The power by which Madame d'Houdetot captivated the gay, handsome, dissipated Saint-Lambert, and kindled into a blaze the passions or the imagination of Rousseau, was not that of beauty. Her face was plain and slightly marked with the small-pox; her eyes were not good; she was extremely short-sighted, which gave to her countenance and address an appearance of uncertainty and timidity; her figure was mignonne, and in all her movements there was an indescribable mixture of grace and awkwardness. The charm by which this woman seized and kept the hearts, not of lovers only, but of friends, was a character the very reverse of that of Madame du Châtelet, who would have deemed it an insult to be compared to her either in mind or beauty:—the absence of all pretension, all coquetry; the total surrender of her own feelings, thoughts, interests, where another was concerned; the frankness which verged on giddiness and imprudence; the temper which nothing could ruffle; the warm kindness which nothing could chill; the bounding spirit of gaiety, which nothing could subdue,—these qualities rendered Madame d'Houdetot an attaching and interesting creature, to the latest moment of her long life. "Mon Dieu! que j'ai d'impatience de voir dix ans de plus sur la tête de cette femme!" exclaimed her sister-in-law, Madame d'Epinay, when she saw her at the age of twenty. But at the age of eighty, Madame d'Houdetot was just as much a child as ever,—"aussi vive, aussi enfant, aussi gaie, aussi distraite, aussi bonne et très bonne;"[148] in spite of wrinkles, sorrows, and frailties, she retained, in extreme old age, the gaiety, the tenderness, the confiding simplicity, though not the innocence of early youth.
Her liaison with Saint-Lambert continued fifty years, nor was she ever suspected of any other indiscretion. During this time he contrived to make her as wretched as a woman of her disposition could be made; and the elasticity of her spirits did not prevent her from being acutely sensible to pain, and alive to unkindness. Saint-Lambert, from being her lover, became her tyrant. He behaved with a peevish jealousy, a petulance, a bitterness, which sometimes drove her beyond the bounds of a woman's patience; and when ever this happened, the accommodating husband, M. d'Houdetot would interfere to reconcile the lovers, and plead for the recall of the offender.
When Saint-Lambert's health became utterly broken, she watched over him with a patient tenderness, unwearied by all his exigeance, and unprovoked by his detestable temper; he had a house near her's in the valley of Montmorenci, and lived on perfectly good terms with her husband. I must add one trait, which, however absurd, and scarcely credible, it may sound in our sober, English ears, is yet true. M. and Madame d'Houdetot gave a fête at Eaubonne, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage. Sophie was then nearly seventy, but played her part, as the heroine of the day, with all the grace and vivacity of seventeen. On this occasion, the lover and the husband chose, for the first time in their lives, to be jealous of each other, and exhibited, to the amusement and astonishment of the guests, a scene, which was for some time the talk of all Paris.
Saint-Lambert died in 1805. After his death, Madame d'Houdetot was seized with a sentimental tendresse for M. Somariva,[149] and continued to send him bouquets and billets-doux to the end of her life. She died about 1815.
To her singular power of charming, Madame d'Houdetot added talents of no common order, which, though never cultivated with any perseverance, now and then displayed, or rather disclosed themselves unexpectedly, adding surprise to pleasure. She was a musician, a poetess, a wit;—but every thing, "par la gràce de Dieu,"—and as if unconsciously and involuntarily. All Saint-Lambert's poetry together is not worth the little song she composed for him on his departure for the army:—
L'Amant que j'adore,
Prêt à me quitter,
D'un instant encore
Voudrait profiter:
Felicité vaine!
Qu'on ne peut saisir,
Trop près de la peine
Pour étre un plaisir![150]
It is to Madame d'Houdetot that Lord Byron alludes in a striking passage of the third canto of Childe Harold, beginning
Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,[151] &c.
And apropos to Rousseau, I shall merely observe, that there is, and can be but one opinion with regard to his conduct in the affair of Madame d'Houdetot: it was abominable. She thought, as every one who ever was connected with that man, found sooner or later, that he was all made up of genius and imagination, and as destitute of heart as of moral principle. I can never think of his character, but as of something at once admirable, portentous and shocking; the most great, most gifted, most wretched;—worst, meanest, maddest of mankind!