How the French Invented Love (10 page)

The difference between English and French modes came home to me vividly when I was at Oxford many years ago. Nearing the end of my sabbatical stay, I knew something had gone awry. I was supposed to be researching a paper on the reception of George Sand in England, but spent most of my time caring for a willful five-year-old and keeping order in an antiquated thatched cottage outside the city. Sometimes on weekends, hoping to liven up my neutered state, I would go into town and attend a formal dinner party given by one of the Oxford faculty. The food was invariably bland and the conversation desexualized. Where were the playful innuendos I associated with European living?

“Enough,” I silently screamed one day. “Enough of British dinners featuring stewed lamb and cauliflower. Enough of men who avoid my glance and make me feel like a talking block of wood. I’m going to France!”

As soon as school was out and I could place my son in an overnight boys’ camp, I took off for Paris. The minute I dropped my suitcase in a small Left Bank hotel and strolled out into the street, I began to feel different. Outside my hotel, a street cleaner using one of those old-fashioned twig brooms looked me up and down admiringly and said, “
Bonjour, Madame
” in a suggestive tone I shall never forget. I was once again in France, a land where pleasing the ladies had not gone out of style.

I
cannot resist one further anecdote of how French boys are, to this day, indoctrinated into the art of gallantry. My American friend Judy, who has lived in Paris since she married a Frenchman some twenty-five years ago, recalled this incident from the life of her son, Albert. He was three or four years old, playing on the floor, while she and her American brother discussed the differences between heterosexual relations in France and the United States. Her brother spoke of the ease with which Frenchmen attract women, while he lamented his own ineptness with the opposite sex. Judy agreed that Frenchmen certainly know how to turn on the charm. Witness her husband, who had wooed her away from less seductive Americans. These words were apparently not wasted on her son. He looked up from his toys and carefully said: “Mommy, you have such pretty lips!”

I met Albert much later, when he was seventeen and in the last year of a prestigious French lycée. As he was considering various university possibilities, both in France and in the United States, I encouraged him to apply to my home university, Stanford. He was subsequently accepted, decided to go there, and ultimately made a name for himself, not only with his schoolwork but also with the ladies. Whatever elements of gallantry he had brought from France served him well on “the Farm.”

CHAPTER THREE

Comic Love, Tragic Love

Molière and Racine

L
OVE IS A GREAT TEACHER:
W
HAT ONE NEVER WAS, IT TEACHES US TO BE.

Molière,
L’école des femmes,
1662

T
HE CURSE OF
V
ENUS IS FATAL.

Jean Racine,
Phèdre,
1677

Front-page engraving of
L’école des femmes
, 1719 edition. From
Wikipedia
, “The School for Wives” entry.

M
ost French people were still illiterate during the seventeenth century. Only members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie could read and write. For those who could read with ease, a steady stream of novels, poems, fables, maxims, and memoirs familiarized them with the rules of gallantry. For the rest, as in Shakespearean England, you could keep abreast of the latest fashions by going to the theater, where there were comfortable boxes for the well-heeled and standing room in the pit for only fifteen sous. Paris, like London, was a mecca for playwrights, and even the provinces had their share of theatrical productions. The illustrious names of Corneille, Molière, and Racine speak for an era when dramatic spectacle reached Olympian heights, never attained before or since in France, and most of these plays dealt directly or indirectly with love.

Molière and his younger contemporary Racine were first inheritors of and then contributors to the latest fashions in loving. Love showed its comic face in Molière’s works, though sometimes those same comic faces betrayed inner anguish, whereas love was resolutely tragic in the world of Racine. Through the masks of comedy and tragedy, we can approach the meaning and practice of love during the 1660s and 1670s, the same period that gave rise to
La Princesse de Clèves
. At Versailles, in Paris, and in the major provincial cities, love onstage attracted spectators who could never get enough of beautiful young people magnetically drawn to one another despite the forces that conspired to pull them apart. As in real life, love knew no age barriers, with older men comically in love with younger women and older women tragically in love with younger men. In both instances, theater would take on a psychological dimension it didn’t have before. Spectators who went to the theater to be entertained might come away with insights into their own amorous entanglements and erotic longings.

Molière’s Comedies of Passion

During the years that Molière was traveling in the provinces with his theater troupe, from 1643 to 1658,
précieuses
controlled the salons that legislated correct French usage and refined modes of behavior. Yet even as preciosity dictated proper speech and conduct, its excesses would ultimately doom it to ridicule.
Les précieuses ridicules
(
The Pretentious Young Ladies
), the play that put Molière on the Parisian map in 1659, made a mockery of naïve young women bitten by the bug of romance. Better yet, listen to Magdelon, one of the two young protagonists, as she lays out her improbable vision of love to her incredulous father.

    Father, my cousin will tell you, just as well as I, that marriage should never occur until after all the other adventures are over. A lover, in order to be acceptable, should be able to toy with noble fancies, and play the gamut of emotion, sweet and tender and impassioned. And he should woo according to the rules. . . . The day of the declaration arrives; this should usually take place on a garden path, while the rest of the party has gone out. . . . Then come the adventures: rivals who threaten an already established affection, persecutions by fathers, jealousies conceived on some false basis, reproaches, despairs, abductions and all the consequences. That’s how matters are treated according to proper etiquette; those are rules of gallantry which can hardly be set aside.
¹

Magdelon’s father has entirely different ideas. Marriage is where love should begin, and he has already chosen husbands for his daughter and his niece, Cathos, on the basis of their suitors’ families and finances.

