by Will Durant
When Mme. du Deffand first met him (1743) she was struck by the range and clearness of his mind. She was then forty-six, he twenty-six. She adopted him as her “wildcat” (chat sauvage);99 invited him not only to her salon but to private dinners tête-à-tête; she vowed her willingness to “sleep for twenty-two hours of the twenty-four, so long as we pass the remaining two hours together.”100 It was after eleven years of this warm friendship that Julie came into their lives.
There was a natural bond between the natural son and the natural daughter. D’Alembert noted it in retrospect:
Both of us lacked parents and family, and having suffered abandonment, misfortune, and unhappiness from our birth, nature seemed to have sent us into the world to find each other, to be to each other all that each had missed, to stand together like two willows, bent by the storm but not uprooted, because in their weakness they have intertwined their branches.101
He felt this “elective affinity” almost at first sight. “Time and custom stale all things,” he wrote to her in 1771, “but they are powerless to touch my affection for you, an affection which you inspired seventeen years ago.”102 Yet he waited nine years before declaring his love, and then he did it by indirection: he wrote to her from Potsdam in 1763 that in refusing Frederick’s invitation to become president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences he had had “a thousand reasons, one of which you haven’t the wits to guess”103—a strange lapse of intelligence in d’Alembert, for was there ever a woman who did not know when a man was in love with her?
Mme. du Deffand felt the growing warmth between her prized guest and her guarded niece; she noticed, too, that Julie was becoming the center of discussion and interest in the salon. For a while she uttered no reproach, but in a letter to Voltaire (1760) she made some bitter remarks on d’Alembert. She allowed a friend to read to her guests, before d’Alembert had arrived, Voltaire’s reply, referring to these remarks. D’Alembert came in soon after the reading had begun, and heard the telltale passage; he laughed with the others, but he was hurt. The Marquise tried to make amends, but the wound remained. When he visited Frederick in 1763 his letters were almost daily to Mlle, de Lespinasse, seldom to Madame. After his return to Paris he fell into the habit of visiting Julie in her apartment before they came down to the salon; and sometimes Turgot or Chastellux or Marmontel accompanied him in these intimate visits. The aging hostess felt that she was being betrayed by those whom she had helped and loved. Now she looked upon Julie as her enemy, and she revealed her feelings in a dozen irritating ways-cold tone, petty demands, occasional reminders of Julie’s dependence. Julie grew daily more impatient with this “blind and vaporous old woman,” and with the obligation to be always on hand or nearby to attend to the Marquise at any hour. Every day increased her unhappiness, for each day had its sting. “All pain strikes deep,” she later wrote, “but pleasure is a bird of quick passage.”104 In a final outburst Madame accused her of deceiving her in her own home and at her expense. Julie replied that she could no longer live with one who so considered her; and on a day early in May, 1764, she left to seek other lodgings. The Marquise made the breach irreparable by insisting that d’Alembert should choose between them; d’Alembert left, and never returned.
For a time the old salon seemed mortally wounded by these amputations. Most of the habités continued to come to the Marquise, but several of them—the Maréchale de Luxembourg, the Duchesse de Châtillon, the Comtesse de Boufflers, Turgot, Chastellux, even Hénault—went to Julie to express their sympathy and continued interest. The salon was reduced to old and faithful friends, and newcomers who sought distinction and good food. Madame described the change in 1768:
Twelve people were here yesterday, and I admired the different kinds and degrees of futility. We were all perfect fools, each in his kind. … We were singularly wearisome. All twelve departed at one o’clock, but none left a regret behind. … Pont-de-Veyle is my only friend, and he bores me to death three quarters of the time.105
She had never, since her light went out, had any love for life, but now that her dearest friends were gone she sank into a hopeless and cynical despair. Like Job, she cursed the day of her birth. “Of all my sorrows my blindness and age are the least. … There is only one misfortune, … and that is to be born.”106 She laughed equally at the dreams of romantics and philosophers—not only at Rousseau’s Héloïse and Savoyard Vicar, but at Voltaire’s long campaign for “truth.” “And you, Monsieur de Voltaire, the declared lover of Truth, tell me in good faith, have you found it? You combat and destroy errors, but what do you put in their place?”107 She was a skeptic, but she preferred genial doubters like Montaigne and Saint-Évre-mond to aggressive rebels like Voltaire and Diderot.
