the variable light of the dark, thoughtful eyes. In her last years, when
her stately figure had grown attenuated, and her face was pallid
with long suffering, the underlying force of her character was more
distinctly defined in the clear and noble outlines of her features. Her
nature was full of subtle shades. Over her reserved strength, her calm
judgment, her wise penetration played the delicate light of a lively
imagination, the shifting tints of a tender sensibility.
Her sympathy
found ready expression in tears, and she could not even bear the
emotion of saying good-by to Mme. de Sevigne when she was going away to
Provence. But her accents were always tempered, and her manners had the
gracious and tranquil ease of a woman superior to circumstances. Her
extreme frankness lent her at times a certain sharpness, and she deals
many light blows at the small vanities and affectations that come under
her notice. "Mon Dieu," said the frivolous Mme. de Marans to her one
day, "I must have my hair cut." "Mon Dieu," replied Mme.
de La Fayette
simply, "do not have it done; that is becoming only to young persons."
Gourville said she was imperious and over-bearing, scolding those she
loved best, as well as those she did not love. But this valet-de-chambre
of La Rochefoucauld, who amassed a fortune and became a man of some
note, was jealous of her influence over his former master, and his
opinions should be taken with reservation. Her delicate satire may have
been sometimes a formidable weapon, but it was directed only against
follies, and rarely, if ever, used unkindly. She was a woman for
intimacies, and it is to those who knew her best that we must look for
a just estimate of her qualities. "You would love her as soon as you
had time to be with her, and to become familiar with her esprit and her
wisdom," wrote Mme. de Sevigne to her daughter, who was disposed to be
critical; "the better one knows her, the more one is attached to her."
One must also take into consideration her bad health.
People thought
her selfish or indifferent when she was only sad and suffering. For more
than twenty years she was ill, consumed by a slow fever which permitted
her to go out only at intervals. La Rochefoucauld had the gout, and they
consoled each other. Mme. de Sevigne thought it better not to have the
genius of a Pascal, than to have so many ailments. "Mme.
De La Fayette
is always languishing, M. de La Rochefoucauld always lame," she writes;
"we have conversations so sad that it seems as if there were nothing
more to do but to bury us; the garden of Mme. de La Fayette is the
prettiest spot in the world, everything blooming, everything perfumed;
we pass there many evenings, for the poor woman does not dare go out in
a carriage." "Her health is never good," she writes again, "nevertheless
she sends you word that she should not like death better; AU CONTRAIRE."
There are times when she can no longer "think, or speak, or answer, or
listen; she is tired of saying good morning and good evening." Then she
goes away to Meudon for a few days, leaving La Rochefoucauld "incredibly
sad." She speaks for herself in a letter from the country house which
Gourville has placed at her disposal.
"I am at Saint Maur; I have left all my affairs and all my husbands; I
have my children and the fine weather; that suffices. I take the waters
of Forges; I look after my health, I see no one. I do not mind at all
the privation; every one seems to me so attached to pleasures which
depend entirely upon others, that I find my disposition a gift of the
fairies.
"I do not know but Mme de Coulanges has already sent you word of our
after-dinner conversations at Gourville's about people who have taste
above or below their intelligence. Mme. Scarron and the Abbe Tetu were
there; we lost ourselves in subtleties until we no longer understood
anything. If the air of Provence, which subtilizes things still more,
magnifies for you our visions, you will be in the clouds. You have taste
below your intelligence; so has M. de La Rochefoucauld; and myself also,
but not so much as you two. VOILA an example which will guide you."
She disliked writing letters, and usually limited herself to a few plain
facts, often in her late years to a simple bulletin of her health. This
negligence was the subject of many passages-at-arms between herself and
Mme. de Sevigne. "If I had a lover who wished my letters every morning,
I would break with him," she writes. "Do not measure our friendship by
our letters. I shall love you as much in writing you only a page in a
month, as you me in writing ten in eight days." Again she replies to
some reproach: "Make up your mind, ma belle, to see me sustain, all my
life, with the whole force of my eloquence, that I love you still more
than you love me. I will make Corbinelli agree with me in a quarter of
an hour; your distrust is your sole defect, and the only thing in you
that can displease me."
