by Antal Szerb
Loin donc ces froids jardins, colifichet champêtre,
Insipides réduits, dont l’insipide maître
Vous vante, en s’admirant, ses arbres bien peignés,
Ses petits salons verts, bien tondés, bien soignés.
Far from these cold gardens, these rustic baubles,
These insipid retreats whose insipid owners
Brag, self-admiringly, of their well-groomed trees,
Their little green salons, so well cared-for and tended.
Delille goes on to state what it is that he and his contemporaries look for in a garden, and in nature—the human heart.
Il est des soins plus doux, un art plus enchanteur,
C’est peu de charmer l’oeil, il faut parler au coeur.
Avez-vous donc connu ces rapports invisibles
Des corps inanimés et des êtres sensibles?
Avez-vous entendu des eaux, des prés, des bois
La muette eloquence et la secrète voix?
There are sweeter cares, a more enchanting art:
To charm the eye is nothing: you must speak to the heart.
Have you ever known the invisible rapport
Between inanimate things and conscious beings?
Have you listened to the wordless eloquence
Of the waters, the fields and the woods?
Bernadin de Saint Pierre, the author of Paul et Virginie, writing in this period found in nature the love of God and a benign and sensitive Providence. In his Études de la nature—Studies of Nature—he asserts that volcanoes exist because if Nature did not locate its great chimneys beside the oceans, then oils and fats from plants and animals would coat the surface of the water; that cows have four udders and only one or perhaps two calves at a time because Providence reserves two of the udders for supplying humans with milk, and that fleas are black so that they will stand out against human skin and thus be easier to pick off.
This sentimentality is simply a loftier, more sublime form of hedonism. People want to take pleasure in the soul, in the human heart, in their own sensitivity and in the fatal présent du ciel—the fateful gift from Heaven. Above all, they want to enjoy the emotions and the sensitivity that their own goodness, or that of others, inspires in them. The War of American Independence, which the French supported, gave rise to a sort of sentimental patriotism—the enthusiasm was intense. They even shed their blood for the fine, upstanding Americans, for Benjamin Franklin, with his great clumsy shoes that stood for everything simple and natural, for the gentle-souled Quakers, and for the brave and open-hearted pioneers of the virgin forests, who were taming the lands so they could be worked by a peace-loving people.
In the theatre, these sensitive hearts, kindly fathers, chaste maidens, heroic fiancés, faithful lovers and steadfast spouses abound, and virtue is everywhere. Actors praise the virtue of princes to storms of applause, and a minute later the princes sitting in their boxes renew the applause when the same actors praise the virtues of the common people. And the newspapers run columns devoted to Traits d’humanité in which heart-warming good deeds are recorded.
Count Haga, whom we have joined on his travels through France, had, as his favourite reading when young, a novel by Marmontel entitled Bélisaire. What was it about, this tale that so captivated the heart of the youthful prince? Belisarius, the Byzantine general, has in his old age been the victim of a court intrigue, has gone into exile, and is now a beggar making his way back to his ancestral mansion. Along the way, he comforts all who take pity on him, explaining that they should not be angry with the King—he certainly feels no anger himself—because he had been misled by others, and besides, being exiled was no great hardship, since what mattered was to have a benevolent heart. No one today would be able to read such a tale of good-heartedness and virtue through to the end, but at the time frivolous and worldly young men were bowled over by it, as must have been the case with Count Haga.
All this virtue and good-heartedness was of course principally to be found on the stage and in books. A great many people found it absurd. Amongst them was a Hungarian contemporary, György Alajos Szerdahely, the Jesuit father and Latin poet. Satirical Verses for our Times is the title of his poem, “which celebrates nothing so much as the love of one’s fellow man”:
Nullum odium, nulla est dissentio, nulla simultas.
Aurea Saturni tempora Phoebe vehis!
Otia securae ducant mollissima Gentes.
Est sincera fides, regnat amicitia.
Estne? vel esse potest, qui non loqueretur Amorem?
Cor riget at sermo totus Amore calet.
