Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

So she plays, in letter after letter, on the whole compass of the tenderest, most self-abandoning affection. With him in London and herself in Paris, and several days of delaying post between them, she writes incessantly, begging for good news, bad news, any news. His plans, she must know every detail of his plans, what he does, where he goes, whom he sees. His health. Let but the gout touch him and she is in misery. She showers remedies, like a quack doctor, or an aged nurse. Her distress is everywhere made plain to us by the vivid touches of her quick imagination. “I am like a child hanging out of a window by a cord and every instant on the brink of falling.”

The best remedy for the anxiety of absence would certainly be presence and she seems to live only in the passionate hope of those rare and hurried visits which brought her beloved to her. Yet even so, she is most characteristically afraid that when he does come he will be bored. He shall see only whom he wishes when he wishes, provided he gives long hours to seeing her. He comes, she is in Paradise, sits talking with him till two in the morning, and he gets a long letter from her before he rises the next day.

Then he is gone again and she is in pain again. The memory of past pleasure only makes the pang of separation keener. She is old, old, hardly a particle of life left in her, and she cannot hope to live to see him ever any more.

A passion like this, full as it is of tragedy and pathos, will at times tempt sarcasm. The sincerity and fine intelligence of Madame du Deffand make it impossible for a sympathetic reader even to smile at her. But Walpole was by nature abnormally sensitive to ridicule, as he himself confesses. To be praised as if he were a god and loved as if he were an opera tenor by an old lady of seventy, whom he knew to be living in closest intimacy with the most critical and mocking wits of the world, placed a man of his temper in an exceedingly difficult position. Beware of romance, he cautioned mildly. But she laughed at him. Romance! at her age! She had never been romantic, had all her life stripped the veil of sentimental illusion from the cold bones of reality. Romance! Her feelings were nothing but common, daylight friendship. In which she was quite wrong, for nothing about her was or could be common or of every day.

So felt Walpole. And he still shuddered at the thought of the vast guffaw of future generations. Destroy my letters, he insisted, and do, do moderate the tone of yours. And he cautioned, and he lectured, as a tutor might lecture a moonstruck girl.

She did not like it, she resented it. The notes she writes so thickly are of painful interest in their sore, hurt, pleading, protesting energy. “If I were as unreasonable as you, you would never hear another word from me. The letter I have just received is so offensive, so extravagant, that I should throw it in the fire unanswered.” “Should throw,” you notice, not “have thrown.” “It is impossible to judge more falsely than you judge me.... You see yourself in everything I say about others and think I am finding fault with you, when I find fault with any one.” “God is not more incomprehensible than you; but if he is not more just, it is hardly worth while believing in him.”

Yet she kissed the hand that chastened her, she turned like a child to its tutor, for advice and comfort, with blind trust, blind confidence, blind hope. He is a true physician for the soul, she says, and one who needs no physician for his own. She only wishes that he might have had control of her from childhood. How different she would have been! “You would have formed my taste, my judgment, my discernment, you would have taught me to know the world, to mistrust it, to despise it, to enjoy it; you would not have bridled my imagination, or blighted my passions, or chilled my soul; but you would have been like a skilful dancing-master, who keeps the natural poise of health and vigor and adds to it finished grace.”

So she loved for eleven years and died with this final illusion like the cross in her hands and the sacred wafer at her lips. You think she was pitiably infatuated. Perhaps she was. But it was an infatuation that not only furnished the clue to her whole life, but in a manner sanctified it.

It is a curious thing that the two greatest women letter writers of France, perhaps of the world, Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand, should each have built the main fabric of their correspondence on an exaggerated, not to say abnormal, affection. It is far more curious that this affection should be with Madame de Sévigné the one flaw in a singularly well-balanced character and with Madame du Deffand the most marked symptom of health in a character otherwise erratic, distorted, and unsound.