Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

It ought to be. But in Madame de Sévigné it certainly was not. She had two children, a daughter and a son. The son much resembled her, with some of her good qualities exaggerated into faults. He was gay and kindly; but he was light-headed and careless. Such as he was, his mother loved him with normal affection. She saw his weakness and tried to correct it. But she enjoyed his society, retained his confidence, and could be as merry with him as a summer’s day, witness her inimitable account of his relating to her his comic parting from Ninon de l’Enclos. “He said the maddest things in the world and so did I. It was a scene worthy of Molière.” Then, when he keeps bad company, behaves indiscreetly, and is generally reprehensible, she is aware of it at once and comments in no uncertain terms. “I wish you could see how little merit or beauty it takes to charm my son. His taste is beneath contempt.”

But the daughter, the daughter, Madame de Grignan, she is a paragon, a miracle of nature, above admiration, and without defect. The bulk of Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence is written to her, and what is much worse, it is written about her, page after page of advice, of anxiety, of adoration, until even dear lovers of the mother, like Fitzgerald, feel that, in her own vivid phrase, they have had “an indigestion of Grignans.”

But this feeling of boredom vanishes as soon as you see that you are confronted with a psychological problem. For Madame de Sévigné’s attitude, her language, are not that of a normal, not even of a passionately affectionate, mother. Her feeling in this case is an obsession, a real mania, like a girl’s or a grown woman’s genuine love affair. She cannot be happy one moment away from the object of her devotion. She thinks of her daily, nightly, dreams of her, in everything is anxious to please her or sick to think she has not pleased her. She seeks solitude because there she can dream more freely of this beloved daughter of hers. And the chief charm of society is that some one may inquire about Madame de Grignan’s health and venture a compliment which the eager listener can set down and pass on. Like a lover of twenty, she suggests that she and her beloved are looking at the moon at the same time. “You alone,” she writes, in the ardor of her passion, “can make the joy or the sorrow of my life. I know nothing but you, and beyond you everything is nothing to me.” Over and over again she repeats that she wishes she loved God as she loves this bit of herself, this thing of mortal, but exquisite fragility. Now this is not quite the love of a common sane and normal mother, is it?

And the daughter, did she deserve it? Some think not. She was beautiful. And she was a scholar, a pupil of Descartes, a reader of philosophies and critic of literature, who looked down a little on her mother’s naïve and extremely personal judgments. She was a wit, also,—wrote what she thought fine letters. They seem to us a little stilted, as the one she sent to Moulceau after her mother’s death. And some say she was haughty, without her mother’s broad sympathy, and even high-tempered and quarrelsome.

But all these flaws were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed, pretty to observe how, being the keenest sighted of women, she occasionally sees things that she will not see. Thus, she writes of her daughter’s boasted style, “It is perfect. All you have to do is to keep it as it is and not try to improve it.” Or of her attitude towards herself. “Somebody said the other day that, with all the tender affection you have for me, you don’t get as much out of my society as you might, that you do not appreciate what I am worth, even as regards you.”

For the most part, however, it is a sweet, warm tempest of praise, an indigestion of praise, touchingly at variance with the chilly judgment of those who looked on. Madame de Grignan has not only the choicest of intellects, but the tenderest of hearts. She has a stoical, old Roman virtue which the vulgar may mistake for indifference; but underneath she is so surprisingly sensitive that every precaution is necessary to guard her too delicate nerves from intolerable shock. She thinks loftily, she speaks wittily, and her letters are the quintessence of everything finished and exquisite, so different from the hasty and careless scrawls of this scribbling mother, though, to be sure, good judges have found ours, also, not unworthy of commendation. And some, who do not believe that a love that takes us out of ourselves is the best worth having of all things in this loveless world, may think such a degree of self-deception puerile. It is a little unusual, at any rate.

Such a love, in a universe of cross accidents and unforeseen contingencies, is always shot through and through with misery. This woman, so poised and tempered in all that concerned herself and the common course of life, dwelt in a cloud of anxiety for what concerned the welfare of her precious daughter. It was worry, worry from morning till night. In far Provence, where the treasure and her husband and children lived, what disasters might not occur, while the sun was shining and wit sparkling in jovial Paris? With the lovely inconsistency of love, the mother declares at one moment that her passion is all joy and the delight of it far, far outweighs the care and trouble, at the next that life is only wretchedness for those who have a great devotion. “The mind should be at peace,” she says; “but the heart debauches it perpetually. Mine is filled full with my daughter.” She frets over great things and little, Madame de Grignan’s children, Madame de Grignan’s debts, Madame de Grignan’s lawsuits, above all over Madame de Grignan’s health. The daughter was, apparently, one of those persons who are never ill and never well. And the doting mother, at five hundred miles distance, is always suggesting drugs, draughts, plasters, poultices, doctors, doctor’s devices, and devices of the devil.

Also, in the rare intervals when they were together, she suggested to the same effect, and in consequence such sojourns were not happy. I know few things more tragic than this vast affection, longing, longing to be with its object, and when they did meet, thwarted, hampered, blighted by that fatal inadequacy of human contact which makes love’s fine fruition a joy not of this transitory world. We have, of course, little record of things actually done or said while the lover and the beloved were together. But we have the piteous cry of the bereaved one when they had felt themselves compelled to part. “Was it a crime for me to be anxious about your health? I saw you perishing before my eyes, and I was not permitted to shed a tear. I was killing you, they said, I was murdering you. I must keep still, if I suffocated. I never knew a more ingenious and cruel torment.” Or again, “In God’s name, child, let us try another visit to reëstablish our reputation. We must be more reasonable, at least you must, and not give them occasion to say, ‘You simply kill one another.’” With what a strangling clutch does she tear at her heart, in the effort to make those adjustments of human passion which can never be perfectly made by flesh and blood. “You speak like one who is even further from me than I thought, who has wholly forgotten me, who no longer understands the measure of my attachment, nor the tenderness of my heart, who knows no longer the devotion I have for her, nor that natural weakness and bent to tears which have been an object of mocking to your philosophic firmness.”

But it makes no difference. In spite of presence, or absence, or indifference, the old wound keeps still and always fresh and bleeding. Still, still the longing heart cries out for what it needs, even if it can never obtain it. “How is it that my whole life turns on one sole thought and everything else appears to me to be nothing?” Only God can comfort her. “Everything must be given up for God, and I will do it, and will only wonder at His ways, who, when all things seem as if they should be well with us, opens great gulfs which swallow the whole good of life, a separation which wounds my heart every hour of the day and far more hours of the night than sense or reason would.”