Meanwhile he is consoling himself with another woman of Valognes: ‘I went to bed, you know where, not without difficulty but not with any adventure worth the trouble of telling.’40
It was 1828, the year of the lemon-juice letters to Rosalie Malye, and Kergorlay was still faithfully sending reports about her from Metz (the last surviving is dated 1 November). But however hard he found it to let go, it must have become obvious to Tocqueville that the affair had no future, and it is not surprising that such a highly sexed young man sought pleasure elsewhere. He continued to do so for the next two years: a letter of May 1830 shows that he and Beaumont were involving themselves with two sisters, Amélie and Sidonie d’Aumont, who lodged in the château of Versailles.41 We hear no more of Mlle X. There remains the question of the other young woman whose name began with M.
The likeliest guess is that she was Mary Mottley. The story goes that she met Tocqueville because she was his neighbour in the rue d’Anjou (when writing about her from America he archly refers to her as ‘la voisine’).42
Since the disappearance of the Court, Versailles had been a dull little town, and Tocqueville, at least when he was alone there, took small advantage of it; he writes to Beaumont:
I die of boredom here: the evenings seem endless, I drift about the woods of the neighbourhood until after night has fallen. Then I come home and start taking off my frock-coat so as to change my clothes and go into society. And then when I am in my shirt-sleeves I can’t resist the opportunity to go to bed. Such is my life. For the rest, I work like the devil at the parquet.43
Things were livelier when Beaumont was at home, and Paris was always close at hand; Tocqueville was not always a hermit; but his world was not Miss Mottley’s.
She was an Englishwoman. Sheila Le Sueur has established that she was born on 2 March 1801 or thereabouts, at Gosport. The Mottleys were an emphatically naval family: her father was the bursar of the seamen’s hospital at Gosport, one of her uncles was an admiral, and her three brothers were all officers in the Royal Navy. She had four sisters.44 Readers of Mansfield Park will understand what happened. At the age of four Mary was handed over to her father’s rich sister for her upbringing, like Fanny Price in the novel: one less mouth for her parents to feed. But this aunt was no baronet’s lady. She was Elizabeth Belam, the widow of a man who made and sold ‘pills and remedies’ and had, apparently, prospered. Born in 1769, she was comparatively young when she adopted Mary. She seems to have made an excellent mother-substitute: she and Mary might occasionally quarrel, but they were devoted to each other.
Why and when did they move to France? They cannot have done so before the fall of Napoleon, which the British celebrated by pouring over the Channel in vast numbers to a Continent which they had not seen for a decade or more. Most went as tourists, but more and more settled, for all sorts of reasons: Beau Brummell fled to Boulogne-sur-Mer to escape his creditors. It is unlikely that Mrs Belam had serious money problems; still, she may have had reason to economize, and living in France was notoriously cheaper than living in England. Versailles was notoriously cheaper than Paris. As a result houses left empty by the departure of courtiers and government officials began to fill with English and Irish people of modest means, who were sneered at as less than genteel by their snobbish compatriots, while the French welcomed all agreeable company. The poet Tom Moore used the phrase ‘Versailles English’ as shorthand for second-rate, though he himself was another refugee from creditors. At any rate, by 1828 Mrs Belam and her niece were established at Versailles, and Mary had learned to speak fluent French.45
She was pretty, or Tocqueville would probably never have noticed her. Rédier has ungallantly preserved a tradition that she had unattractively long yellow teeth but the likeness taken of her in 1831 by Candide Blaize does not support it. No doubt the artist felt obliged to flatter his sitter where necessary, but the face as he drew it is far too individual to be disbelieved: for one thing, it is much more vividly precise than the only other likenesses.46 In it Miss Mottley is dressed to kill, her thick and lustrous dark curls crowned fashionably with a tortoiseshell comb, her face framed by pearl ear-rings, her dress a frothy confection of lace and silk. She has a tiny waist (this, perhaps, is painter’s licence). Her look is patient, modest, even a little anxious, as if she does not like sitting and will be glad when the ordeal is over; but her large eyes are alert, her mouth is firm: this is a woman of courage and intelligence. The overall impression is of a woman not to be taken lightly and, surprisingly, a slightly sad one.
Tocqueville needed women for much more than sex; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that for him sex could comprehend much more than eager physical pleasure. He wanted mothering. Perpetually anxious about his talents, his health, his worldly prospects, he needed tenderness and reassurance. He also needed forgiveness and patience: he was well aware of his faults. He needed companionship. Perhaps his effusive expressions of devotion to Kergorlay and Beaumont were in part attempts to get something from men that women had not yet offered him; certainly no woman would permanently succeed with him who could not enter into his ambitions, his intellectual life, his political preoccupations. To a lesser, but still great extent, he needed someone who needed him: someone he could cherish and protect. In Mary Mottley he found it all.
She was not perfect, even for him. She was something of a hypochondriac, perhaps because of her background in quack medicine. She had little humour and no wit, although she enjoyed good conversation. She was tenacious in her grudges. But for the most part these traits were inconsequential.