No hatred or dissension, no envy or rivalry.
Apollo, you have restored the golden age of Saturn!
Secure nations live in sweet tranquillity.
Faith is sincere, and amity rules.
Is there, could there possibly be, anyone, who does not speak of love?
Their hearts are cold, yet all their talk is aglow with love.
Thus Szerdahely. But we must not be untruthful. The age did love and cultivate charity, and actually practised it. The relevant French word ‘bienfaisance’—doing good—is itself a product of the times. It is significant that in its derivation and morphology it recalls ‘bienséance’, meaning ‘courtesy’. The two concepts were connected at the time. We know how charitable the royal family could be. The Dauphine would jump down from her carriage and rush to the aid of an injured postillion or a peasant who had been wounded by a stag. The King and the Comte d’Artois would help pull a transport wagon out of the mud. In the severe winter of 1784 the royal couple gave enormous sums to the needy from their personal allowances—the King three million livres and the Queen 200,000. Similar deeds were performed by the Court aristocracy.
Mme de Genlis and the Duc de Lauzun, who was notorious for his cynicism, founded the Order of Perséverance—Steadfastness—which soon acquired ninety noble members. To be accepted, one had to solve a riddle, to answer a question on morality and give a talk on one of the virtues. Every knight or lady who uncovered and reported three authenticated acts of virtue received a gold medal. Every knight had a chosen ‘brother in arms’, and every lady a ‘friend of the heart’. And each had their own motto, which hung in the Temple of Honour, at the centre of Lauzun’s park.
It became the fashion for landowners every year to crown a village girl with garlands if she distinguished herself by her innocence and virtue.
And even the Academy, that austere marketplace of cool scholarship and ethereal art, could not stand aloof from charity. “It appears,” says Grimm, “that the example of Christian virtue now has a rival, and Philosophy strives equally to shine in the doing of good deeds, in its charitable institutions and pious foundations.” He made this remark in 1782, when announcing the Montyon Prize. The enormously rich Baron Montyon, the Comte de Provence’s chancellor, had set up a fund of 12,000 francs with the idea that every year the Academy would reward the man or woman of lowly origins who had performed the most virtuous action in the last twelve months. He also offered a prize to the person who had in the same year written the most morally improving work of literature. It was said, Grimm chuckles, that the lower classes of Paris were so enraged by the way the Academy had begun to exceed its powers that they set up a prize for the best madrigal of the year.
The Montyon medal was first won, in 1783, by a woman called Lespanier, who had spent two years nursing the ‘Comte’ de Rivarol, during which time she not only received no fee, but sacrificed her own fortune and whatever other funds she could raise on credit, for her patient. The Academy thus made adroit use of the prize to humiliate Rivarol, who only the year before had written a savage critique of the poetry of the celebrated Abbé Delille.
The following year, in the presence of the Prussian Duke Henrik, brother of Frederic the Great, Marmontel gave the prize to another woman who had nursed someone at her own expense, and in 1785 it went to a certain M Poultier, who had refused a legacy of 200,000 livres and persuaded the pers
on planning to leave it to him to bequeath it instead to his natural heirs. M Poultier then gave further evidence of his generosity by making a gift to the value of the medal to a concierge who had done the same as he had some twelve months before (the terms of the foundation allowing it to reward only deeds done in the current year). At the same meeting Marmontel announced that a person of high rank who wished to remain anonymous had donated a gold medal worth 3,000 livres to reward the poem which, in the view of the Academy, most worthily celebrated the self-sacrifice of the Duke of Brunswick, who had died in the river Oder trying to rescue two peasants from drowning.
Taine explains the prevailing sensibilité of the second half of the eighteenth century as the result of people looking for some sort of compensation for everything that had been denied them under the cold rationalism and severe neoclassical tastes of the years dominated by the Court. They could no longer bear the spiritual aridity (to which the French mind has a strong tendency, though Taine does not mention this), but the reaction was taken too far, and began to foster sentimentality. “At that moment,” writes Taine, “as this particular world approached its end, some degree of fellow-feeling, a softening of the emotions, came into being, and, like the flaming colours and ethereal mists of autumn, dissolved the severity that still lingered in the arid spirit of the age, bathing the elegance of its final moments with the scent of dying roses.”
