Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern Part 16

VIII

LOVE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The modern history of love opens with laughter, the rich faunesque laugh of Francois I{er}. In Italy he had lost, as he expressed it, everything--fors l'honneur. For his consolation he found there gallantry, which Montesquieu defined as love's light, delicate and perpetual lie.

Platonism is the melody of love; gallantry the parody. Platonism beautifies virtue, gallantry embellishes vice. It makes it a marquis, gives it brilliance and brio. However it omit to spiritualize it does not degrade. Moreover it improves manners. Gallantry was the direct cause of the French Revolution. The people bled to death to defray the amours of the great sent in their bill. Love in whatever shape it may appear is always educational.

Hugo said that the French Revolution poured on earth the floods of civilization. Mignet said that it established a new conception of things.

Both remarks apply to love. But before it disappeared behind masks, patches, falbalas and the guillotine, to reappear in the more or less honest frankness which is its Anglo-Saxon garb to-day, there were several costumes in its wardrobe.

In Germany, and in the North generally, the least becoming fas.h.i.+ons of the Middle Ages were still in vogue. In Spain was the constant mantilla.

Originally it was white. The smoke of the auto-da-fe had, in blackening it, put a morbid touch of hysteria beneath. In France, a brief bucolic skirt, that of Amaryllis, was succeeded by the pretentious robes of Rambouillet. In England, the Elizabethan ruff, rigid and immaculate--when seen from a distance--was followed by the yielding Stuart lace. Across the sea fresher modes were developing in what is now the land of Mille Amours.

In Italy at the moment, gallantry was the fas.h.i.+on. Francois I{er} adopted it, and with it splendor, the magnificence that goes to the making of a monarch's pomp. In France hitherto every castle had been a court than which that of the king was not necessarily superior. Francois I{er} was the first of French kings to make his court first of all courts, a place of art, luxury, constant display. It became a magnet that drew the n.o.bility from their stupid keeps, detaining them, when young, with adventure; when old, with office, providing, meanwhile, for the beauty of women a proper frame. Already at a garden party held on a field of golden cloth the first Francis of France had shown the eighth Henry of England how a king could s.h.i.+ne. He was dreaming then of empire. The illusion, looted at Pavia, hovered over Fontainebleau and Chambord, royal residences which, Italian artists aiding, he then constructed and where, though not emperor, for a while he seemed to be.

Elsewhere, in Paris, in his maison des menus plaisirs--a house in the rue de l'Hirondelle--the walls were decorated with salamanders--the fabulous emblems of inextinguishable loves; or else with hearts, which, set between alphas and omegas, indicated the beginning and the end of earthly aims.

The loves and hearts were very many, as multiple as those of Solomon.

Except by Brantome not one of them was compromised. Francois I{er} was the loyal protector of what he called l'honneur des dames, an honor which thereafter it was accounted an honor to abrogate for the king.[63]

"If," said Sauval, "the seraglio of Henri II was not as wide as that of Francois I{er}, his court was not less elegant."

The court at that time had succ.u.mbed to the refinements of Italy. Women who previously were not remarkable for fastidiousness, had, Brantome noted, acquired so many elegancies, such fine garments and beautiful graces that they were more delectable than those of any other land.

Brantome added that if Henri II loved them, at least he loved but one.

That one was Dianne de Poytiers. Brantome suspected her of being a magician, of using potable gold. At the age of seventy she was, he said, "aussy fraische et aussy aymable comme en l'aage de trente ans." Hence the suspicion, otherwise justified. In France among queens--de la main gauche--she had in charm but one predecessor, Agnes Sorel, and but one superior, La Valliere. The legendary love which that charm inspired in Henri II had in it a troubadourian parade and a chivalresque effacement.

In its fervor there was devotion, in its pa.s.sion there was poetry, there was humility in its strength. At the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, on the walls without, in the halls within, on the cornices of the windows, on the panels of the doors, in the apartments of Henri's wife, Catherine de'

Medici, everywhere, the initials D and H, interlaced, were blazoned.

Dianne had taken for device a crescent. It never set. No other star eclipsed it. When she was sixty her colors were still worn by the king who in absence wrote to her languorously:

Madame ma mye, je vous suplye avoir souvenance de celuy quy n'a jamais connu que ung Dyeu et une amye, et vous a.s.surer que n'aurez poynt de honte de m'avoyr donne le nom de serviteur, lequel je vous suplye de me conserver pour james.[64]

Dianne too had but ung Dyeu et un amy--one G.o.d and one friend. It was not the king. More exactly it was a king greater than he. This woman who fascinated everybody even to Henri's vampire-wife was, financially, insatiable. The exactions of the Pompadour and the exigencies of the Du Barry were trumpery beside the avidity with which she absorbed castles, duchies, provinces, compelling her serviteur to grant her all the vacant territories of the realm--a fourth of the kingdom. At his death, beautiful still, "aussy fraische et aussy belle que jamais," she retreated to her domain, slowly, royally, burdened with the spoils of France.

