by Will Durant
A healthier way of life accompanied the change to easier dress. A growing minority went in for “natural living”: no corsets, no servants, more outdoor living, and, whenever possible, a retreat from the city to the country. Arthur Young reported: “Everybody that have country seats is at them, and those who have not visit those who have. This revolution in French manners is certainly one of the best features they have taken from England. Its introduction was the easier because of the magic of Rousseau’s writings.”40 But much of this “return to nature” was talk or sentiment rather than action or reality; life in Paris still ran a dizzy race with concerts, operas, plays, horse races, water sports, card games, dances, balls, conversation, and salons.
III. THE SALONN1ÉRES
French women adorned the decline of feudalism not only with the charms of their persons and their dress, but also with their unrivaled ability to make French society no mere gathering of gossips but a vital part of the nation’s intellectual life. Gibbon, after renewing in 1777 his acquaintance with the salons of Paris, wrote:
If Julian could now revisit the capital of France [where he had been born in A.D. 331], he might converse with men of science and genius capable of understanding and instructing a disciple of the Greeks; he might excuse the graceful follies of a nation whose martial spirit has never been enervated by the indulgence of luxury; and he must applaud the perfection of that inestimable art which softens and refines and embellishes the intercourse of social life.41
And in a letter he added: “It has always seemed to me that in Lausanne, as well as in Paris, the women are far superior to the men.”42
The older salonnières were reluctantly leaving the scene. Mme. Geoffrin, as we have seen, died in 1777. Mme. du Deffand almost spanned the century by entering history as one of the Regent’s mistresses43 and opening a salon that continued from 1739 to 1780. She had lost most of the literary lions to Julie de Lespinasse and the new salons, and Horace Walpole, coming to her for the first time in 1765, found her assortment of aging aristocrats unexciting. “I sup there twice a week, and bear all her dull company for the sake of the Regent”44—i.e., for her lively memories of that remarkable interregnum which had set the tone of French society and morals for the next sixty years. But (Horace added) she herself “is delicious [at sixty-eight], as eager about what happens every day as I am about the last century.”
He admired her mind so rapturously—having never met such brilliance in the still-suppressed women of England—that he went to her every day, and paid her compliments that seemed to restore her golden days. She gave him a special chair, which was always reserved for him; she had him pampered with every form of womanly solicitude. Herself somewhat masculine, she was not displeased by his almost effeminate delicacy. Unable to see him, she could mold her image of him close to her heart’s desire, and fell in love with that image. Able to see her, he could never forget her age and her physical helplessness. When he went back to England she wrote him letters almost as warm with devotion as those of Julie de Lespinasse to Guibert, and written in as fine a prose as that age could show. His replies tried to check her elation; he shivered at the thought of what the Selwyns of England would do with such a juicy morsel for satire. She suffered his reproofs, reaffirmed her love, agreed to call it friendship, but assured him that in France friendship was often deeper and stronger than love. “I belong to you more than to myself.... I wish I could send you my soul instead of a letter. I would willingly give up years of my life to be sure of being alive when you come back to Paris.” She compared him to Montaigne, “and this is the highest praise I could give you, for I find no mind as just or as clear as his.”45
He went to Paris again in August, 1767. She awaited him with virginal excitement. “At last, at last, no sea divides us. I cannot make myself believe that a man of your importance, with his hands on the wheel of a great government, and therefore of Europe, could … leave everything to come and see an old sibyl in the corner of a convent. It is really too absurd, but I am enchanted. … Come, my tutor! … It is not a dream—I know I am awake—I shall see you today!” She sent her carriage for him; he went to her at once. For six weeks he gladdened her with his presence and saddened her with his cautions. When he had gone back to England she could think only of his returning to Paris. “You will make my sunset far more beautiful and happy than my noon or my dawn. Your pupil, who is as submissive as a child, only wishes to see you.”46
On March 30, 1773, he asked her to write no more.47 Then he relented, and the correspondence was resumed. In February, 1775, he asked her to return all his letters. She complied, with a delicate suggestion that he reciprocate. “You will have enough to light your fires for a long time if you add to yours all those you have received from me. That would be only fair, but I leave it to your prudence.”48 Of his eight hundred letters to her only nineteen have survived; all of hers were preserved, and were published after Walpole’s death. When he heard that her pension had been discontinued he offered to replace it out of his own income; she did not think it necessary.