But sentimentality was not a uniquely French phenomenon—it prevailed even more strongly in Germany and England. So it is not possible to see it as simply a reaction against French aridity. On the one hand, that reading does not properly explain why, in France, it took so essentially practical and moral a form, and was so concerned with love of one’s fellow man. A more satisfactory account lies in the second, more current, explanation, which argues that since the Enlightenment had undermined the basis of religion, and thus the moral code that depended on it, it became necessary to provide something to guide people through life, and in consequence people discovered social morality, altruism and philanthropy. The transcendent love of one’s fellow man was replaced by an immanent sense of fellow-feeling, whose practitioner helps others for the sake not of God, but of man.
However it was, and however amusing the simpler manifestations of that charitable impulse might have been, there is no doubt that the late eighteenth century had discovered for the Western world what can be called social values in the modern sense. Of course it was hardly by chance that the virtue of charity emerged among the privileged classes precisely at a time when the underprivileged were feeling ever more dissatisfied with the social arrangements. The two forces were linked together. The upper classes came to realise that members of the lower orders were human beings too, whereupon the self-esteem and yearning for equality simply increased among the latter, thus preparing the way for the Revolution.
So, in the final analysis, the origins of this cult of sensibility lay in the guilty conscience of the privileged classes. The situation greatly resembles the last half-century of the Russian Tsars. In Russia too the upper strata came to feel a deep ‘Slavic’ compassion for the lower orders, at precisely the moment when growing industrialism was starting to promote self-respect among the bourgeoisie and a growing resentment among the proletariat. In Russia too, it was the aristocratic writers, Turgenev and Tolstoy, who wrote the finest works expressing pity for the people. So the Tsars too were brought down by their own guilty conscience. It is possible to see similar symptoms in the English literature of the twenties and thirties, perhaps most strongly of all in the later writings of Galsworthy, which deal with the upper bourgeoisie and their troubled consciences, though we have of course yet to see any of the developments anticipated by those particular omens.
This is one side of the coin. There is another. Guilty conscience can manifest itself in other ways.
Mercier not only reveals that everyone in Paris lisped, but also that everyone went about with one shoulder held higher than the other—which gave the citizens a somewhat diabolical appearance.
The young Grimod de la Reynière, the son of an enormously wealthy man, sent out a grotesque invitation to dinner to a motley company of writers, tailors’ assistants, actors and doctors. It was bordered in funeral black, and was so unusual that the King had the example that came into his hands framed. On arrival the guests were asked by the porter which Reynière they were calling on—the old man, that bloodsucker of the people, or the young, the protector of widows and orphans. After they had been kept waiting for a quarter-of-an-hour in a darkened room, they were finally shown in to the dining area, which was lit by a thousand candles. In each of its four corners stood an altar-boy swinging a censer.
“Whenever my parents have visitors,” the host explained, “there are always three or four who feel the need for purification by incense, so I thought I’d save you the trouble of asking.”
This same rather interesting young man was once asked why he hadn’t bought himself a seat on the bench (at that time in France you paid to become a judge), and why he remained a simple lawyer.
“Because if I were a judge,” he replied, “I might easily find myself in the position of having to hang my father. At least as a lawyer I would be free to defend him.”
The situation of the wealthy father and the son rebelling against wealth was often repeated in this sort of grotesque, jocular way in the period. “It is typical of the age,” Sainte Beuve would write later, “that what began in frivolity ended in bloodshed.” But the underlying and wholly serious fact was that young Grimod de la Reynière had a guilty conscience.
