Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  La Comtesse was truly chagrined. But you knocked a pair of ducats out of her pocket at cards. This turned up her Dutch nose … After dinner you said imprudently you had so bad a view of life that you could do almost anything.

  By now Boswell was again swinging through terrible extremes. On one day he rose ‘dreary as a dromedary’; on the next he was valiantly determined to ‘sustain the character of a country gentleman’. He received a ‘sweet and elegant letter’ from Madame Geelvinck in the Hague, and momentarily thought her ‘the finest prize in the Provinces’; but then found – ‘alas! it did not elevate your gloomy soul.’ He tried eating at a raffish hotel in the Oudkerkhof, but then came home in misery.

  You dined at Kloster’s – blackguards. You was direfully melancholy and had the last and most dreadful thoughts. You came home and prayed. You read Greek, and Voltaire on the English.

  He tried to drown himself in study: Xenophon, Plato, Civil Law, his idea for a Dutch dictionary; but ended up discussing predestination with the Reverend Brown.

  Assailed by thoughts of suicide, Boswell turned his mind to his warlike Scottish ancestors and went out one winter’s dawn into the deserted meadows beyond Utrecht Cathedral where he performed a curious ritual with a dress sword.

  You went out into the fields, and in view of the [cathedral] tower, drew your sword glittering in the sun, and on your knees swore that if there is a Fatality, then that was also ordained: but if you had free will, as you believed, you swore and called the Great God to witness that, although you’re melancholy, you’ll stand it, and for the time before you go to Hague, now own it.

  Then he went grimly off to Professor Trotz’s lecture.

  Later in the day he returned to the cathedral, climbed the narrow stone steps to the top of the tower, over 350 feet high, and stood silently looking down on Utrecht, and far out across the stretching misty expanse of Holland, pierced with innumerable spires, towards his Scottish homeland far in the north. Then he hurried off and took tea with Zélide.

  Zélide’s highly iconoclastic views on marriage gradually came to fascinate Boswell, providing not merely a diversion to his melancholy, but something of a solace. He found a new role: no longer the desperate, lovelorn traveller, he became the wise, amusing, philosophic friend.

  Her autobiographical ‘Character’, which he kept among his papers with a series of sheets headed ‘Portrait of Zélide’, provided him with much material for reflection. In many ways she seemed strikingly like himself (though he would never admit this), and her situation was one that he instinctively understood. Certain passages went straight to his heart. Zélide had written of herself:

  Realising that she is too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased to hope for happiness. She flees from remorse and pursues diversion. Her pleasures are rare, but they are lively. She snatches them, she relishes them eagerly. Aware of the futility of planning and the uncertainty of the future, she seeks above all to make the passing moment happy. Can you not guess her secret? Zélide is something of a sensualist. Too lively and too powerful feelings; too much inner activity with no satisfactory outlet: there is the source of all her misfortunes.

  Boswell could identify with that restlessness, that secret ‘sensuality’, that excessive ‘inner activity’, only too well. It was exactly these things that he was trying to curb in himself. So he set out to curb them in Zélide instead. He would not so much court this Tulip as cultivate her, guide her and if necessary defend her in the little daily duels of Dutch gossip. He would become her adviser and her champion. It was understood that she was wittier, cleverer perhaps, than he; but in exchange it was also to be understood that he was wiser, more morally sound, than she. That is the role that Boswell now assigned to himself, and which, with touching vanity, he assumed that Zélide (not to mention her parents) would gratefully accept from a young Scottish gentleman of parts. It was one way, after all, of avoiding suicide. And psychologically it also represented a subtle shift from the autobiographical to the biographical mode.

  Boswell was determined to stay on in Utrecht – to ‘stick to his post’ – until the end of the academic year in June. But it was Zélide, not Madame Geelvinck, who now held him. He wrote long letters to his friends Dempster and Temple, and even to his father, explaining his depression and also his determination.

  It is certain that I am subject to melancholy. It is the distemper of our family. I am equally subject to excessive high spirits. Such is my constitution. Let me study it, and let me maintain an equality of mind.

