A Short History of French Literature

by George Saintsbury

It is otherwise with letters, of which the century contributes to literature some of the most remarkable which we possess. It is impossible even to give a bare list of those which remain from a time when almost every person of quality knew how to correspond either in the natural or the artificial style; but the most remarkable (each of which is in its way typical of a group) may be noticed with some minuteness. Among these the correspondence of Grimm, though one of the bulkiest and most important, may be dismissed with a brief reference; for it will be noticed again in the succeeding chapter, and most of it is not either the work of one man or real correspondence. The flying sheets which Grimm, largely aided by his complaisant friends, and especially by Diderot, sent to his august Russian and German correspondents, were in reality periodical summaries of the state of politics, society, letters, and art in Paris, not different in subject and style from the printed newspaper letters of the present day. They form in the aggregate a very important work, whether looked at from the point of view of history, or from the point of view of literature; but they are not, properly speaking, letters. Of the letter-writers proper three women and three men may be selected,—Mademoiselle Aïssé, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, and Madame du Deffand; Voltaire, Diderot, and Galiani.

Mademoiselle Aïssé.

Mademoiselle Aïssé had a singular history. When a child she was carried off by Turkish rovers, and sold at Constantinople to the French ambassador, M. de Ferriol. This was at the beginning of the century. Her purchaser had her brought up carefully at Paris as his property, which no doubt he always considered her. But in his old age he became childish, and Mademoiselle Aïssé was free to frequent society to which she had been early introduced. She met and fell in love with a certain Chevalier d'Aydie, who himself (at a later date, for the most part,) was a letter-writer of some merit. Her letters to him and of him constitute her claim to a position in the history of literature. They display the sensibilité of the time in a decided form, but in a milder one than the later letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. But there is something in them more than mere sensibilité—a tender and affectionate spirit finding graceful expression and deserving a happier fate. Mademoiselle Aïssé, like most other people of her time, turned devout, but earlier than most. She died in 1733.

Madame du Deffand.

Madame du Deffand was a very different person. She was born in 1697, and she distinguished herself when quite a girl, not merely by her beauty, but by her wit and tendency to freethinking. She was married in 1718 to the Marquis du Deffand, but soon separated from him, and lived for many years the then usual life of gallantry. This merged insensibly into a life of literary and philosophical society. Though Madame du Deffand was not, like the wealthier but more plebeian Madame Geoffrin, and later Madame Helvétius, a 'nursing mother of the philosophers,' in the sense of supplying their necessities, her salon in the Rue Saint Dominique was long one of the chief resorts of philosophism. In 1753 she became blind, but this made little difference in her appetite for society. She lived like many other great ladies in a monastery. She died in 1780. As a letter-writer Madame du Deffand was the correspondent of most of the greatest men of letters of the time (Voltaire, D'Alembert, Hénault, Montesquieu, etc.). But her most remarkable correspondence, and perhaps her most interesting one, was with Horace Walpole, the most French of contemporary Englishmen. Their friendship, for which it is hard to find an exact name, unless, perhaps, it may be called a kind of passionate community of tastes, belongs to the later part of her long life. Madame du Deffand is the typical French lady of the eighteenth century, as Richelieu is the typical grand seigneur. She was perhaps the wittiest woman (in the strict sense of the adjective) who ever lived[290], and an astonishingly large proportion of the best sayings of the time is traced or attributed to her. Nearly seventy years of conversation and a great correspondence did not exhaust her faculty of acute sallies, of ruthless criticism, of cynical but clearsighted judgment on men and things. But she was thoroughly unamiable, purely selfish, jealous, spiteful, destitute of humour, if full of wit. A comparison with Madame de Sévigné shows how the French character had, in the upper ranks at least, degenerated (it is worth remembering that Madame du Deffand was born just after Madame de Sévigné's death), though it must be admitted that the earlier character shows perhaps the germs of what is repulsive in the second.

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.