There were those who attempted to silence their pangs of conscience through sensibility and charitable deeds; others simply revelled in their own wickedness the way the first group did in their benevolence. Both responses combined in one man: the Duc de Lauzun was the most dedicated roué of his time, an inveterate gambler and womaniser, and at the same time the sentimental co-founder of the Order of Steadfastness. Some of the writers, like Marmontel, Florian or Thomas, were so naively sensible and idyllic that it is difficult for us to understand how anyone at the time could read anything so false to nature; others were not at all naive—learned, cynical and acerbic—indeed, surprisingly modern. Their work was the sincere expression of a group purged of all self-delusion. And these are the really good writers: Choderlos de Laclos, Chamfort, Beaumarchais.
The rococo impulse sought to distance love from everything that was deep and passionate: it became a matter of charming games. No one ever died, relationships could be lightly broken and everyone was easily consoled. In Laclos’s wonderful novel Les liaisons dangereuses the rococo idea of love is pushed to the point of absurdity, perhaps to reveal it in all its danger. Love is shown in this book not as charming but as a pitiless toying with other people’s hearts, with the perpetrator revelling in the misery he produces, like a dramatist enjoying the writhings of his own characters. The hero, Valmont, is an aimable roué; his coldly superior deceptions are naturally always adored by the ladies (in life just as much as they were in books), and Valmont is unquestionably a forerunner of Richardson’s Lovelace, for whom women readers wept for a hundred years. But there is a crucial difference between the two. Lovelace first seduces the middle-class Clarissa but then comes truly to love her, though he refuses to marry her for reasons of aristocratic pride. But Valmont deceives the pure-souled Mme Tourvelt out of simple vanity, according to Taine. And this is still to understate, because Valmont is motivated not only by vanity but by a self-regarding wickedness which is actually satanic. Moreover, Valmont is not the real driver of events, but his cold ex-mistress Mme de Merteuil. She directs his amours simply in order to destroy the lives of the women who become her prey. The novel is a handbook of sexual psychopathology, and is often invoked as an example of mental cruelty.
It is interesting too, how strongly the events in the novel found an echo in aristocratic society. Chamfort referred to it constantly, and the Comte de Tilly speaks of it, and of its harmful inf
luence, at some length in his memoirs. He calls Laclos the genius of wickedness, and says: “His book was one of the waves pouring into the ocean of the French Revolution to cleanse the throne.” And yet there is nothing revolutionary about it—it is just a love story, nothing more.
So that was how this society saw itself: so fundamentally wicked that it seemed almost to revel in the artistic perfection of its own wickedness. Tilly thought that the novel helped prepare the way for the Revolution by laying bare the immorality of the aristocracy, whether real or supposed. But he himself is an example of the way the aristocrats themselves delighted in the revelation. It is rather like those American financiers who take pleasure in reading the novelistic indictments of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.
A rather less open hostility to the ruling class is found in the dis-illusionment and cynicism of Chamfort. The illegitimate son of a nobleman, he was an embittered and defiant déclassé. As a young man—when, according to one of his mistresses women would begin by thinking of him as an Adonis but then discover he was a Hercules—he enjoyed the favour of high-born ladies. Later his body and life were blighted by venereal disease, which in those times struck down the dissolute like the workings of an ancient curse. There is scarcely a memoir in which it does not feature.
Chamfort’s resentment of the aristocratic world is an unusual and complex phenomenon. Certainly he had no cause for complaint about not being accepted by it. He received two pensions from the King by right, was made secretary to the Duc de Condé, reader to the Duc d’Artois and secretary to Mme Elisabeth. He became an Academician, and lodged with the Comte de Vaudreuil. But his bitterness arose from precisely the fact that he was accepted. As a pampered writer proud of his gifts he refused to play the role of court jester assigned to the intellectual in an aristocratic society. “It is a ridiculous thing to grow old as an actor in a theatrical company in which you count as only half a man.” Later he provided the single most celebrated slogan for the Revolution. He is said to be the source of the opening words of the famous pamphlet by Sieyès: “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? Tout. Qu’a-t-il été jusqu’à présent dans l’ordre politique? Rien.”—What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it ever been in the political order? Nothing. And again: “Guerre aux châteaux! Paix aux chaumières!”—War on the chateaux! Peace among the cottages!
