“Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination, Zélide is patient only on principle; when she is indulgent and easy, be grateful to her, for it costs her an effort. When she prolongs her civility with people she holds in small esteem, redouble your admiration: she is in torture. Vain at first by nature, her vanity has become boundless; knowledge and scorn of mankind soon perfected that quality. Yet, this vanity is excessive even to her own taste. She already thinks that fame is worth nothing at the cost of happiness, and yet she would make many an effort for fame.
“Would you like to know if Zélide is beautiful, or pretty, or merely passable? I can not tell; it all depends on whether one loves her, or on whether she wishes to make herself be loved. She has a beautiful neck, and displays it at some sacrifice to modesty.
“Excessively emotional, and not less fastidious, she can not be happy either with or without love. Perceiving herself too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased to aspire to happiness and has devoted herself to goodness. She thus escapes repentance and seeks only for diversion.
“Can you not guess her secret? Zélide is somewhat sensuous. Emotions too vivid and too intense for her organism, and exaggerated activity without any satisfying object, these are the sources of all her misfortunes. With less sensibility, Zélide would have had the mind of a great man; with less intelligence, she would have been only a weak woman.”
Sensuous she may have been, but sex never clamoured very loudly for appeasement. Her emotions were too vivid and intense for her organism and she lived in perpetual warfare with herself. Profoundly egotistic she delighted in revealing herself. Her self-esteem did not permit her to soften a defect or enhance a quality. In spite of her egotism she gave out more than she received because of her abounding vitality of mind and body. Her early love affairs were purely cerebral—indeed all of them were until she met Benjamin Constant. She married without love, because her mind told her that having reached the age of twenty-eight it would be unwise to delay. Monsieur Hermenches, an older man, was her first friend—one could scarcely call him lover. He had had success with women, but she could not accept a master. When she was twenty-three she met Boswell and for nine months she amused herself at his expense. He was so assured of his own charm that he believed Zélide was in love with him, and if he could reform her, he intended to marry her. But Zélide had no desire or intention to reform. After endeavouring in vain to support the boredom of life at Colombier, whither she had gone with her conventional and unemotional husband, she became ill and was sent to Paris for a change. There she met Benjamin Constant, the nephew of her early friend Hermenches. He was twenty, she was forty-seven. The attraction was mutual and immediate; disparity of years was ignored; they spoke a common language and felt that they had each found an alter ego. Constant, despite a most unattractive exterior, .appears to have made powerful appeal to women; during his long association with Zélide, he had many amours of which she was cognisant. They did not arouse in her the slightest feeling of jealousy. She feared only intellectual rivalry. Her love affair with Constant lasted many years and was interrupted and finally shattered by the advent of Madame de Staël. Constant was unable to withstand Madame de Staël. Possibly he was tired of being completely understood and may have craved the companionship of some one who would idealise him. He met her at the psychological moment. Her strong personality, combined with great sensuality, attracted him and obscured her limitations. There was not room in his heart and mind for two women and Zélide had to give way. She accepted the situation quietly and reasonably, but never recovered.
Her death was tragic for she realised that she had failed to accomplish that which she had set out to do. She was a great character to whom truth made a profound appeal. Illusions and shams were abhorrent to her. She showed this in her dispassionate description of herself; her power of separating herself from her subject is extraordinary. Above all her predilections, she sought reality. In a world where the majority prefer illusions, it was difficult for her to find congeniality. For a while she believed that she found it in Benjamin Constant but it was transitory. She died alone, solitary in death as she had been in life.
Some day a psychologist will explain why the artistic temperament is inimical to happiness. Madame de Charrière had health, beauty, charm, wealth, a complaisant husband, an ardent lover, an indulgent conscience and withal ability which was loudly applauded and remotely echoed, but she was not happy. Perhaps she would not have gone all the way with Anatole France who said that he had never had a happy day in his life, but she would know just what he meant to convey.
Beauty, fame, love and riches are seldom synonymous with happiness. The case of Zélide is only one instance of the truth of this statement; she has sisters in all races, in all times, and Yang Kuei-Fei, whom Mrs. Shu-Chiung introduces to Western civilisation under the name of The Most Famous Beauty of China, is another of those whom the gods loved and tortured.
Then there is the form of biography that is not a portrait of the soul or of the body, nor is it exactly fictional biography. It stands midway between the psychographed and the idealised life. A conspicuous practitioner of this branch of art is Meade Minnigerode. He calls his latest book Lives and Times, Four Informal American Biographies.
Mr. Minnigerode has at his service a keen—almost too keen—fictional sense. He seems to have less regard for truth and facts than for incidentals that make a good picture and enhance a story; and in his painstaking and careful selection of material, he uses only whatever assists him in building characters and situations. He has searched not so much for that which reveals character as motives in higher relief. As a result, we know less accurately what the four characters really were, than what Mr. Minnigerode thought they were—almost what he thought it would be interesting for them to be.