She thought herself finished with life, but life had not yet quite finished with her. Her salon had a fitful resurrection during the ministry of Choiseul, when the leading men in the government gathered around the old Marquise, and the friendship of the kindly Duchesse de Choiseul brought some brightness to darkened days. And in 1765 Horace Walpole began to come to her gatherings, and gradually she developed for him an affection that became her last desperate hold upon life. We hope to meet her again in that final and amazing avatar.
3. Mlle, de Lespinasse
Julie chose as her new home a three-story house at the meeting of the Rue de Bellechasse with the Rue St.-Dominique—only a hundred yards from the Marquise’s conventual home. She was not reduced to poverty; besides several small pensions, she had received pensions of 2,600 livres out of “the King’s revenues” (1758 and 1763), apparently at the urging of Choiseul; and now Mme. Geoffrin, at d’Alembert’s suggestion, dowered her with separate annuities of two thousand livres and one thousand crowns. The Maréchale de Luxembourg gave her a complete suite of furniture.
Soon after settling in these new quarters Julie came down with a severe case of smallpox. “Mlle, de Lespinasse is dangerously ill,” wrote David Hume to Mme. de Boufflers, “and I am glad to see that d’Alembert has come out of his philosophy at such a moment.”108 Indeed, the philosopher walked a long distance every morning to watch at her bed till late at night, and then walked back to his own room at Mme. Rousseau’s. Julie recovered, but was left permanently weak and nervous, her complexion coarsened and blotched. We can imagine what this meant to a woman thirty-two years old and still unmarried.
She was cured just in time to care for d’Alembert, who took to his bed in the spring of 1765 with a stomach ailment that brought him near death. Marmontel was shocked to find him living in a “little room ill-lit, ill-aired, with a very narrow bed like a coffin.”109 Another friend, the financier Wate-let, offered d’Alembert the use of a commodious home near the Temple. The philosopher now sadly consented to leave the woman who had housed and fed him since his childhood. “Oh, wondrous day!” exclaimed Duclos; “d’Alembert is weaned!” To his new quarters Julie commuted daily, repaying his recent care of her with her own unstinted devotion. When he was well enough to move she begged him to occupy some rooms on the upper floor of her house. He came in the fall of 1765, and paid her a moderate rental. He did not forget Mme. Rousseau; he visited her frequently, shared some of his income with her, and never ceased apologizing for their separation. “Poor foster mother, fonder of me than of your own children!”110
For a while Paris assumed that Julie was his mistress. Appearances warranted the assumption. D’Alembert took his meals with her, wrote letters for her, managed her business affairs, invested her savings, collected her income. Publicly they were always together; no host dreamed of inviting one without the other. Nevertheless it gradually dawned even upon the gossipers that Julie was neither mistress nor wife nor lover to d’Alembert, but only a sister and friend. She seems never to have realized that his love for her, though he could not put it into words, was complete. Mesdames Geoffrin and Necker, both of exemplary morals, accepted the relationship as Platonic. The aging salonnière invited both of them to both of her gatherings.
