Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

With literature the case is little better. Madame du Deffand knew well most of the French writers of her day and had little esteem for them or their works. Of earlier authors she thought more, but not much. La Fontaine occasionally made her smile. Corneille’s heroics enraptured her—for a moment. A minor comedy gives her extreme pleasure, in fact she weeps during the whole third act, and “they were not tears of bitter anguish, but tears of tender emotion.” Her usual state of mind is, however, better expressed in another passage: “Everything I read bores me; history, because I am totally incurious; essays, because they are half platitude and half affected originality; novels, because the love-making seems sentimental and the study of passion makes me unhappy.”

For a soul thus blasted by a dry wind from the barren places of this world it would seem as if the thought of another might offer irresistible attraction. It did, and Madame du Deffand is fascinating on the subject. She would like, oh, she would like to practice religion with fervor. She invites a confessor to dine, talks with him, and is quite encouraged. Why should not grace work a miracle for her as well as for others? She reads Saint François de Sales and finds a tender and winning spirit under his “mystical nonsense.” She regrets that he is dead. “He would have bored me considerably, but I should have loved him.” And in her long hours of insomnia she reflects upon the delightful possibility of believing and builds castles in Spain, or in heaven. “I should read sermons instead of novels, the Bible instead of fables, the Lives of the Saints instead of history, and I should be less bored, or no more, than with what I read now ... at least I should have an object to which I could offer all my sorrows and make the sacrifice of all my desires.”

But it is utterly futile, babble of children, dreams of white nuns bereft of all converse with the heart of man. She was the pupil of Voltaire, the mistress of the Regent, the friend of D’Alembert and Helvétius. To be the friend of these celebrities and of God also would have been too much. Therefore she believed in nothing whatever. Faith, she says, is a devout belief in what one does not understand. We must leave it to those who have it. I have it not. And what belief could overcome the colossal wretchedness of having been born? “Everything that exists is wretched, an angel, an oyster, perhaps even a grain of sand; nothingness, nothingness, what better can we have to pray for?” She did not originate, but she would gladly have accepted the bitter definition of life as “a nightmare between two nothings.”

Thus, you see, she missed, as so many do, the one great privilege of universal scepticism: universal hope. There are thousands who, like her, proclaim that they have no belief in anything, yet, like her, appear to have a most fervent belief in the devil and all his works.

It was natural that one isolated by blindness and unable to get pleasure from the resources of her own soul should turn to society, should try to draw life from constant contact with others who had more of it than she. In none was this restless desire ever more intense than in Madame du Deffand. She seeks people always, goes among them when she can, uses every effort to make them come to her. Her chief dread of poverty is that she may lose the means of attracting company. Even dull company seems to her more tolerable than her own thoughts. And as I have already pointed out, when she got among people, they enjoyed and admired her. She was quick, vivacious, brilliant, gave no sign of being bored, if she was so. Some of her words even make one suspect that she exaggerated her troubles and found more in life to please her than she would willingly confess. Hear what she says of a long projected and finally realized visit. “I have been here five weeks and I can say, with entire truth, that I have not been bored one single minute, have not had the smallest mishap or annoyance.” Surely the most contented of us can seldom say as much.

But the general tone of her social experience is much better manifested in one long passage, as remarkable for style as for self-revelation. “Men and women alike seemed to me machines on springs, which went, came, spoke, laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling. Everybody played a part from habit merely. One woman shook with laughter, another sneered at everything, another gabbled about everything. The men’s performance was no better. And I myself was swallowed up in the blackest of black thoughts. I reflected that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had dug for myself all the pits I had fallen into; that all my judgments had been false and rash, always too hasty; that I had never known any one perfectly; that I had never been known by any one either, and perhaps I did not know myself. One seeks everywhere for something to lean on. One is charmed with the hope of having found it: it turns out to be a dream which harsh facts scatter with a rude awakening.”

By this time it must be very clear that the lady’s worst tormentor was herself. If she could have followed the wholesome advice of her exquisite friend, Madame de Choiseul, she would have seen life differently. “Eat little at night, open your windows, drive out often, and look for the good in things and people.... You will no longer be sad, or bored, or ill.” It was quite in vain. In such maladies the patient must minister to himself, and this poor patient not only submitted to the black ennui of to-day but doubled it, in fact gave it its chief significance, by dreading the longer, blacker hours of many to-morrows.

So you set her down as a cold, barren, dead old woman, and think you have heard enough of her. But there is more and of singular interest. She had noble and beautiful and winning qualities. For one thing, she was frank, straightforward, and sincere. Indeed, it was the excess of these fine traits that caused her troubles. She would have no illusion, no deception, no sham, nothing but the truth. It was the exaggerated fear of accepting pleasant falsehoods which led her to believe that necessarily everything pleasant must be a falsehood. But her honesty draws you to her, even while her misery repels.

Then, curiously enough, though the case is not unprecedented, her very pessimism and failure to find any good in the world resulted from an inherent idealism, from too high expectations of men and things. Her imagination was so keen that it discounted every pleasure before it came, with resultant disappointment. Her natural instinct was to trust, often unwisely. Then, when she was deceived, she mistrusted and suspected—unwisely also. Primarily she was a dreamer, a hoper, as she herself phrases it in her vivid language, “a listen-if-it rains, a visionary, who watches the clouds and sees lovely things there that fade even as one beholds them.” And vast dreams dispelled left a darker and a sadder emptiness.