Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

She had the sheer salt of French wit, too, could tell a story inimitably, or strike off a stinging epigram. It was she who created the well-known phrase in regard to St. Denis’s long perambulation with his head off: “It is the first step that costs”; she who said—untranslatably—of the verses that showered on Voltaire’s grave, that the great author had become “la pâture des vers”; she who remarked of one of her own friends that her wit was like a fine instrument always a-tuning and never played on. Above all, she could make inexhaustible mockery of her besetting evil. “Write disagreeably, if you like,” she urges. “As the man said of the rack, it will help me to pass an hour or two, at any rate.” And again, “I hear nothings, I speak nothings, I take interest in nothing, and from nothing to nothing I travel gently down the dull way which leads to becoming nothing.”

Thus the roses strewn over the abyss make it only deeper and blacker and more horrible. Others may take pleasure in her vivacity, may laugh at her stories and applaud her wit. She takes no pleasure and finds the applause and laughter utterly hollow. Man delights her not nor woman either. And still those interminable hours drag along, unfilled and unfillable as the sieves of the daughters of Danäus.

To be sure, when all these glittering analyses of nothing were written, she was old, and blind, and sleepless, three things that are apt to dull the quickest spirits. Before she was far past middle life her eyesight failed her and she became the frail, exquisite, touching figure that we see in her best-known portrait, sitting in a great straw-canopied chair, her tonneau, she called it, with fine, earnest, sensitive features, stretching out her hands in the groping gesture pathetically characteristic of her affliction. And loss of sight to eyes so keen must leave an appalling emptiness.

Also she was tormented by insomnia, to long, blind, empty days added solitary nights, when the tossing of weary limbs doubles the tossing of weary spirits. “One goes over and over in one’s mind everything that worries and distresses one; I have a gnawing worm which sleeps no more than I do; I reproach myself alone with all my troubles and it seems clear that I have brought them all upon myself.” At two A.M. such things do have a most intolerable clarity.

With afflictions like these, at seventy years old, it is perhaps not wonderful that a lone woman should feel she had had enough of life. Unfortunately Madame du Deffand’s weariness began when she was young and could see—too well. According to Mademoiselle Aïssé, after she and her husband had parted, she asked him to come back to her, desiring to reëstablish her position in the world. For six weeks things hobbled along. Then she became bored till she could endure it no further, and she made her state of mind so evident, not by ill-temper, but by all signs of depression, that the husband departed, this time for good and all. But who can depict her experiences better than herself? “I remember thinking in my youth that no one was happy but madmen, drunkards, and lovers.” And elsewhere she flings the facts at us like a glass of cold water in the face. “I was born melancholy. My gayety comes only by fits and they are growing rare enough.”

Those things which distract and divert most men and women, those great passions and little pleasures which to some of us seem to fill every cranny of life with business and delight, to her meant simply nothing. If we review them in their larger categories, we shall see her lay her cold, light finger on them and shrivel them up. It is not deliberate on her part. She would be glad to enjoy as others do. But she has not the power. “It is not my purpose to refuse happiness from anything. I leave open every door that seems to lead to pleasure; and if I could, I would bar those that let in sorrow and regret. But destiny or fortune has bereft me of the keys that open and close the mansion of my soul.”

Nature, the calmest, the most soothing of spiritual consolations? She has no place for it. As a scientific, intellectual pursuit, she blasts it with her savage, untranslatable epigram on Buffon: “Il ne s’occupe que des bêtes; il faut l’être un peu soi-même pour se dévouer à une telle occupation.” As for the emotional, imaginative aspects of the natural world, she grudgingly confesses that she might enjoy them, if circumstances were favorable: “I am not insensible to natural and rural beauties, but one’s soul must be in a very gentle and peaceful mood to get much pleasure from them.” Her friend, Horace Walpole, can hardly be regarded as an ardent nature lover, he who wrote of general birdsong, “It is very disagreeable that the nightingales should sing but half a dozen songs, and the other beasts squall for two months together.” Yet to Madame du Deffand it seemed that even Walpole’s delight in country life was quite incomprehensible. “I cannot form any idea of the pleasures you taste in solitude and of the charm you find in inanimate objects.”

But the more human interests did not please her any better. Thought, learning, the long effort to understand the secret of life and the springs of human action? Will this dissipate ennui? Not hers. It only deadens it.

Politics? The movement of the world, wars, battles and sieges, deaths of illustrious princes and of unknown thousands? They move not her. High and mighty potencies seem to her perfectly trivial. “Let me whisper in your ear that I make precious little account of kings; their protestations, their retractations, their recriminations, their contradictions, I find them of no more moment than the mixing of a breakfast for my cat.” But if you think that at the other extreme she had any more sympathy with the people, just then at the point of striving so mightily, you are altogether mistaken. “From the Agrarian Law down to your monument, your lanterns, and your black flag, the people, with its joy, its anger, its applause, and its curses, is thoroughly odious to me.”

Then there is art, beauty of human creation, to some a resource so great that it overcomes not only tedium but even misery and acute suffering. To this lady with the dead heart beauty makes no appeal whatever. Her blindness of course cut her off from beauty of the eye to which she seldom if ever refers. But the ears of the blind are supposed to be doubly keen and indeed hers were so. Yet to the nerves behind the ears music was mainly a vexation. In one instance she does, indeed, find the harp delightful. This was her idea of delight: “The thought that one gets hold of nothing, that everything slips away and fails us, that one is alone in the universe and fears to go out of it: this is what occupied me during the music.” Do you wonder that she elsewhere writes, “To me music is a noise more importunate than agreeable.”