We do not know what first drew her to Tocqueville; indeed we know nothing at all about their courtship. It is only certain that by the summer of 1830 their affair was solidly established, which makes it all the more curious that Tocqueville should at that time (as he wrote to Beaumont) have prowled after Sidonie d’Aumont through the Versailles fair, making ‘carp’s eyes’ and shooting ‘Assassin glances’ at her and doing his best to win an assignation. Perhaps he reflected that Marie, as he called her (and as I will from this point), having moved to Saint-Cloud, could not easily detect his goings-on – which included a brief fling with an unnamed woman at Caen. He was always an unrestrained, or shall we say a selfish, lover, which was to cause Marie much unhappiness; but that did not diminish his permanent commitment to his maîtresse en titre.47
None of his friends seems to have had the least doubt as to what was going on, but there are various mysteries. While Tocqueville was in America (1831–2) he sent his letters to Marie under cover to his friend Ernest de Chabrol; the explanation is presumably that Mrs Belam had still to be kept in the dark. As a respectable Englishwoman she could only approve of Tocqueville if he offered honourable marriage, and whatever he and Marie hoped for he was not yet in a position to do anything of the kind. He was still entirely reliant on his father for money, and Marie was conspicuously unsuitable by the standards of the comte and comtesse, even if they knew of her existence (which they probably did – Comte Hervé’s Versailles connections were excellent). She was English, Protestant and middle-class: Rédier goes so far as to say that if Alexis married her he would violently overturn the prejudices of his race (meaning the whole extended family of the French noblesse).48 The post-revolutionary nobility felt that it was hanging on to its identity with its fingernails. The Second Estate was no longer recognized in law; the reduced monarch in the Tuileries was never in a position to restore the hierarchies of Versailles; wealth and social position – even noble titles – were now also enjoyed by bankers and Bonapartists; the old noblesse could only maintain itself by insisting on the importance of birth. Unless she was very rich (like Édouard de Tocqueville’s wife) a bride had to be née, and Marie Mottley was neither. It was probably years before Alexis dared to mention the possibility of this marriage to his parents. It is not even certain that at this stage he was sleeping with Marie. She may have held back; besides, Versailles was the epitome of those small French towns which were, as Richar
d Cobb repeatedly insists, close, cruelly observant, and very hierarchical neighbourhoods.49 As a foreigner, Mrs Belam was presumably not fully integrated into the network of gossip and spying, but it would have been difficult to hide a sexual liaison from her (we may remember Tocqueville’s poor servant, Madeleine). Then there was the possibility of pregnancy: the consequences of that would be ruinous to them all.
If Tocqueville and Marie did indeed at first refrain from coupling, it helps us to understand why he continued to pursue other women. But whatever the facts, he loved Marie, and was firmly loyal (if not constant) to her; and there was something else. He was bored, almost disgusted, by the sort of young woman whom men of his breeding were expected to marry. A noble young lady, brought up in the utmost seclusion and educated, if that was the word, only by nuns, was carefully drilled in all the insipidities of correct behaviour and then launched into ‘the world’, where her reputation as a jeune fille bien élevée was promoted by her family; sometimes she was encouraged to be ostentatiously pious. After marriage she showed her true colours, either by becoming implacably frivolous, living only for pleasure, or implacably religious and domesticated. In neither incarnation was she the sort of wife that Tocqueville desired. Kergorlay too was emphatic on the point: on a visit to Germany in 1837 he was disgusted at the hypocritical prudery of German ladies who when suffering from sore throats said that they had ‘pains in their necks’, and, if pregnant, that they were ‘expecting’. He put it down to Protestantism, and asked Tocqueville if Englishwomen and Americans were not just as bad? Tocqueville, though by now married to Marie, gave modified assent to this suggestion. There was much pretence of virtue in England, he said, so that it was actually easier to get into an Englishwoman’s bedroom to sleep with her than for any other purpose (how did he know?), but at the same time there was more genuine virtue and self-respect among women in London than in Paris.50 Since he held such views it is not surprising that he married an Englishwoman, or that he opposed arranged marriages, or that the list of his women friends – Mme Swetchine, Mme Ancelot, Mrs Grote, Mrs Child, Mme Mohl, for instance – does not contain the name of a single Frenchwoman of his own age, outside his family, except those whom his male friends married. During the 1848 revolution he met George Sand at a party and to his surprise got on very well with her, but Mme Sand was not in the least typical of her countrywomen.51 He delighted in the company of women of an older generation – Mme Récamier, Mme de Kergorlay, Mme de Dino – but they had no successors. He never lapsed into misogyny, unlike Kergorlay, but it can hardly be denied that his attitude to Frenchwomen would tend to isolate him in his own country; and from the point of view of his parents, it made him a most intractable son.
His love of Marie was the strongest and deepest emotion of his life. Their relationship grew and changed over time, but perhaps this is as good a point as any to quote a letter which he wrote to her after some years of marriage: it goes to the heart of the matter in every sense.
Apparently Marie had been doubting her success as a wife.
