Women of Modern France

by Hugo P. Thieme

In his early days, La Rochefoucauld found it convenient, for selfish purposes, to simulate an ardent passion for Mme. de Longueville, of which mention has been made in the chapter relating to Mme. de Longueville. In his later period, he had settled down to a normal mode of life and sought the friendship of a more reasonable and less passionate woman. He himself said:

"When women have well-informed minds, I like their conversation better than that of men; you find, with them, a certain gentleness which is not met with among us; and it seems to me, besides, that they express themselves with greater clearness and that they give a more pleasant turn to the things they say."

Mme. de La Fayette exercised a great influence upon La Rochefoucauld—an influence that was wholesome in every way. It was through her influential friends at court that he was helped into possession of his property, and it was she who maintained it for him. As to his literary work (his Maxims), her influence over him was supposed to have somewhat modified his ideas on women and to have softened his tone in general. She wrote: "He gave me wit, but I reformed his heart." M. d'Haussonville has proved, without doubt, that her restraint modified many of his maxims that were tinged with the spirit of the commonplace and trivial. While Mme. de Sablé—essentially a moralist and a deeply religious woman—was more of a companion to him, and though his maxims were, for the greater part, composed in her salon, Mme. de La Fayette, by her tenderness and judgment, tempered the tone of them before they reached the public.

Mme. de La Fayette will always be known, however, as the great novelist of the seventeenth century. Two novels, two stories, two historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M. d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not reliable, because she was so often absent from court; also, in them she shows a tendency to avenge herself, in a way, upon Mme. de Maintenon, whose friend she was until the trouble between this lady and Mme. de Montespan occurred. The latter was the intimate friend of Mme. de La Fayette. As for her literary work proper, her desire to write was possibly encouraged, if not created, by her indulgence in the general fad of writing portraitures, in which she was especially successful in portraying Mme. de Sévigné. Her literary effort was, besides, a revolt of her own taste and sense against the pompous and inflated language of the novels of the day and against the great length of the development of the events and adventures in them. Thus, Mme. de La Fayette inaugurated a new style of novel; to show her influence, it will be well to consider the state of the Romanesque novel at the period of her writing.

In the beginning of the century, D'Urfé's novels were in vogue; these works were characterized by interminable developments, relieved by an infinite number of historical episodes. All characters, shepherds as well as noblemen, expressed the same sentiments and in the same language. There was no pretension to truth in the portraying of manners and customs.—A reaction was natural and took the form of either a kind of parody or gross realism. These novels, of which Francion and Berger Extravagant were the best known, depicted shepherds of the Merovingian times, heroes of Persia and Rome, or procurers, scamps, and scoundrels; but no descriptions of the manners of decent people (honnêtes gens) were to be found.

The novels of Mlle. de Scudéry, while interesting as portraitures, are not thoroughly reliable in their representation of the sentiments and environment of the times; on the other hand, those of Mme. de La Fayette are impersonal—no one of the characters is recognizable; yet their atmosphere is that of the court of Louis XIV., and the language, never so correct as to be unnatural, is that used at the time. Her novels reflect perfectly the society of the court and the manner of life there. "Thus," says M. d'Haussonville, "she was the first to produce a novel of observation and sentiment, the first to paint elegant manners as they really were."

Her first production was La Princesse de Montpensier (1662); in 1670, appeared Zayde, it was ostensibly the work of Segrais, her teacher and a writer much in vogue at the time; in 1678, La Princesse de Clèves, her masterpiece, stirred up one of the first real quarrels of literary criticism. For a long time after the appearance of that book, society was divided into two classes—the pros and the cons. It was the most popular work of the period.

M. d'Haussonville says it is the first French novel which is an illustration of woman's ability to analyze the most subtile of human emotions. Mme. de La Fayette was, also, the first to elevate, in literature, the character of the husband who, until then, was a nonentity or a booby; she makes of him a hero—sympathetic, noble, and dignified.