But in spite of a certain apparent indolence, and her constant ill
health, there were many threads that connected with the outside world
the pleasant room in which Mme. de La Fayette spent so many days of
suffering. "She finds herself rich in friends from all sides and all
conditions," writes Mme. de Sevigne; "she has a hundred arms; she
reaches everywhere. Her children appreciate all this, and thank her
every day for possessing a spirit so engaging." She goes to Versailles,
on one of her best days, to thank the king for a pension, and receives
so many kind words that it "suggests more favors to come." He orders
a carriage and accompanies her with other ladies through the park,
directing his conversation to her, and seeming greatly pleased with
her judicious praise. She spends a few days at Chantilly, where she is
invited to all the fetes, and regrets that Mme. de Sevigne could not be
with her in that charming spot, which she is "fitted better than anyone
else to enjoy." No one understands so well the extent of her influence
and her credit as this devoted friend, who often quotes her to Mme.
de Grignan as a model. "Never did any one accomplish so much without
leaving her place," she says.
But there was one phase in the life of Mme. de La Fayette which was not
fully confided even to Mme. de Sevigne. It concerns a chapter of obscure
political history which it is needless to dwell upon here, but which
throws much light upon her capacity for managing intricate affairs. Her
connection with it was long involved in mystery, and was only unveiled
in a correspondence given to the world at a comparatively recent date.
It was in the salon of the Grande Mademoiselle that she was thrown into
frequent relations with the two daughters of Charles Amedee de Savoie,
Duc de Nemours, one of whom became Queen of Portugal, the other Duchesse
de Savoie and, later, Regent during the minority of her son. These
relations resulted in one of the ardent friendships which played so
important a part in her career. Her intercourse with the beautiful
but vain, intriguing, and imperious Duchesse de Savoie assumed the
proportion of a delicate diplomatic mission. "Her salon," says Lescure,
"was, for the affairs of Savoy, a center of information much
more important in the eyes of shrewd politicians than that of the
ambassador." She not only looked after the personal matters of Mme.
Royale, but was practically entrusted with the entire management of her
interests in Paris. From affairs of state and affairs of the heart to
the daintiest articles of the toilette her versatile talent is called
into requisition. Now it is a message to Louvois or the king, now a turn
to be adroitly given to public opinion, now the selection of a perfume
or a pair of gloves. "She watches everything, thinks of everything,
combines, visits, talks, writes, sends counsels, procures advice,
baffles intrigues, is always in the breach, and renders more service
by her single efforts than all the envoys avowed or secret whom
the Duchesse keeps in France." Nor is the value of these services
unrecognized. "Have I told you," wrote Mme. de Sevigne to her daughter,
"that Mme. de Savoie has sent a hundred ells of the finest velvet in the
world to Mme. de La Fayette, and a hundred ells of satin to line it,
and two days ago her portrait, surrounded with diamonds, which is worth
three hundred louis?"
The practical side of Mme. de La Fayette's character was remarkable in
a woman of so fine a sensibility and so rare a genius.
Her friends
often sought her counsel; and it was through her familiarity with legal
technicalities that La Rochefoucauld was enabled to save his fortune,
which he was at one time in danger of losing. In clear insight, profound
judgment, and knowledge of affairs, she was scarcely, if at all,
surpassed by Mme. de Maintenon, the feminine diplomatist par excellence
of her time, though her field of action was less broad and conspicuous.