  They all wrote back encouragingly, Lord Auchinleck with the greatest feelings of sympathy, having experienced similar emotions in youth. He bracingly quoted Virgil:

  You are not therefore to despond or despair; on the contrary, you must arm yourself doubly against them, as the poet directs: ‘Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.’ [Thou shall not give way to misfortune but strive against it with greater daring.]

  And he warned gently against his son’s amatory flights: ‘Your Dutch wit and Dutch widow are not so easily caught as our Scots lasses.’

  As part of his philosophic strategy, Boswell now told Zélide that he was busy finding her an ideal husband in England who would greatly improve her moral outlook. This was an ingenious form of displaced courtship. Temple was chosen for this delightful task, and he responded enthusiastically to this new double intrigue of his wayward friend.

  So the Countess turns out to be a jilt. I am already in love with Mademoiselle de Zuylen. Charming creature! young and handsome, une savante et bel esprit. Tell her an Englishman adores her and would think it the greatest happiness of his life to have it in his power to prostrate himself at her feet. You shall have the widow. Don’t be angry.

  Boswell might have been angry, or at least a little put out, had he known in what spirit of mischievous fun Zélide received these confidences and observed all his grand, philosophic man-oeuvrings. Her own side of the story can easily be traced through the letters she was sending almost daily to Constant d’Hermenches. She first mentioned Boswell in March. ‘When I go to the Assembly, I chat and play with a young Scotsman, full of good sense, wit, and naiveté.’ The emphasis was undoubtedly, for Zélide, on that naiveté. By May, she was relishing his plan to make her ‘more rational, more prudent, and more reserved’ through the curious mechanism of marriage to a Scotsman: ‘I am greatly amused.’ She was running rings round him; it was this fact which gave her such a genuine pleasure in his company.

  Boswell was now in the liveliest state of confusion about his own feelings. While speaking to Zélide of reason and prudence, he was secretly planning a thoroughly imprudent visit to the red-light district in Amsterdam, as a way of treating his depression and completing his Dutch education. While singing Zélide’s praises to Temple, he was simultaneously writing in extreme exasperation in his journal.

  Yesterday you continued in a kind of delirium. You wrote all day. At night you was at Monsieur de Zuylen’s … Zélide was nervish. You saw she would make a sad wife and propagate wretches. You reflected when you came home that you have not made enough use of your time. You have not been active enough, learned enough Dutch, enough of manners.

  Yet when Zélide was criticized by a Dutch naval captain, Petre Reynst, he again leapt faithfully to her defence. Reynst had remarked cuttingly that Zélide had been brought up in Geneva, and there was ‘unlimited wit among the ladies’ but a total lack of ‘good principles’. She sacrificed ‘probity to wit’, like a typical blue-stocking.

  Boswell answered with a gallant broadside. ‘I fought like her champion. I said, “That young lady makes me feel very humble, when I find her so much above me in wit, in knowledge, in good sense.” ‘

  Reynst politely demurred. ‘She lacks good sense and consequently she goes wrong; and a man who has not half her wit and knowledge may still be above her.’

  Boswell pretended to disagree, but did not know exactly what to reply, for it was secretly just what he thought himself. Boswell believed
that it was the male sex who must always command, out of a natural God-given superiority. Zélide directly challenged this notion. It was a profound clash of cultural assumptions, in its own way a clash between Enlightenment and the advance shock-wave of Romanticism. If Boswell aspired to be an Enlightenment philosophe, Zélide was already acting like a Romantic rebel. Boswell added a comment that is one of the most acute things ever observed about Isabelle de Zuylen.

  I thought [Reynst’s criticism] very true, and I thought it a good thing. For were it not for that lack [of good sense], Zélide would have an absolute power. She would have unlimited dominion over men, and would overthrow the dignity of the male sex.

  At the end of May, Boswell took the canal boat to Amsterdam, in an ecstasy of nerves and expectation, to assert the God-given superiority of man in a Dutch bawdy-house. At the same time he had accepted an invitation from ‘dear Zélide’ to visit her for the first time at her family castle. The two expeditions, which took place within twenty-four hours of each other, reveal his divided self with a comedy worthy of Diderot.