The collapse of her romance darkened the natural pessimism of a woman who missed the colors of life but knew its shallows and depths. Even in her blindness she could see through all gallant surfaces to the indefatigable selfishness of the self. “My poor tutor,” she asked Walpole, “have you met only monsters, crocodiles, and hyenas? As for me I see only fools, idiots, liars, envious and sometimes perfidious people. … Everyone I see here dries up my soul. I find no virtue, no sincerity, no simplicity, in anyone.”49 Little religious belief survived to comfort her. Yet she continued her suppers, usually twice a week, and often dined out, if only to avoid the boredom of days as dark as the nights.
At last she, who had learned to hate life, stopped clutching at it, and reconciled herself to death. The illnesses that plague old age had mounted and combined, and she felt too weak, at eighty-three, to combat them. She summoned a priest and made, without much faith, her surrender to hope. In August, 1780, she sent her last letter to Walpole:
I am worse today.... I cannot think that this condition means anything but the end. I am not strong enough to be frightened, and as I am not to see you again I have nothing to regret. … Amuse yourself, my friend, as well as you can. Do not distress yourself about my condition. … You will regret me, for one is glad to know that one is loved.50
She died on September 23, having left to Walpole her papers and her dog.
Many other salonnières continued the great tradition: Mesdames d’Houdetot, d’Épinay, Denis, de Genlis, Luxembourg, Condorcet, Boufflers, Choiseul, Gramont, Beauharnais (wife of an uncle to Josephine). Add to all these the last great pre-Revolutionary salon—Mme. Necker’s. About 1770 she began her Friday receptions; later she received also on Tuesdays, when music ruled; there the Gluck-Piccini war divided the diners, and Mile. Clairon united them by reciting passages from her favorite roles. On Fridays one might meet there Diderot, Marmontel, Morellet, d’Alembert (after Julie’s death), Saint-Lambert, Grimm (after Mme. d’Épinay’s death), Gibbon, Raynal, Buffon, Guibert, Galiani, Pigalle, and Suzanne’s special literary friend, Antoine Thomas. It was at one of these gatherings (April, 1770) that the idea was broached of a statue to Voltaire. There Diderot muzzled his heresies, and became almost refined. “It is regrettable to me,” he wrote to Mme. Necker, “that I did not have the good fortune of knowing you sooner. You would certainly have inspired in me a sense of pureness and delicacy that would have passed from my soul into my works.”51 Others did not report so favorably. Marmontel, though he remained her friend for twenty-five years, described Suzanne in his Memoirs: “Unacquainted with the manners and customs of Paris, she had none of the charms of a young Frenchwoman. … She had no taste in her dress, no ease in her demeanor, no charm in her politeness, and her mind, as well as the expression of her face, was too completely adjusted to possess grace. Her most attractive qualities were those of decorum, sincerity, and kindliness of heart.”52 Aristocratic ladies did not take to he
r; the Baroness d’Oberkirch, who visited the Neckers with Grand Duke Paul in 1782, put her down as “simply nothing more than a governess”;53 and the Marquise de Créqui tore her to shreds in some charmingly spiteful pages.54 Mme. Necker must have had many good qualities to win the lasting love of Gibbon, but she never quite overcame her Calvinist heritage; she remained prim and puritan amid her wealth, and never acquired the sophisticated gaiety that Frenchmen expected of women.
In 1766 she gave birth to the future Mme. de Staël. Germaine Necker, growing up among philosophers and statesmen, became a pundit at ten. Her precocious intelligence made her the pride of her parents until her willful and excitable temperament proved hard on her mother’s nerves. Suzanne, more conservative every day, subjected Germaine to strict discipline; the daughter rebelled, and discord in the elegant home rivaled the chaos in the finances of the state. Necker’s difficulties in trying to stave off governmental bankruptcy despite the American war, and Mme. Necker’s resentment of every criticism that he received in the press, added to the mother’s unhappiness, and Suzanne began to long for the calm life that she had led in Switzerland.