But her love of consideration was not so dominant and her ambition not
so active. It was one of her theories that people should live without
ambition as well as without passion. "It is sufficient to exist," she
said. Her energy when occasion called for it does not quite accord with
this passive philosophy, and suggests at least a vast reserved force;
but if she directed her efforts toward definite ends it was usually to
serve other interests than her own. She had been trained in a different
school from Mme. de Maintenon, her temperament was modified by her
frail health, and the prizes of life had come to her apparently
without special exertion. She was a woman, too, of more sentiment and
imagination. Her fastidious delicacy and luxurious tastes were the
subject of critical comment on the part of this austere censor, who
condemned the gilded decorations of her bed as a useless extravagance,
giving the characteristic reason that "the pleasure they afforded
was not worth the ridicule they excited." The old friendship that had
existed when Mme. Scarron was living in such elegant and mysterious
seclusion, devoting herself to the king's children, and finding her main
diversion in the little suppers enlivened by the wit of Mme. de Sevigne
and Mme. de Coulanges, and the more serious, but not less agreeable,
conversation of Mme. de La Fayette, had evidently grown cool. They had
their trifling disagreements. "Mme. de La Fayette puts too high a price
upon her friendship," wrote Mme. de Maintenon, who had once attached
such value to a few approving words from her. In her turn Mme. de La
Fayette indulged in a little light satire. Referring to the comedy of
Esther, which Racine had written by command for the pupils at Saint Cyr,
she said, "It represents the fall of Mme. de Montespan and the rise of
Mme. de Maintenon; all the difference is that Esther was rather younger,
and less of a precieuse in the matter of piety." There was certainly
less of the ascetic in Mme. de La Fayette. She had more color and also
more sincerity. In symmetry of character, in a certain feminine quality
of taste and tenderness, she was superior, and she seems to me to
have been of more intrinsic value as a woman. Whether under the same
conditions she would have attained the same power may be a question.
If not, I think it would have been because she was unwilling to pay the
price, not because she lacked the grasp, the tact, or the diplomacy.
It is mainly as a woman of letters that Mme. de La Fayette is known
today, and it was through her literary work that she made the strongest
impression upon her time. Boileau said that she had a finer intellect
and wrote better than any other woman in France. But she wrote only for
the amusement of idle or lonely hours, and always avoided any display of
learning, in order not to attract jealousy as well as from instinctive
delicacy of taste. "He who puts himself above others,"
she said,
"whatever talent he may possess, puts himself below his talent." But
her natural atmosphere was an intellectual one, and the friend of La
Rochefoucauld, who would have "liked Montaigne for a neighbor," had her
own message for the world. Her mind was clear and vigorous, her taste
critical and severe, and her style had a flexible quality that readily
took the tone of her subject. In concise expression she doubtless
profited much from the author of the MAXIMS, who rewrote many of his
sentences at least thirty times. "A phrase cut out of a book is worth a
louis d'or," she said, "and every word twenty sous."
Unfortunately her
"Memoires de la Cour de France" is fragmentary, as her son carelessly
lent the manuscripts, and many of them were lost. But the part that
remains gives ample evidence of the breadth of her intelligence, the
penetrating, lucid quality of her mind, and her talent for seizing the
salient traits of the life about her. In her romances, which were first
published under the name of Segrais, one finds the touch of an artist,
and the subtle intuitions of a woman. In the rapid evolution of modern
taste and the hopeless piling up of books, these works have fallen
somewhat into the shade, but they are written with a vivid naturalness
of style, a truth of portraiture, and a delicacy of sentiment, that
commend them still to all lovers of imaginative literature. Fontenelle
read the "Princesse de Cleves" four times when it appeared. La Harpe
said it was "the first romance that offered reasonable adventures
written with interest and elegance." It marked an era in the history of
the novel. "Before Mme. de La Fayette," said Voltaire,
"people wrote
in a stilted style of improbable things." We have the rare privilege of
reading her own criticism in a letter to the secretary of the Duchesse
de Savoie, in which she disowns the authorship, and adds a few lines of
discreet eulogy.
"As for myself," she writes, "I am flattered at being suspected of it.