Magdelon reacts with outrage. “What? Begin with marriage?” And Cathos, in an oft-quoted line, adds: “As for me, all I can tell you is that I find marriage very shocking. How can one endure the idea of sleeping beside a man who is absolutely nude?”

The father warns the two young ladies: “Either you’ll both be married very soon, or you’ll go into a nunnery.”

Magdelon dismisses her father’s position as “utterly bourgeois,” and Cathos condemns him as “coarse.” But this is a play in which the common sense of the coarse bourgeois wins out over the affectations of the two damsels, who have come up from the provinces equipped with nothing more than precious language and far-fetched romantic notions acquired from books. While they hungrily look upon Paris as “the office of marvels, the center of good taste, wit, and gallantry,” they are unable to distinguish between what is authentic and what is false and are taken in by two lackeys masquerading as gentlemen. Molière uses this old theatrical ploy to deflate the sentimental notions of two gullible young women and shame them into submission.

T
he bourgeois ideal of marriage espoused by Magdelon’s father does not fare so well in Molière’s subsequent plays. In fact, once settled in Paris after the success of
Les précieuses ridicules
and after Louis XIV had given him the Palais-Royal theater in 1660, he produced works that were more sympathetic to women’s marital aspirations.
The School for Husbands
(1661),
The School for Wives
(1662), and
The Learned Ladies
(1672), written in the verse couplets that would become Molière’s trademark, feature young women who succeed in marrying the men of their choice.

First,
The School for Husbands
pits old-fashioned patriarchal dominance against the new mode of love, which champions claims of the heart. These two positions are incarnated in two brothers, Sganarelle and Ariste, who have as their wards two sisters of marriageable age. Sganarelle, entrenched in the old order, insists that his ward, Isabelle, should live according to his reactionary ideas: she should stay at home and apply herself to domestic duties such as mending his underwear and knitting socks. She should shut her ears to romantic talk and never go out without a chaperon. Since he himself intends to marry Isabelle, despite their great difference in age, he is intent upon keeping her pure, or, in the language of Molière, “I don’t want to wear horns on my head,” the traditional symbol of cuckoldry.

His brother, Ariste, representing the new order, expresses the credo of gallant love: “I believe the heart is what must be won.” He, too, wants to marry his ward, Léonor, and has brought her up according to an entirely different formula.

    
My care of Léonor has followed these maxims:

    
I have not turned her slight liberties into crimes.

    
I’ve always consented to her youthful desires.

    
And, thank God, I haven’t had to repent.

    
I’ve allowed her attractive company;

    
Entertainment, balls, and comedies;

    
These are things, in my opinion, which are always

    
Very suitable for forming young people’s wit;

    
And the school of the world, in that air which gives life,

    
Is better instruction than any book.

As for his marital plans, Ariste does not want to force Léonor’s hand. He hopes that his great affection and kindness, plus a fortune of 4,000 crowns a year, will make up for the difference in age. But if not, she has the right to look elsewhere for a husband.

In the end, it is Ariste’s version of female liberation that wins over Sganarelle’s old-fashioned script. Léonor chooses Ariste rather than the blond-wigged fops who pursue her at balls, but Isabelle contrives to wed Valère, the young man who has secretly captured her heart, leaving Sganarelle to declaim misogynistically:

    
He who trusts a woman will always be deceived;

    
Even the best of them are fecund in evil;

    
It is a sex born to damn the whole world!

The real message is not so much the warfare between youthful love and parental authority, as one finds in many English and Italian plays of the same period, but the emergence of a radically new spirit announcing the partial emancipation of women. Early in the play Léonor’s female attendant, Lisette, attacks Sganarelle’s efforts to keep his ward a semiprisoner. She asks pointedly: “Are we among the Turks who lock up their women?” The Turkish harem was a symbol of female repression that seemed totally alien to seventeenth-century France, just as the Afghan burqa appears to Westerners today. Yet the liberties that many upper-class women enjoyed during the reign of Louis XIV were by no means universal, and they rarely included the choice of a marriage partner. Freedom, of a sort, was to begin only
after
marriage.

Not so long ago, Frenchwomen of the nobility and
haute bourgeoisie
were still brought up with this sequence in mind. When I was at Wellesley College in the 1950s, one of my housemates announced that she was returning to France to marry a man she hardly knew. Why, I asked, would anyone want to marry so young? Her answer was: to be free. Free? Weren’t we free at college, despite curfews and overnight prohibitions? She was tired of such constraints and wanted to be “truly free.” But how can one be truly free in marriage? Lillian had been brought up in an affluent family, without ever having been away from prying eyes. She went from a girls’ boarding school to a women’s college and was tired of her same-sex world. Marriage was the gateway into heterosexuality. She envisioned a life of relative independence, with opportunities to entertain and be entertained in the company of both men and women. So, back she went to France the summer after our freshman year, to marry, to live in Paris, and, God knows, enjoy the delights of gallant relationships. Though I once visited her in a luxurious Right Bank apartment, we lost touch over the years, and I wonder about the end of her story. Did her marital decision bring her the satisfaction she had anticipated?