In 1786 Germaine married, and took over part of the duties of hostess in her mother’s salon. But the French salon was now in decline; literary discussion was giving way to eager and partisan politics. “I have no literary news to give you,” Suzanne wrote to a friend in 1786. “Such conversation is no longer the fashion; the crisis is too great; people do not care to play chess on the edge of a precipice.”55 In 1790 the family moved to Coppet, a château which Necker had bought on the north shores of the Lake of Geneva. There Mme. de Staël reigned, and Mme. Necker suffered for years a painful nervous disease, which put an end to her life in 1794.
IV. MUSIC
“As far as music is concerned,” Mozart wrote from Paris on May 1, 1778, “I am surrounded by mere brute beasts. … Ask anyone you like—provided he is not a Frenchman born—and if he knows anything about the matter he will say exactly the same.... I shall thank Almighty God if I escape with my taste unspoiled.”56 These were hard words, but Grimm and Goldoni agreed with them;57 however, all three critics were foreigners. The musical taste of the upper-class Parisians reflected their manners, inclining to restraint of expression and regularity of form; it still echoed the age of Louis XIV. Yet it was precisely in these first years of the new reign that half of Paris lost restraint, and perhaps good manners, in the excitement of the battle over Piccini and Gluck. And note Julie de Lespinasse’s letter of September 22, 1774: “I go constantly to Orfé et Eurydice. I long to hear a dozen times a day that air which rends me, … ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.’”58 Paris was not dead to music, though it imported more than it produced.
In 1751 François-Joseph Gossec, aged seventeen, came from his native Hainaut to Paris with a letter of introduction to Rameau. The old master secured for him a post as conductor of the private orchestra maintained by Alexandre-Joseph de La Popelinière. For that “band” Gossec composed (1754 f.) symphonies antedating Haydn’s first by five years, and in 1754 he published quartets antedating Haydn’s by a year. In 1760 he presented in the Church of St. Roch his Messe des Morts, which originated the idea of playing the wind instruments of the Tuba mirum outside the church. There was no end to Gossec’s enterprise and versatility. In 1784 he founded the École Royale du Chant, which became the nucleus of the renowned Paris Conservatoire de Musique. He achieved a moderate success in opera, comic and serious. He adjusted himself to the Revolution, and composed some of its most famous songs, including the “Hymn to the Supreme Being” for Robespierre’s celebration (June 8, 1794). He survived all political modulations, dying in 1829 at the age of ninety-five.
The dominant figure in the French opera of this period was André Grétry. Like so many others prominent in French music in the eighteenth century, he was an alien, born at Liège in 1741, son of a violinist. On the day of his first Communion, he tells us, he asked God to let him die at once unless he was destined to be a good man and a great musician. That day a rafter fell on his head and severely wounded him; he recovered, and concluded that a noble future was divinely promised him.59 From the age of sixteen he suffered periodically from internal hemorrhages, vomiting six cups of blood in a day; he was subject to fevers and occasional delirium, and at times he went almost mad from inability to stop some strain of music from turning round and round in his head. Even bad music could be forgiven to a man who was so tormented and yet kept his good cheer through seventy-two years.
At the age of seventeen he composed six symphonies, good enough to secure from a cathedral canon the means of going to Rome. If we may believe the engaging Mémoires which he published in 1797, he walked all the way.60 During his eight years in Italy he was influenced by the success of Pergolesi to compose comic operas. Coming to Paris (1767), he received encouragement from Diderot, Grimm, and Rousseau. He studied the dramatic art of Mile. Clairon, developed a special skill in adjusting his music to the accents and inflexions of dramatic speech, and achieved in his operas a lyric delicacy and tenderness that seemed to reflect the spirit of Rousseau, and the return to simplicity and sentiment in French life. He continued to be popular throughout the Revolution, which ordered his works to be published at the government’s expense; arias from his operas were sung by revolutionary crowds. Napoleon gave him a pension. Everybody liked him because he had so few of the stigmata of genius: he was kindly, affectionate, sociable, modest, spoke well of his rivals, and paid his debts. He loved Rousseau, though Rousseau had offended him; in his old age he bought the Hermitage, where Rousseau had lived. In that cottage, on September 24, 1813, while Napoleon was fighting all Europe, Grétry died.