  Boswell chose a Saturday night for his Amsterdam expedition. Having spent all Friday night awake on the canal boat ‘among ragamuffins’, he arrived ‘restless and fretful’, put up at Grubb’s English Hotel and spent the morning paying courtesy calls on a series of Scottish clergymen. He then dined with an English merchant, drinking a good deal. These psychological preparations were somewhat marred by the realization that he had no condom to protect himself against venereal disease, and he did not know where to purchase one in Amsterdam. (The eighteenth-century condom was usually made of animal-bladder, and referred to as a ‘sheath’ or ‘armour’; it was expensive and therefore considered to be reusable in an emergency.)

  Trusting to luck, Boswell blundered off to a bawdy-house at five o’clock. ‘I was shown upstairs, and had a bottle of claret and a juffrouw.’ But on closer inspection Boswell concluded that the girl had more need of a doctor than a customer and excused himself. ‘I had no armour, so did not fight. It was truly ludicrous to talk in Dutch to a whore. This scene was to me a rarity as great as peas in February.’ He suddenly felt ashamed of himself, wondering what he was doing in ‘the sinks of gross debauchery’, and he fled in deepest gloom. Back in the streets he then upbraided himself for moral cowardice: ‘so sickly was my brain that I had the low scruples of an Edinburgh divine.’

  But the comedy was not over. Boswell rushed off to another Scottish clergyman, James Blinshall (there seemed to be an endless supply of these hospitable reverends in Amsterdam), and sat talking of ‘religious melancholy like a good sound fellow’ until nine in the evening. This revived his spirits, and he then went drinking at a Scottish tavern called Farquhar’s ‘among blackguards’, and supped with an Irish peruke-maker. It was, he thought hazily, turning into a ‘queer evening’ altogether. By eleven he was back on the streets looking for a speelhuis, the Dutch equivalent of a dance-hall. But he had no guide (and still no ‘armour’).

  I therefore very madly sought for one myself and strolled up and down the Amsterdam streets, which by all accounts are very dangerous at night. I began to be frightened and to think of Belgic knives.

  But weaving through the narrow alleys, he persisted until he heard music, found the speelhuis and ‘entered boldly’.

  One can just about reconstruct the scene from his by now rather confused notes. A band was playing in one corner; the place was packed with sailors and whores; everyone was dancing and drunk. Boswell lurched to the bar, obtained a drink and a pipe and launched himself into the mêlée, talking wildly in Dutch to anyone he bumped into. ‘I had near quarrelled with one of the musicians. But I was told to take care, which I wisely did.’ He was transfixed by the extraordinary fancy dress worn by all the girls. Finally he found one got up in ‘riding-clothes’, with a mass of lace frou-frou, and cheerfully danced with her ‘a true blackguard minuet’. For a little while he forgot everything in this strange, erotic pas de deux. ‘I had my pipe in my mouth and performed like any common sailor.’ Then he was suddenly tired and drunk and hopeless. ‘I spoke plenty of Dutch but could find no girl that elicited my inclinations. I was disgusted with this low confusion.’ Boswell staggered out, miraculously found his way back to Grubb’s Hotel, and ‘slept sound’.

  He played out the final act of his great Amsterdam expedition, which he realized had turned into low farce, on Sunday morning. He went meekly off to the English Ambassador’s chapel, heard a ‘good sermon’, dined and then returned to hear James Blinshall preach. He was overwhelmed by ‘all the old Scots gloomy ideas’, and determined on one last sortie before the return to Utrecht.

  I then strolled through mean brothels in dirty lanes. I was quite splenetic. I still wanted amour. I drank tea with Blinshall. At eight I got into the roef of the Utrecht boat. I had with me an Italian fiddler, a German officer, his wife and child.

  So his wild weekend finished penitently, on a subdued domestic note. Boswell did not know whether to be more ashamed by what he had attempted to do in Amsterdam, or by what he had failed to do. Back at Utrecht he was ‘changeful and uneasy’ all day. There was nothing for the philosopher to be proud of, either way.

