by Will Durant
VI. THE GREAT SALONS
1. Mme. Geoffrin
The reign of woman ended, but only after the zenith of the salons. That unique institution reached its climax with Mme. Geoffrin, and subsided in a fever of romance with Mlle, de Lespinasse. It would revive after the Revolution, with Mesdames de Staël and Récamier, but never again with the zest and fullness of the time when political celebrities met on Saturdays at Mme. du Deffand’s, artists met on Mondays and philosophers and poets on Wednesdays at Mme. Geoffrin’s, philosophers and scientists on Tuesdays at Mme. Helvétius’ and on Sundays and Thursdays at Baron d’Holbach’s, and literary and political lions on Tuesdays at Mme. Necker’s, and any of these might meet any night at Julie de Lespinasse’s. Besides these there were many minor salons: chez Mesdames de Luxembourg, de La Vallière, de Forcalquier, de Talmont, de Broglie, de Bussy, de Crussol, de Choiseul, de Cambis, de Mire-poix, de Beauvau, d’Anville, d’Aiguillon, d’Houdetot, de Marchais, Dupin, and d’Épinay.
It was not beauty that distinguished these Junos of the salons; nearly all of them were middle-aged or older; it was that complex of intelligence, tact, grace, influence, and unobtrusive money that enabled a hostess to assemble women of charm and men of mind who could make a gathering or causerie sparkle with wit or wisdom without setting it on fire with passion or prejudice. Such a salon was no place for flirtations, or for erotic themes or double-entendres.81 Every man there might have a mistress, every woman a lover, but this was politely veiled in the civilized give and take of courtesies and ideas. Platonic friendships could find acceptance there, as with Du Def-fand and Horace Walpole, or with Lespinasse and d’Alembert. As the Revolution neared, the salons tended to lose their dispassionate elevation, and became centers of revolt.
Mme. Geoffrin’s salon won the highest repute because she was the most skillful of lion tamers among the salonnières, allowed more freedom of discussion, and knew how—without appearing oppressive—to keep liberty from passing the bounds of good manners or good taste. She was one of the few women who rose from the middle class to maintain a distinguished salon. Her father, valet de chambre to the Dauphine Marie-Anne, had married the daughter of a banker; their first child, born in 1699, was Marie-Thérèse, who became Mme. Geoffrin. The mother, a woman of culture with some talent for painting, laid great plans for her daughter’s development, but died in 1700 giving birth to a son. The two children were sent to live with their grandmother in the Rue St.-Honoré. Half a century later, in reply to Catherine II’s request for a brief autobiography, Mme. Geoffrin explained her lack of erudition:
My grandmother … had very little education, but her mind was so observant, so clever, so quick, that … it always served her instead of knowledge. She spoke so agreeably of the things she knew nothing of, that no one desired she should know them better. … She was so satisfied with her lot that she regarded education as superfluous for a woman. “I have managed so well,” she said, “that I have never felt the need of it. If my granddaughter is a fool, knowledge will make her self-confident and unbearable; if she has wit and sense she will do as I did; she will make up the deficiency by her tact and perception.” Therefore, in my childhood, she taught me simply how to read, but she made me read a great deal. She taught me to think, and made me reason; she taught me to know men, and made me say what I thought of them, and told me how she herself judged them. … She could not endure the elegancies that dancing masters teach; she only desired me to have the grace which nature gives to a well-formed person.82
Religion, Grandma felt, was more important than education; so the two orphans were taken to Mass every day.
Grandma attended also to Marie’s marriage. A wealthy businessman, François Geoffrin, aged forty-eight, offered to marry the thirteen-year-old girl; Grandma thought it a good match, and Marie was too well brought up to object. She insisted, however, on taking her brother with her to join M. Geoffrin in the comfortable home, also in the Rue St.-Honoré, which she was to keep to the end of her life. In 1715 she gave birth to a daughter, and in 1717 to a son—who died at the age of ten.