V. ART UNDER LOUIS XVI
Now the style Louis Seize, which had begun almost with the birth of Louis XVI (1754), continued its reaction against the sinuous irregularities of baroque and the feminine delicacies of rococo, and moved toward the masculine lines and symmetrical proportions of a neoclassical art inspired by the excavations at Herculaneum and the Greco-Roman fervor of Winckelmann. The most famous example of the new style in architecture is the Petit Trianon; it is amusing that Mme. du Barry and Marie Antoinette, who were not on speaking ternr, agreed in enjoying this modest tribute to classical order and simplicity. Another pretty example is the present Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, built as the Hôtel Salm (1782) by Pierre Rousseau on the left bank of the Seine. A more massive product of the style is the Palais de Justice as rebuilt in 1776, with its magnificent wrought-iron grille fronting the Cour de Mai. The Théâtre National de l’Odéon (1779) took a somber Doric form; more amiable is the theater raised at Amiens (1778) by Jacques Rousseau in a union of classical and Renaissance. At Bordeaux Victor Louis built (1775) on classical lines an immense theater which Arthur Young described as “by far the most magnificent in France; I have seen nothing that approaches it.”61
Interior decoration retained French elegance. Tapestry was going out of fashion except as covering for armchairs and sofas; painted wallpaper was coming in from China, but was used chiefly in bedrooms; the walls of salons were generally divided into panels of treated wood, carved or painted with figures or floral arabesques rivaling the best in Italy. The finest furniture in the France of Louis XVI was designed and made by two Germans, JeanHenri Riesener and David Roentgen; the Wallace Collection has some enviable examples made for Marie Antoinette and the Petit Trianon.
Sculpture flourished. Pigalle, Falconet, and Jean-Jacques Caffieri lived on from the days of Louis XV. Augustin Pajou, who had begun work in that reign, now came into his own. Under commissions from Louis XVI he carved decorations for the Palais-Royal and the Palais-Bourbon. In his Psyche Abandoned,62 he tried to reconcile two elements in the new age-tender sentiment and classic form. He transmitted his art—and gave his daughter in marriage—to Clodion, whose real name was Claude Michel. Clodion carved a way to prosperity with terra-cotta groups slightly erotic, and reached his zenith with a statue of Montesquieu.63 All the ecstasy of the
flesh sings in the Nymph and Satyr now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The supreme sculptor of the age was Jean-Antoine Houdon. His father was a porter, but in an art school. Born in Versailles, Jean breathed sculpture from the statues with which Louis XIV had peopled the gardens of Le Nôtre. After studying with Pigalle he won the Prix de Rome at twenty, and sallied off to Italy (1760). The St. Bruno that he carved in Rome so pleased Clement XIV that he commented, “The Saint would speak, were it not that the rules of his order impose silence.”64 In Paris he carved or cast a succession of Dianas; one in bronze, in the Huntington Collection, is a marvel of classic features and French grace. More famous is the bronze Diane Nue now in the Louvre; it was refused a place in the Salon of 1785, perhaps because (said a critic) “she was too beautiful and too nude to be exposed to the public,”65 more probably because the statue violated the traditional conception of Diana as chaste.
Houdon, like so many artists of the eighteenth century, found more profit in contemporary portraits than in inviolable goddesses. Nevertheless he resolved to be fair with the facts, and to show a character rather than a face. He spent many hours in the dissecting rooms of medical schools, studying anatomy. When possible he made careful measurements of the sitter’s head, and carved or cast the statue to correspond. When question arose as to whether a corpse that had been exhumed in Paris was really, as claimed, that of John Paul Jones, the shape and measurements of the skull were compared with those of the portrait that Houdon had cast in 1781, and the agreement was so close that the identity was accepted as confirmed.66 He cut into the marble of his Mirabeau all the ravages of smallpox, and showed every shadow and wrinkle, even the fire and depth of the eyes, and the lips parted in readiness to speak.