I believe I should acknowledge the book, if I were assured the author
would never appear to claim it. I find it very agreeable and well
written without being excessively polished, full of things of admirable
delicacy, which should be read more than once; above all, it seems to
be a perfect presentation of the world of the court and the manner
of living there. It is not romantic or ambitious; indeed it is not a
romance; properly speaking, it is a book of memoirs, and that I am told
was its title, but it was changed. VOILA, monsieur, my judgment upon
Mme. De Cleves; I ask yours, for people are divided upon this book to
the point of devouring each other. Some condemn what others admire;
whatever you may say, do not fear to be alone in your opinion."
Sainte-Beuve, whose portrait of Mme. de La Fayette is so delightful as
to make all others seem superfluous, has devoted some exquisite lines
to this book. "It is touching to think," he writes, "of the peculiar
situation which gave birth to these beings so charming, so pure, these
characters so noble and so spotless, these sentiments so fresh, so
faultless, so tender;" how Mme. de La Fayette put into it all that her
loving, poetic soul retained of its first, ever-cherished dreams, and
how M. de La Rochefoucauld was pleased doubtless to find once more in
"M. De Nemours" that brilliant flower of chivalry which he had too much
misused--a sort of flattering mirror in which he lived again his youth.
Thus these two old friends renewed in imagination the pristine beauty of
that age when they had not known each other, hence could not love each
other. The blush so characteristic of Mme. De Cleves, and which at first
is almost her only language, indicates well the design of the author,
which is to paint love in its freshest, purest, vaguest, most adorable,
most disturbing, most irresistible--in a word, in its own color. It is
constantly a question of that joy which youth joined to beauty gives, of
the trouble and embarrassment that love causes in the innocence of early
years, in short, of all that is farthest from herself and her friend in
their late tie."
But whatever tints her tender and delicate imaginings may have taken
from her own soul, Mme. de La Fayette has caught the eternal beauty of
a pure and loyal spirit rising above the mists of sense into the serene
air of a lofty Christian renunciation.
The sad but triumphant close of her romance foreshadowed the swift
breaking up of her own pleasant life. In 1680, not long after the
appearance of the "Princesse de Cleves," La Rochefoucauld died, and
the song of her heart was changed to a miserere. "Mme.
de La Fayette has
fallen from the clouds," says Mme. de Sevigne. "Where can she find
such a friend, such society, a like sweetness, charm, confidence,
consideration for her and her son?" A little later she writes from
The Rocks, "Mme. de La Fayette sends me word that she is more deeply
affected than she herself believed, being occupied with her health
and her children; but these cares have only rendered more sensible the
veritable sadness of her heart. She is alone in the world... The poor
woman cannot close the ranks so as to fill this place."
The records of the thirteen years that remain to Mme. de La Fayette are
somber and melancholy. "Nothing can replace the blessings I have lost,"
she says. Restlessly she seeks diversion in new plans.
She enlarges her
house as her horizon diminishes; she finds occupation in the affairs of
Mme. Royale and interests herself in the marriage of the daughter of
her never-forgotten friend, the Princess Henrietta, with the heir to the
throne of Savoy. She writes a romance without the old vigor, occupies
herself with historic reminiscences, and takes a passing refuge in an
ardent affection for the young Mme. de Schomberg, which excites the
jealousy of some older friends. But the strongest link that binds her
to the world is the son whose career opens so brilliantly as a young
officer and for whom she secures an ample fortune and a fine marriage.
In this son and the establishment of a family centered all her hopes
and ambitions. She was spared the pain of seeing them vanish like the
"baseless fabric of a vision." The object of so many cares survived
her less than two years; her remaining son and the only person left to
represent her was the abbe who had so little care for her manuscripts
and her literary fame. A century later, through a collateral branch
of the family, the glory of the name was revived by the distinguished
general so dear to the American heart. It was in the less tangible realm
of the intellect that Mme. de La Fayette was destined to an unlooked-for
immortality.