In that same fashionable street Mme. de Tencin opened a famous salon. She invited Mme. Geoffrin to attend. M. Geoffrin objected; La Tencin’s past had made some noise, and her favorite guests were such dangerous freethinkers as Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Marivaux, Prévost, Helvétius, and Marmontel. Mme. Geoffrin went nevertheless. She was fascinated by these untrammeled minds; how tiresome, by comparison, were the merchants who came to visit her aging husband! He was sixty-five now, and she was Balzac’s femme de trente ans. She too began to entertain. He objected, she overruled him; finally he consented to preside at her dinners, usually silent and always polite. When he died (1749), aged eighty-four, her diners hardly noticed his absence. One who returned from a journey inquired what had become of the old gentleman who had sat so unobtrusively at the head of the table. Mme. Geoffrin answered softly, “It was my husband. He is dead.”83
Mme. de Tencin also completed her course in 1749, to the dismay of her accustomed guests. We must record again the remark of the ninety-two-year-old Fontenelle: “Such a good woman! [She had been a veritable synthesis of sins.] What a worry! Where shall I dine on Tuesdays now?” But he brightened up: “Well, on Tuesdays now I must dine at Mme. Geof-frin’s.”84 She was glad to have him, for he had been a philosophe before Montesquieu and Voltaire, he had memories stretching back to Mazarin, he had seven years left in him, and could bear teasing without taking offense, being hard of hearing. Most of the celebrities who had shone at Tencin’s table followed his example, and soon the Geoffrin Wednesday midday dinners brought together, at one time or another, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Holbach, Grimm, Morellet, Raynal, Saint-Lambert, and the witty little Neapolitan, Abbé Ferdinando Galiani, secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador in Paris.
After her husband’s death, and despite her daughter’s scandalized opposition, Mme. Geoffrin allowed Diderot, d’Alembert, and Marmontel to set the line and tone of discussion at her Wednesday dinners. She was a patriot and a Christian, but she admired the courage and vivacity of the philosophes. When the Encyclopédie was organized she contributed over 500,000 livres to its costs. Her home became known as “the salon of the Encyclopédie”; and when Palissot satirized the rebels in his comedy Les Philosophes (1760), he made fun of her as Cydalize, the fairy godmother of the coterie. Thereafter she asked her lions to roar more courteously, and checked wild eloquence with a deflating compliment—“Ah, there’s something good!”85 At last she withdrew her standing invitation to Diderot, but she sent him a suite of new furniture and an uncomfortably gorgeous dressing gown.
She discovered that artists, philosophers, and men of affairs did not mix well; the philosophers liked to talk, the statesmen expected discretion and good manners; the artists were a tempestuous tribe, and only artists could understand them. So Madame, who collected art and had caught some aesthetic glow from the Comte de Caylus, invited the leading artists and connoisseurs of Paris to special dinners on Monday evenings. Boucher came, La Tour, Vernet, Chardin, Vanloo, Cochin, Drouais, Robert, Oudry, Nattier, Soufflot, Caylus, Bouchardon, Greuze. Marmontel was the only philosophe admitted, for he lived in Mme. Geoffrin’s house. The amiable hostess not only entertained these guests; she bought their works, posed for their portraits of her, and paid them well. Chardin pictured her best, as a stout and kindly matron in a lace bonnet.86 After the death of Vanloo she bought two of his pictures for four thousand livres; she sold them to a Russian prince for fifty thousand livres, and sent the profit to the widow.87
To round out her hospitality Mme. Geoffrin gave petits soupers for her women friends. But no woman was invited to the Monday dinners, and Mlle, de Lespinasse (perhaps as d’Alembert’s alter ego) was one of the few women who came to the Wednesday soirees. Madame was somewhat possessive, and besides she found that female presences distracted her lions from philosophy and art. Her policy of segregation seemed justified by the high repute her assemblies gained for interesting and si
gnificant discussions. Foreigners in Paris angled for invitations; to be able to say, when they returned home, that they had attended Mme. Geoffrin’s salon was a distinction second only to being received by the King. Hume, Walpole, and Franklin were among her grateful guests. Ambassadors to Versailles—even the lordly Count von Kaunitz—made it a point to present themselves at the famous house in the Rue St.-Honoré. In 1758 Prince Cantemir, the Russian ambassador, brought with him the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, who told of the accomplishments of her daughter; four years later this daughter became Catherine II, and for many years thereafter the Empress of All the Russias carried on a charming correspondence with the bourgeois salonnière. A handsome and brilliant Swede who attended some of Madame’s dinners went home to be Gustavus III.