  His expedition to Zuylen was such an absolute contrast that even Boswell was somewhat bewildered by his own capacity for extremes. In response to Zélide’s invitation, he and the Reverend Brown walked the five miles to the ancestral castle on the Vecht, and were instantly captivated by the old moated building with its four pointed turrets reflected in the still waters. Gazing round at the ancient brick gatehouse, the cobbled paths, the formal gardens and the stretching vistas of beech trees opening out on to placid water meadows dotted with windmills, Boswell had a new vision of Zélide’s existence. She became for him the daughter of a magic domain, a princess in an enchanted tower, imprisoned perhaps by her own brilliant perversities, which the wandering young philosopher must waken with a kiss. Or the spiritual equivalent of a kiss. This image of Zélide, like a figure out of a Dutch fairy tale, would never quite leave Boswell. And her enigmatic quality, her refusal ever wholly to yield her mysterious independence of soul, became for him a symbol of Holland itself.

  They returned that evening to Utrecht, and dined with the assembled van Tuyl clan. Boswell at once set about charming Zélide, summoning up all his Scottish sagacity, teasing, reasoning, playing his philosophic part to the full. She was highly responsive, and together in that elegant company, they danced a very different kind of minuet, each wondering who was in love with whom.

  Zélide was too vivacious, abused system, and laughed at reason, saying that she was guided by a sentiment intérieur. I was lively in defence of wisdom and showed her how wrong she was, for if she had no settled system one could never count on her. One could not say what she would do. I said to her also, ‘You must show a little decorum. You are among rational beings, who boast of their reason, and who do not like to hear it flouted.’ Old De Zuylen and all fifteen friends were delighted with me.

  After dinner Boswell and Zélide slipped away and walked together outside in the fine spring evening, wandering into ‘a sweet pretty wood’. It was the moment for romantic declarations, but Boswell carefully changed tack, and deployed his double intrigue.

  I delivered to Zélide the fine compliments which my friend Temple had charged me to deliver; that is to say, the warm sentiments of adoration. She was much pleased. I talked to her seriously and bid her marry a bon baron of good sense and amiable manners who would be her superior in common life, while he admired her fine genius and all that.

  Zélide gazed at Boswell with amusement. ‘She said she would marry such a man if she ever saw him. But still she would fain have something finer.’ They turned to go back into the house, and Boswell risked a final shift of direction.

  ‘I said she should never have a man of much sensibility. For instance, “I would not marry you if you would make me King of the Seven Provinces.” ‘

  Zélide burst out laughing and later reported the
whole conversation to d’Hermenches. ‘He told me the other day that although I was a charming creature, he would not marry me if I had the Seven United Provinces for my dowry; I agreed heartily.’ So the princess and the philosopher dallied, and in ‘fine, gay, free conversation did the minutes fly’.

  There was not enough time left for Boswell to resolve his own paradoxes, or those of Zélide. His Dutch sojourn was drawing to its close. In early June, Lord Marischal, an old friend of Lord Auchinleck’s, arrived at the Hague and announced that he had come to take Boswell on the next stage of his European journey. He promised to take him into Germany on a visit to the Prussian Court of Frederick the Great. Boswell’s thoughts swung rapidly from love to glory, and he began to pack his law books, while ordering ‘a genteel flowered-silk suit’.

  Boswell’s last days were spent in a flurry of visits to Zélide in her enchanted castle and a series of extended farewells. He swung between passion and relief. Peter Reynst informed him that Zélide was ‘really in love’ with Boswell. ‘I believed it. But I was mild and retenue.’ On 10 June, he rushed up to Zuylen in a splendid hired chaise and his mood was very different.

  I was in solid spirits in the old chateau, but rather too odd was I; for I talked of my pride, and wishing to be kind. Zélide and I were left alone. She owned that she was hypochondriac [melancholy], and that she had no religion other than that of the adoration of one God. In short, she discovered an unhinged mind; yet I loved her.