... Must I reproach you? What for? For having given me the only real happiness I have felt in life, and a great zest for existence, and for having endured without complaint my violent and despotic character, for subduing me by your sweetness and tenderness? To my knowledge these are the only complaints I have to make. You have done yet more for me, mon amie chérie, and I have kept that service for mention in the final place. You have diverted me from a course in which perhaps without you I would have been lost. You have shown me for the first time all the nobility, generosity and, let me add, the virtue of true love. I swear that I believe my love for you has made me a better man. I love the good more because I love you than for any other reason. When I think of you I feel my soul ascend; I want to make you proud of me and to prove every day to you that you did not make a mistake when you chose me. Lastly, I never feel more inclined to think about God, more convinced of the reality of the other life, than when I think of you ... You are without exception the only person in the world who knows the bottom of my soul in these matters; you alone see my instincts, my hopes, my doubts. If ever I become a Christian, I will owe it, I think, to you ... I love you as a sixteen-year-old never could, but in thinking of you I feel all the generous passions, all the noble instincts, the complete surrender of oneself, that as a rule lovers feel only at that age ...52
It was a betrothal, it would one day be a match; and meanwhile it was already a spur to ambition.
It may be said in conclusion to this chapter that by 1830 Tocqueville had rejected his family traditions in religion, history and love.
There remained politics.
* The eldest son of Charles X, better known as the duc d’Angoulême.
* Not that he ever forgave Thiers. He regarded him as one of those writers of democratic times who preached a kind of blind surrender to historical inevitability (see OC I ii 91–2) and blamed the Histoire de la Révolution, along with Lamartine’s Girondins, for helping to bring on the 1848 Revolution (OX VII 94–5).
* At this stage of his development AT thought that the American example was thoroughly unsuitable for France.
* ‘rouses vain weakness in my heart’
* The influence of Montesquieu seems clear in an essay on duelling which AT presented to the parquet of Versailles that autumn, in which the practice is linked to the sentiment of honour, ‘so precious in our monarchies’ (OXC XVI 63).
* Both André Jardin and Larry Siedentop state that Tocqueville began to attend Guizot’s lectures (on the history of civilization in Europe) in 1828. They give no authority, I have found absolutely no confirmation of the statement, and the letter which I cite (30 August 1829) seems conclusive that AT first heard Guizot in 1829.
* The references to Providence in DA I, ‘Introduction’, are a sad, but not inexplicable, backsliding.
CHAPTER SIX
JULY
1829–1830
Once, the Italian went on, once only in his life, and that in his early manhood, had his grandfather known what it was to feel profound joy. That was at the time of the Paris July Revolution. He had gone about proclaiming to all and sundry that some day men would place those three days alongside the six days of creation, and reverence them alike. Hans Castorp felt utterly dumbfounded – involuntarily he slapped the table with his hand.
THOMAS MANN, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN,
TR. H. T. LOWE-PORTER
ON 2 MAY 1829 there was a public disturbance at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Some thirty young workingmen who had been drinking outside the town in one of the cabarets which were a well-known feature of the district, on returning to Saint-Germain were challenged when they reached the gate: ‘Qui vive?’ They were in a jolly mood: it was a spring evening, and a Monday (perhaps they were prolonging Sunday); two or three of them were even in fancy dress. At any rate, a voice called out in reply, ‘Troupe de Napoléon! Vive l’Empéreur!’ They entered Saint-Germain, refreshed themselves further at another cabaret, and eventually arrived at the place de l’Église. There one of them, who was carrying a long branch of birch, became the centre of the group, which danced round him crying ‘Vive l’Empéreur, à bas Charles X, vive la République,’ and, some of them, ‘Le pain à 24 sous les huit livres! ’* They found their way to yet another cabaret and drank some more, and then began to feel the need for cockades. So they tied a red and blue handkerchief and a white one to the branch of birch, and lo! – a tricolour. By 10 p.m. they were ready to go home, and the streets were quiet again. But the authorities could not overlook such a shocking business. Twenty arrests were made, and Tocqueville, with a colleague, was sent from Versailles to investigate the incident. His report was as temperate as possible: he said everything he could to minimize the affair, though he had to report that one of the men arrested had said that ‘he didn’t love Charles X more than he did Napoleon and if he supported the latter he was fully entitled to shout Vive l’Empéreur now that there was freedom of the press.’ But the tribunal was sev
ere: eventually seventeen of the twenty were found guilty and sent to prison for terms ranging from five days to six months.1
In this nutshell may be seen the causes of the July Revolution: the failure of the Bourbon Restoration to win any solid support among the labouring people of Paris and its immediate hinterland; popular nostalgia for the age of the tricolour, whether republican or (which they preferred) imperial; the dangerous threat of hard times – a crisis had begun in 1827 which was not going to abate until 1832, and meanwhile the price of bread was twenty-one sous for a four-pound loaf;2 the stupid rigidity of an insecure regime.
Apparently Tocqueville was not yet much interested in questions of penal policy; it may or may not have struck him that prison was an absurd and cruel punishment for an evening’s revel. But he was certainly much concerned about a quite different display of the Ultras’ heavy-handedness that followed hard upon: the dismissal of the Martignac ministry and its replacement by that of Polignac on 8 August. Next day Tocqueville wrote to his brother Édouard, who was honeymooning in Italy:
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 13