A still handsomer youth, Stanislas Poniatowski, was a frequent visitor, almost a devotee of Mme. Geoffrin (who sometimes paid his debts);88 soon he was calling her Maman; and when he became King of Poland (1764) he invited her to visit Warsaw as his guest. Though now sixty-four years old, she accepted. She made a triumphal stay in Vienna on the way: “I am better known here,” she wrote, “than a couple of yards from my own house.”89 For a while, in the royal palace at Warsaw (1766), she played at mothering and advising the King. The letters that she sent to Paris were passed from hand to hand there, like the letters of Voltaire from Ferney; “those who had not read Mme. Geoffrin’s letters,” Grimm wrote, “were not fit to go into good society.”90 When she came back to Paris and resumed her dinners, a hundred celebrities rejoiced; Piron and Delille wrote poems celebrating her return.
The trip had been arduous—riding in a coach through half the length of Europe and back; Mme. Geoffrin was never again as alert and sprightly as before. She who had once expressed her disbelief in life after death,91 and had reduced religion to charity, now renewed her observance of Catholic worship. Marmontel described her peculiar piety:
To be in favor with heaven without being out of favor with her society, she used to indulge in a kind of clandestine devotion. She went to Mass as secretly as others go to an intrigue; she had an apartment in a nunnery, … and a pew in the church of the Capuchins, with as much mystery as the galante women of that day had their petites maisons for their amours.92
In 1776 the Catholic Church announced a jubilee in which all who visited certain churches at stated times would receive dispensations and indulgences. On March 11 Mme. Geoffrin attended a long service in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Soon after reaching home she fell in an apoplectic fit. The philosophes were angry that her illness should have followed an act of worship; the mordant Abbé Morellet remarked, “She has confirmed, by her own example, the maxim which she frequently repeated: One dies only through an act of stupidity.’”93 The daughter, Marquise de La Ferté-Imbault, took possession of her sick mother, and warned the philosophes away. Madame never saw d’Alembert or Morellet again; however, she arranged that the pensions she had given them should be increased after her death. She lingered on for another year, paralyzed and dependent, but distributing charity to the end.
2. Mme. duDeffand
There was only one salon in Europe that could rival Geoffrin’s in fame and votaries. We have studied elsewhere the career and character of Marie de Vichy-Chamrond: how as a girl she dismayed nuns and priests with her freethinking; how she wed the Marquis du Deffand, left him, and solaced her solitude with a salon (1739 f.), at first in the Rue de Beaune, then (1747) in the Convent of St. Joseph in the Rue St.-Dominique. Her new site frightened away all but one of the philosophes who had previously come to enjoy her wine and wit; d’Alembert remained, being the least pugnacious of the tribe; for the rest, her habitués were men and women of the aristocracy, who tended to snub La Geoffrin as bourgeoisie. When the Marquise became blind at the age of fifty-seven (1754), her friends still came to her dinners; but during the rest of the week she felt loneliness with a rising despondency, until she persuaded her niece to stay with her and serve as assistant hostess at her soirees.
Julie de Lespinasse was the illegitimate daughter of the Comtesse d’Albon and Gaspard de Vichy, brother of Mme. du Deffand. The Comtesse acknowledged her, brought her up with her other children, gave her an exceptionally good education, and sought to have her legitimized; but one of the daughters objected, and it was never done. In 1739 this half sister married Gaspard de Vichy and went to live with him in the Château de Chamrond in Burgundy. In 1748 the Comtesse died, leaving an annuity of three hundred livres for Julie, then sixteen. Mme. de Vichy took Julie to Cham-rond, but treated her as an illegitimate orphan who served as governess for the children. When Mme. du Deffand visited Chamrond she was struck by the excellent mind and manners of Mlle, de Lespinasse; she won the girl’s confidence, and learned that she was so unhappy in her present position that she had decided to enter a convent. The Marquise proposed that Julie come and live with her in Paris. Objections were raised by the family, in fear that Du Deffand would arrange Julie’s legitimation, thus entitling her to a share in the Albon estate. The Marquise promised that she would not so offend her relatives. Meanwhile Julie entered a convent (October, 1752), not as a novice but as a boarder. The Marquise renewed her proposal. After a year of hesitation, Julie agreed. On February 13, 1754, the Marquise sent her a strange letter, which must be remembered in judging the sequel:
I shall introduce you as a young lady from my province who intended to go into a convent, and will say that I offered you a lodging until you should find one which would suit you. You will be treated with politeness, and even with compliment, and you can count upon me that your self-respect will never be offended.