The third most remarkable lady letter-writer of the century, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was closely connected with Madame du Deffand. She was indeed her companion, her coadjutor, and her rival. Julie Jeanne Eléonore de Lespinasse was in reality the illegitimate daughter of a lady of rank, the Countess d'Albon, who lived apart from her husband, and the name Lespinasse was merely a fancy name taken from the D'Albon genealogy. She was born, or at least baptized, at Lyons on the 19th November, 1732. Her mother, who practically acknowledged her, died when she was fifteen, leaving her fairly provided for. But her half-brothers and sisters deprived her of most of her portion, though for a time they gave her a home. In 1754 Madame du Deffand, to whom she had been recommended, and who had just been struck with blindness, invited her to come and live with her, which she did, after some hesitation. For ten years the two presided jointly over their society, but at last Madame du Deffand's jealousy broke out. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse retired, taking with her not a few of the habitués of the salon, with D'Alembert at their head. Madame Geoffrin seems to have endowed her, and she established herself in the Rue de Bellechasse, where D'Alembert before long came to join her. They lived in a curious sort of relationship for more than ten years, until Mademoiselle de Lespinasse died on the 22nd May, 1776. During this time she was a gracious hostess and a bond of union to many men of letters, especially those of the younger philosophe school. But this is not what gives her her place here. Her claim rests upon a collection of love-letters, not addressed to D'Alembert. She was thirty-four when the earliest of her love affairs began, and had never been beautiful. When she died she was forty-four, and her later letters are more passionate than the earlier. Her first lover was a young Spaniard, the Marquis Gonsalvo de Mora; her second, the Count de Guibert, a poet and essayist of no great merit, a military reformer said to have been of some talent, and pretty evidently a bad-hearted coxcomb. To him the epistles we have are addressed. All the circumstances of these letters are calculated to make them ridiculous, yet there is hardly any word which they less deserve. The great defect of the eighteenth century is that its sensibilité excludes real passion. The men and women of feeling of the period always seem as if they were playing at feeling; the affairs of the heart, which occupy so large a place in its literature, show only the progress of a certain kind of game which has its rules and stages to which the players must conform, but which, when once over, leaves no more traces than any other kind of game. To this Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is a conspicuous exception. It has been said of her that her letters burn the paper they are written on with the fervency of their sentiment, nor is the expression an exaggerated one. Except in Rousseau and (in a different form) in Manon Lescaut, it is in these letters that we must look for almost the only genuine passion of the time. It is no doubt unreal to a certain degree, morbid also in an even greater degree as regards what is real in it. But it is in no sense consciously affected, and conscious affectation was the bane of the period.

Voltaire.

The three examples which have been chosen of the masculine letter-writing of the period are of somewhat wider range. Mademoiselle Aïssé and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse show in various forms the amiable weaknesses of womankind, Madame du Deffand its unamiable strength. The letters of Voltaire, of Diderot, and of the Abbé Galiani are not so typical of a sex, but are more representative of individuals and at the same time of the age. Voltaire's correspondence is simply enormous in point of bulk. Fresh letters of his are constantly being discovered and edited even now. His long life, his extraordinary industry, his position during nearly half a century as first one of the leading men of letters, and then unquestionably the leading man of letters of Europe, the curious diversity of his interests, even the prosperity in point of fortune which made him command the services of secretaries and under-strappers, while humbler men of letters had to do the mechanical work of composition for themselves, all contributed to bring about this fecundity. The consequence is, that not only is the correspondence of Voltaire of vast extent but it is also of the most various character. We have from him early love-letters, letters to private friends of all dates, business letters, literary letters, letters to great persons, letters intended for publication, letters not intended for publication, flattering letters, insulting letters, benevolent letters, patronising letters, begging letters, letters of almost every sort and kind that the ingenuity of human imagination can conceive or the diversity of human relationships and circumstances require. Partial critics have contended that the singular quality of Voltaire's genius might be sufficiently exemplified from his letters, if no other documents were forthcoming. Without going quite so far as this, it may be allowed that his correspondence is a remarkable monument of those qualities in literature which enable a man to express himself happily and rapidly on any subject that happens to present itself. The letters of Voltaire do not perhaps supply any ground for disputing Carlyle's sentence on Voltaire (a sentence which has excited the wrath of French critics) that there is not one great thought in all his works. But they enable us, even better than any other division of those works, to appreciate the singular flexibility of his intellect, the extraordinarily wide range of his interests and sympathies, the practical talents which accompanied his literary genius.

Diderot.