there was a long tradition in France that allowed, even expected, French kings to take sexual partners in addition to their wives. The king was allowed “two bodies”—one considered “divine” that extended in an unbroken line from king to king; the other “human,” all too human. No one but censorious priests objected to the king’s sexual exploits. The number of his liaisons attested to his virility. This attitude has persisted in France long after the demise of the monarchy, spilling over onto presidents, whose extramarital involvements were publicly known and never detrimental to their careers.

The future Madame de La Fayette became well versed in the bedroom ploys of the French elite when she was maid of honor to Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria. Then, through her marriage to the Comte de La Fayette in 1655, she had continued familiarity with court life, although she and he also lived at his far-distant estate in Auvergne. At the time of her marriage, she was twenty-one and no longer a “young” bride, since it was common for noblewomen to be married off in their late teens, before they had any chance of becoming corrupted by would-be seducers. And like most women of her class, she was married to an older man. Arranged marriages among the nobility, like those of Madame de La Fayette in real life and the Princess de Clèves in fiction, were the norm well into the early twentieth century. Parents sought unions for their sons and daughters in the interest of fortune, title, and family connections. One did not expect to marry for love.

So, in the novel, when the future Princess de Clèves, barely sixteen, is offered the Prince de Clèves as a suitable match, she does not find him unacceptable, even though she does not love him. For one thing, she has never felt those delicious internal stirrings that the French aptly call
troubles
. She has lived a protected life under the guidance of her widowed mother, Madame de Chartres, a woman of known distinction and virtue. Madame de Chartres had not only sought to cultivate her daughter’s wit and beauty—the two qualities considered necessary for a marriageable woman—she had also tried to make her “virtuous.” Female virtue consisted mainly in shunning the practices that led to sexual entanglements. Madame de Chartres warned her daughter of love’s dangers, however attractive they were made to appear: she spoke to her of “men’s insincerity, of their deceptions and infidelity, of the disastrous effects of love affairs on conjugal life,” and she argued convincingly for “the only thing that can ensure a woman’s happiness,” namely, reciprocal love between husband and wife.

The young woman’s first appearance at court produced a sensation. The Prince de Clèves was struck by her beauty and modest behavior, and fell in love with her on the spot. This was the classic
coup de foudre
, love at first sight, that enters through the eyes and travels immediately to the heart and other unmentioned organs.

Other love-struck rivals presented themselves, but events conspired to leave the field open to the Prince de Clèves. He managed to find an occasion to speak to her of his passion in a suitably respectful manner. “He begged her to let him know what her feelings were for him and told her that his own were of a kind that would make him eternally unhappy if she obeyed her mother’s wishes only out of duty.”

All this high-flown language centers on one question: “Do you love me?” It is still a question that causes anxiety on the part of the person who asks, as well as the person obliged to answer. “Loves me, loves me not” cannot be determined by plucking daisy petals. It is something one feels in a rush of hormones when one is very young, and even when one is supposedly mature. Mademoiselle de Chartres does not yet know what love feels like. She tells her mother that she would marry Monsieur de Clèves “with less reluctance than another man, but that she felt no particular attraction for his person.”

Madame de Chartres accepted the prince’s proposal for her daughter and had no reason to believe that she was giving her a husband she could not love. In this respect, the union was not unlike traditional marriages in India, where many parents still choose spouses for their children and hope that the bride and groom will come to love each other in time. Most young people today in the West assume they will choose their own mates on the basis of the shared love they have already known, whereas in arranged marriages you are given someone “to love” in the future. In
La Princesse de Clèves
, we are at a key point in Western history when romantic love was beginning to make inroads into marital choices, even at the highest level.

After a short engagement, Mademoiselle de Chartres and the Prince de Clèves are wed in a ceremony that takes place at the Palais du Louvre, followed by a nuptial supper attended by the king and queen. We are barely twenty pages into the novel and already the marriage has taken place. What would constitute the happy ending of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English novel occurs near the beginning of this quintessentially French story.

Unfortunately, marriage does not change the nature of the princess’s feelings, and the prince is not satisfied with their union, though he has given her his name and has access to her bedchamber. (At this level of society, they would have had separate suites.) He wants her to love him with some measure of the passion he feels for her. But love and passion are still sentiments unknown to the princess. All she can feel for the prince is
amitié
, a form of affection closer to friendship than to sexual love. In this respect, the princess exemplifies the belief held by Marie de Champagne and her twelfth-century associates that true love cannot exist between spouses.