But in spite of these interests, the sense of loneliness and desolation
is always present. Her few letters give us occasional flashes of the old
spirit, but the burden of them is inexpressibly sad. Her sympathies and
associations led her toward a mild form of Jansenism, and as the evening
shadows darkened, her thoughts turned to fresh speculations upon the
destiny of the soul. She went with Mme. de Coulanges to visit Mme. de
La Sabliere, who was expiating the errors and follies of her life in
austere penitence at the Incurables. The devotion of this once gay and
brilliant woman, who had been so deeply tinged with the philosophy of
Descartes, touched her profoundly, and suggested a source of consolation
which she had never found. She sought the counsels of her confessor, who
did not spare her, and though she was never sustained by the ardor and
exaltation of the religieuse, her last days were not without peace and
a tranquil hope. To the end she remained a gracious, thoughtful,
self-poised, calmly-judging woman whose illusions never blinded her to
the simple facts of existence, though sometimes throwing over them a
transparent veil woven from the tender colors of her own heart. Above
the weariness and resignation of her last words written to Mme. de
Sevigne sounds the refrain of a life that counts among its crowning
gifts and graces a genius for friendship.
"Alas, ma belle, all I have to tell you of my health is very bad; in a
word, I have repose neither night nor day, neither in body nor in mind.
I am no more a person either by one or the other. I perish visibly.
I must end when it pleases God, and I am submissive.
BELIEVE ME, MY
DEAREST, YOU ARE THE PERSON IN THE WORLD WHOM I HAVE
MOST TRULY LOVED."
Mme. de La Fayette represents better than any other woman the social
and literary life of the last half of the seventeenth century. Mme. de
Sevigne had an individual genius that might have made itself equally
felt in any other period. Mme. de Maintenon, whom Roederer regards as
the true successor of Mme. de Rambouillet, was narrowed by personal
ambition, and by the limitations of her early life. Born in a prison,
reared in poverty, wife in name, but practically secretary and nurse
of a crippled, witty, and licentious poet over whose salon she presided
brilliantly; discreet and penniless widow, governess of the illegitimate
children of the king, adviser and finally wife of that king, friend of
Ninon, model of virtue, femme d'esprit, politician, diplomatist, and
devote--no fairy tale can furnish more improbable adventures and more
striking contrasts. But she was the product of exceptional circumstances
joined to an exceptional nature. It is true she put a final touch upon
the purity of manners which was so marked a feature of the Hotel de
Rambouillet, and for a long period gave a serious tone to the social
life of France. But she ruled through repression, and one is inclined
to accept the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that she does not represent the
distinctive social current of the time. In Mme. de La Fayette we find
its delicacy, its courtesy, its elegance, its intelligence, its critical
spirit, and its charm.
In considering the great centers in which the fashionable, artistic,
literary, and scientific Paris of the seventeenth century found its
meeting ground, one is struck with the practical training given to its
versatile, flexible feminine minds. Women entered intelligently and
sympathetically into the interests of men, who, in turn, did not
reserve their best thoughts for the club or an after-dinner talk among
themselves. There was stimulus as well as diversity in the two modes of
thinking and being. Men became more courteous and refined, women more
comprehensive and clear. But conversation is the spontaneous overflow
of full minds, and the light play of the intellect is only possible on
a high level, when the current thought has become a part of the daily
life, so that a word suggests infinite perspectives to the swift
intelligence. It is not what we know, but the flavor of what we know,
that adds"sweetness and light" to social intercourse.
With their rapid
intuition and instinctive love of pleasing, these French women were
quick to see the value of a ready comprehension of the subjects in which
clever men are most interested. It was this keen understanding, added to
the habit of utilizing what they thought and read, their ready facility
in grasping the salient points presented to them, a natural gift
of graceful expression, with a delicacy of taste and an exquisite
politeness which prevented them from being aggressive, that gave them
their unquestioned supremacy in the salons which made Paris for so long
a period the social capital of Europe. It was impossible that intellects
so plastic should not expand in such an atmosphere, and the re