It was a severe tes
t of Mme. Geoffrin’s motherly kindness that she made no known protest when Mlle, de Lespinasse developed a salon of her own. Julie and d’Alembert had made so many friends that within a few months her drawing room was filled almost daily, from five to nine o’clock, with chosen visitors, women as well as men, nearly all of fame or rank. D’Alembert led the conversation, Julie added all the charms of womanhood, all the warmth of hospitality. No dinner or supper was offered, but the salon gained the reputation of being the most stimulating in Paris. Here came Turgot and Loménie de Brienne, soon to be high in the government; aristocrats like Chastellux and Condorcet, prelates like de Boismont and Boisgelin, skeptics like Hume and Morellet, authors like Mably, Condillac, Marmontel, and Saint-Lambert. At first they came to see and hear d’Alembert; then to enjoy the sympathetic skill with which Julie drew out each guest to shine in his or her special excellence. No topics were barred here; the most delicate problems of religion, philosophy, or politics were discussed; but Julie—trained in this art by Mme. Geoffrin—knew how to calm the excited, and return dispute to discussion. The desire not to offend the frail hostess was the unwritten law that generated order in this liberty. At the close of Louis XV’s reign the salon of Mlle, de Lespinasse, in Sainte-Beuve’s judgment, was “the most in vogue, the most eagerly frequented, at an epoch that counted so many that were brilliant.”111
No other salon offered such a double lure. Julie, though pockmarked and fatherless, was becoming the second love of a dozen distinguished men. And d’Alembert was at the height of his powers. Grimm reported:
His conversation offered all that would instruct and divert the mind. He lent himself with as much facility as good will to whatever subject would please most generally, bringing to it an almost inexhaustible fund of ideas, anecdotes, and curious memories. There was no topic, however dry or frivolous in itself, that he had not the secret of making interesting. … All his humorous sayings had a delicate and profound originality.112
And hear David Hume, writing to Horace Walpole:
D’Alembert is a very agreeable companion, and of irreproachable morals. By refusing offers from the Czarina and the King of Prussia he has shown himself above personal gain and vain ambition. … He has five pensions: one from the King of Prussia, one from the King of France, one as a member of the Academy of Sciences, one as a member of the French Academy, and one from his own family. The whole amount is not above six thousand livres a year; on half of this he lives decently; the other half he gives to poor people with whom he is connected. In a word I scarce know a man who, with some few exceptions, … is a better model of a virtuous and philosophical character.113
Julie was at opposite poles to d’Alembert in everything but facility and elegance of speech. But whereas the Encyclopédiste was one of the last heroes of the Enlightenment, seeking reason and measure in thought and action, Julie, after Rousseau, was the first clear voice of the Romantic movement in France, a creature (Marmontel described her) of “the liveliest fancy, the most ardent spirit, the most inflammable imagination which has existed since Sappho.”114 None of the romantics, in flesh or print—no Héloïse of Rousseau nor Rousseau himself, no Clarissa of Richardson or Manon of Prévost—exceeded her in keenness of sensibility, or in the ardor of her inner life. D’Alembert was objective, or tried to be; Julie was subjective to the pitch of a sometimes selfish self-absorption. Yet she “suffered with those that she saw suffer.”115 She went out of her way to comfort the sick or aggrieved, and she labored feverishly to get Chastellux and Laharpe elected to the Academy. But when she fell in love she forgot everything and everybody else—in the first case Mme. du Deffand, in the second and third d’Alembert himself.
In 1766 a young noble, Marqués José de Mora y Gonzaga, son of the Spanish ambassador, entered the salon. He was twenty-two, Julie was thirty-four. He had been married at twelve to a girl of eleven, who died in 1764. Julie soon felt the charm of his youth, possibly of his fortune. Their mutual attraction ripened rapidly to a pledge of marriage. Hearing of this, his father ordered him to military duty in Spain. Mora went, but soon resigned his commission. In January, 1771, he began to spit blood; he went to Valencia, hoping for relief; not cured, he rushed up to Paris and Julie. They spent many happy days together, to the amusement of her little court and the secret suffering of d’Alembert. In 1772 the ambassador was recalled to Spain, and insisted on his son coming with him. Neither parent would consent to his marrying Julie. Mora broke away from them and started north to rejoin her, but he died of tuberculosis at Bordeaux, May 27, 1774. On that day he wrote to her: “I was on my way to you, and I must die. What a horrible doom! … But you have loved me, and the thought of you still gives me happiness. I die for you.” Two rings were removed from his fingers; one contained a strand of Julie’s hair; the other was engraved with the words, “All things pass, but love endures.” The magnanimous d’Alembert wrote of Mora: “I regret on my own account that sensitive, virtuous, and high-minded man, … the most perfect being that I have ever known. … I shall ever remember those priceless moments when a soul so pure, so noble, so strong, and so sweet loved to mingle with mine.”116