A twenty-first-century reader finding his or her way through
La Princesse de Clèves
will certainly notice its rich amatory vocabulary and the fine distinctions made between various shades of sentiment.
Amour
,
passion
,
amitié
,
tendresse
,
attachement
,
inclination
,
trouble
,
agitation
,
ardeur
,
flamme
,
embarras
—these are only some of the many terms that French characters use as they endlessly analyze their feelings. Let us not forget that Madame de La Fayette and other writers of her generation were influenced by the linguistic innovations introduced by a group of highly sophisticated ladies known as
précieuses
, who demanded purity in language, delicacy in thought, and a new psychological awareness.
Les précieuses
promoted an ultra-refined conversational tone that filtered into many important literary works. One of the first, Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel
Clélie, histoire romaine
(Clelie: A Roman Story) offered an allegorical journey to the land of love. Its “Map of the Land of Tenderness” was to become the most celebrated graphic document of its day, and one that has been reproduced countless times. I still have a copy bought on the banks of the Seine, which is reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. Note how the lovers’ path takes them through the many stages of love, from
Nouvelle amitié
(new friendship),
Billets doux
and
Petits soins
(love letters and minor attentions), upward toward the imaginary land of
Tendresse
(tenderness), with its surrounding communities of
Obéissance
(obedience),
Bonté
(goodness), and
Respect
. If the lovers wish to reach their goal, they must be especially careful to avoid the hamlets of
Perfidie
(perfidy),
Médisance
(slander), and
Méchanceté
(maliciousness), and not stray to the Lake of Indifference.

When we listen in on the conversations of the characters in
La Princesse de Clèves
, we hear echoes of
les précieuses
and their purified discourse. Gone are any blunt allusions to the flesh that often erupted in medieval and Renaissance literature. The prince speaks only of the greater privileges afforded him by the status of husband, without suggesting that they may have anything to do with the body. So too, Madame de Chartres speaks to her daughter about “love affairs” without any reference to their carnal nature. Does Mademoiselle de Chartres have any idea of what is in store for her on her wedding night? We shall never know. Whatever transpired that night does not seem to have affected her, for better or for worse. Her first experience of sexual intercourse (to revert to less elegant terminology) did not entail an assault upon her heart. Despite his best effort, the Prince de Clèves had not managed to lead his princess into the Land of Tenderness.

And now, of course, a third party enters the scene. The Duc de Nemours, the most handsome and attractive man at court, meets the princess in a thoroughly romantic manner: without ever having seen her before, he is ordered by the king to dance with her at a betrothal ball for the king’s daughter, Claude de France. This fairy-tale meeting amid a crowd of awed admirers can lead in only one direction. Predictably, Monsieur de Nemours falls wildly in love with the princess, and the rest of the book describes his ill-fated attempts to claim her as his own. Or, in the language of the seventeenth century, Nemours plays the game of
galanterie
with a mastery unequaled by anyone else at court, and yet he fails to obtain the rewards he considers his due.

Why not? That is the essential question one asks after finishing the book. It is not because the princess is lacking in passion; the intense arousal sparked by the Duc de Nemours bears no resemblance to the sexless feelings she has for her husband. No, indeed. Little by little, she comes to know the joys and torments of burning love for a man who is the darling of the French court and even a candidate for the hand of the queen of England, Elizabeth I. For the first time in her life, the princess conceals her feelings. But her mother is no fool, and she begins to suspect her daughter’s budding love. Worry about her daughter precipitates her sudden illness and contributes to her decline, but before she dies, she makes sure that the princess becomes fully aware of the dangers before her. “You have an inclination for M. de Nemours; I do not ask you to confess it to me . . . you are on the edge of a precipice.” Madame de Chartres counsels her daughter to withdraw from the court in order to avoid “the miseries of a love affair.”

While the loss of her mother causes the princess great affliction, it also strengthens her will to resist the Duc de Nemours’ advances. As a narrative strategy, the mother’s death is a form of sacrifice for the good of her daughter, who retreats to the country and clings to her husband more than ever in the hope that her attachment to him will provide a defense against the duke. But in time, the prince and princess are obliged to return to the court, and she is once again confronted with the duke’s winning ways.

He manages to declare his love to her in the oblique manner favored by
les précieuses
. “There are women to whom one dares give no sign of the passion one feels for them. . . . Since we dare not let them see we love them, we should at least like them to see that we have no desire to be loved by anyone else.”

If anyone today were to declare his love in this manner, we would think of him as peculiar, if not downright zany. We would find such speech roundabout and devious. American men tend to be more laconic in their expressions of love, however sincere. And what about Frenchmen today? Do they still practice an art of verbal gallantry meant to please the ladies? Some do, particularly older men of the educated classes, for whom
le bon mot
—the clever phrase—is still a must. It is still not uncommon for Frenchmen to make advances in a flowery style they learned from the classical texts they read in school. “
Madame s’amuse à Paris avec nos hommes galants?
” (“Madame is having a good time in Paris with our gallant men?”) “
Cette robe a été faite exprès pour rehausser la couleur de vos yeux.
” (“That dress was made specially to bring out the color of your eyes.”) “
Votre passion pour la littérature française nous honore. Et le plaisir?
” (“Your passion for French literature honors us. And what about pleasure?”) Pleasure? In French, the word for “pleasure” has a distinctly sexual connotation. I knew exactly what that gentleman had in mind, just as the princess knew exactly what the duke was saying.