However, … there is another point which I must explain to you. The least artifice, even the most trifling little art, if you were to put it into your conduct, would be intolerable to me. I am naturally distrustful, and all those in whom I detect slyness become suspect to me until I lose all confidence in them. I have two intimate friends—Formont and d’Alembert. I love them passionately, but less for their agreeable charms and their friendship than for their absolute truthfulness. Therefore you must, my queen, resolve to live with me with the utmost truth and sincerity. … You may think that I preach, but I assure you that I never do so except in regard to sincerity. On that point I am without mercy.94
In April, 1754, Julie came to live with Mme. du Deffand, first above a carriage shed, then in a room over the Marquise’s apartment in the Convent of St. Joseph. Perhaps at Madame’s suggestion, the Duc d’Orléans settled upon her a pension of 692 livres.95 She helped the blind hostess to receive and place her guests at the salon assemblies; she brightened the proceedings with her pleasant manners, her quick intelligence, her fresh and modest youth. She was no beauty, but her bright black eyes and rich brown hair made an arresting combination. Half the men who came there fell half in love with her, even Madame’s old faithful chevalier, Charles-Jean-François Hénault, president of the Court des Enquêtes, who was seventy, always ailing, always rubicund with a flow of wine. Julie took their compliments with proper discount, but even so the Marquise, doubly sensitive in her blindness, must have felt that some worship had passed from her throne. Perhaps another element entered: the older woman had begun to love the younger one with an affection that would not share. Both were vessels of passion, despite the fact that the Marquise had one of the most penetrating minds of the time.
It was inevitable that Julie should fall in love. First (?) with a young Irishman of whom we know only the name Taaffe. Once admitted to the salon, he came almost every day, and it was soon obvious to the Marquise that he had come to see not her but Mademoiselle. She was alarmed to see that Julie received his advances favorably. She warned Julie against compromising herself. The proud girl resented the motherly advice. Fearing to lose her, and anxious to protect her against an impetuous attachment that promised no permanence, the Marquise commanded Julie to keep to her room when Taaffe called. Julie obeyed, but was so excited by the quarrel that she took opium to calm her nerves. Many persons in t
he eighteenth century used opium as a sedative. Mlle, de Lespinasse increased her doses with each new romance.
She learned to forget Taaffe, but her next love entered history, for it fell upon the man whom Mme. du Deffand had taken to herself with a maternal but possessive attachment. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert was in 1754 at the peak of his renown as mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and collaborator in that Encyclopédie that was the talk of all intellectual Paris. Voltaire, in a modest moment, called him “the foremost writer of the century.”96 Yet he had none of Voltaire’s advantages. He was of illegitimate birth; his mother, Mme. de Tencin, had disowned him, and he had not seen his father since childhood. He lived like a simple bourgeois in the home of the glazier Rousseau. He was handsome, neat, courteous, sometimes gay; he could talk with almost any specialist on any subject, but he could also hide his learning behind a façade of stories, mimicry, and wit. Otherwise he made few compromises with the world. He preferred his independence to the favor of kings and queens; and when Mme. du Deffand campaigned to get him into the French Academy he refused to assure himself of Hénault’s vote by praising Hénault’s Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire de France (1744). There was a strain of satire in him that made his wit bite now and then;97 he could be impatient, “sometimes violently choleric against opponents.”98 He never found out what to say or do when alone with women; yet his shyness attracted them, as if by challenging the efficacy of their charms.