Julie’s heart was torn by the news of Mora’s death, and all the more because she had in the meantime given her love to another man. In September, 1772, she met Comte Jacques-Antoine de Guibert, twenty-nine, who had made a notable record in the Seven Years’ War. Moreover, his Comprehensive Study of Tactics was acclaimed as a masterpiece by generals and intellectuals; Napoleon was to carry a copy of it, annotated by his own hand, through all his campaigns; and its “Preliminary Discourse,” denouncing all monarchies, formulated, twenty years before the Revolution, the basic principles of 1789. We can judge the admiration that poured upon Guibert from a topic selected for discussion in a leading salon: “Is the mother, the sister, or the mistress of M. de Guibert to be most envied?”117 He had, of course, a mistress—Jeanne de Montsauge, the latest and longest of his amours. Julie, in a bitter moment, judged him harshly:
The levity, even hardness, with which he treats women comes from the small consideration in which he holds them. … He thinks them flirtatious, vain, weak, false, and frivolous. Those whom he judges most favorably he believes romantic; and though obliged to recognize good qualities in some, he does not on that account value them more highly, but holds that they have fewer vices rather than more virtues.118
However, he was handsome, his manners were perfect, his speech combined substance with feeling, and erudition with clarity. “His conversation,” said Mme. de Staël, was the “most varied, the most animated, and the richest that ever I knew.”119
Julie considered herself fortunate in the preference that Guibert showed for her gatherings. Fascinated by each other’s fame, they developed what on his side became an incidental conquest, and on her side a mortal passion. It was this consuming love that gave her letters to Guibert a place in French literature and among the most revealing documents of the time; there, even more than in Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), the proto-Romantic movement in France finds its living expression.
Her earliest extant letter to Guibert (May 15, 1773) shows her already in his toils. But she was torn with remorse over the violation of her pledge of fidelity to Mora. So she wrote to Guibert, who was leaving for Strasbourg:
Ah, mon Dieu! by what charm, by what fatality, have you come to distract me? Why did I not die in September? I could have died then without … the reproaches that I now make to myself. Alas, I feel it, I could still die for him; there is no interest of mine that I would not sacrifice to him. … Oh, he will pardon me! I had suffered so much! My body and soul were so exhausted by the long continuance of sorrow. The news I received of him threw me into a frenzy. It was then that I first saw you; then that you received my soul, then that you brought pleasure into it. I know not which was sweetest—to feel it, or to owe it to you.120
Eight days later she took down all her defenses: “If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail
to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honor in it which have won you right over my soul forever.”121 At times she wrote with all the abandon of Héloïse to Abélard:
You alone in the universe can possess and occupy my being. My heart, my soul, can henceforth be filled by you alone. … Not once has my door been opened today that my heart did not beat; there were moments when I dreaded to hear your name; then again I was brokenhearted not to hear it. So many contradictions, so many conflicting emotions, are true, and three words explain them: I love you.122
The conflict of the two loves increased the nervous agitation that perhaps had come from the starvation of her hopes for womanly fulfillment, and from a growing tendency to consumption. She wrote to Guibert on June 6, 1773:
Though your soul is agitated, it is not like mine, which passes ceaselessly from convulsion to depression. I take poison [opium] to calm myself. You see that I cannot guide myself; enlighten me, strengthen me. I will believe you; you shall be my support.123
Guibert returned to Paris in October, severed his relations with Mme. de Montsauge, and offered his love to Julie. She accepted gratefully, and yielded to him physically—in the antechamber of her box at the opera (February 10, 1774).124 She claimed later that this, when she was forty-two, was her first lapse from what she called “honor” and “virtue,”125 but she did not reproach herself:
Do you remember the condition in which you put me, and in which you believed you left me? Well, I wish to tell you that, returning quickly to myself, I rose again [italics hers], and I saw myself not one hair’s-breadth lower than before. … And what will astonish you, perhaps, is that of all the impulses that have drawn me to you, the last is the only one for which I have no remorse.... In that abandonment, that last degree of abnegation of myself and of all personal interests, I proved to you that there is but one misfortune on earth that seems to me unbearable—to offend you and lose you. That fear would make me give my life.126