Brantome was right. She did drink gold. She was an enchantress. She was also a precedent for women who in default of royal provinces for themselves got royal dukedoms for their children.

By comparison Catherine de' Medici is spectral. In her train were perfumes that were poisons and with them what was known as moeurs italiennes, customs that exceeded anything in Suetonius and with which came hybrid-faced youths whose filiation extended far back through Rome, through Greece, to the early Orient and who, under the Valois, were mignons du roi. Apart from them the atmosphere of the queen had in it corruption of decay, an odor of death from which Henri II recoiled as from a serpent, issued, said Michelet, from Italy's tomb. Cold as the blood of the defunct, at once sinister and magnificent, committing crimes that had in them the grandeur of real majesty, the accomplice if not the instigator of the Hugenot ma.s.sacre, Satan gave her four children:--Francois II, the gangrened husband of Mary Stuart; Charles IX, the maniac of St.

Bartholomew; Henri III who, pomp deducted, was Heliogabalus in his quality of Imperatrix, and the Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV.

It would have been interesting to have seen that couple, gallant, inconstant, memorable, popular, both, to employ a Gallicism, franchement paillards. But it would have been curious to have seen Margot, as a historian described her, carrying about a great ap.r.o.n with pockets all around it, in each of which was a gold box and in each box, the embalmed heart of a lover--memorabilia of faces and fancies that hung, by night, at her bed.[65]

"All the world published her as a G.o.ddess," another historian declared, "and thence she took pleasure all her life in being called Venus Urania, as much to show that she partic.i.p.ated in divinity as to distinguish her love from that of the vulgar, for she had a higher idea of it than most women have. She affected to hold that it is better practised in the spirit than in the flesh, and ordinarily had this saying in her mouth: 'Voulez-vous cesser d'aimer, possedez la chose aimee.'"[66]

The historian added: "I could make a better story about it than has ever been written but I have more serious matters in hand."

What Dupleix omitted Brantome supplied. To the latter the pleasure of but beholding Margot equalled any joy of paradise.

Henri IV must have thought otherwise. He tried to divorce her. Margot objected. The volage Henri had become interested in the beaux yeux of Gabrielle d'Estrees. Margot did not wish to be succeeded by a lady whom she called "an ordinary person." But later, for reasons dynastic, she consented to abdicate in favor of Marie de Medici, and, after the divorce, remained with Henri on terms no worse than before, visited by him, a contemporary has stated, reconciled, counselled, amused.[67]

Gabrielle, astonis.h.i.+ngly delicate, deliciously pink, apparently very poetic, but actually prosaic in the extreme, entranced the king who ceaselessly had surrendered to the fair warriors of the Light Brigade.

But to Gabrielle the surrender was complete. He delivered his sword to mes chers amours, as he called her, mes belles amours, regarding as one yet multiple this fleur des beautes du monde, astre clair de la France, whose portrait, painted as he expressed it in all perfection, was in his soul, his heart, his eyes--temporarily that is, but, while it lasted, so coercive that it lifted this woman into a sultana who shared as consort the honors of the triumphal entry of the first Bourbon king into the Paris that was worth to him a ma.s.s.

"It was in the evening," said L'Estoile, "and on horseback he crossed the bridge of Notre Dame, well pleased at the sight of all the people crying loudly 'Live the King!' And, it was laughingly, hat in hand, that he bowed to the ladies and demoiselles. Behind him was a flag of lilies. A little in advance, in a magnificent litter, was Gabrielle covered with jewels so brilliant that they offended (offusquoient) the lights."

However much or little the gems then affected the lights, later they pleased the Medician Marie. She draped herself with them. In the interim a divorce had been got from Margot. Death had brought another from Gabrielle. The latter divorce poison probably facilitated. Gabrielle, through the sheer insolence of her luxury had made herself hated by the poverty-stricken Parisians. The detail is unimportant. There was another hatred that she had aroused. Not Henri's however. When she died he declared that the root of his love, dead with her, would never grow again--only to find it as flouris.h.i.+ng as ever, flouris.h.i.+ng for this woman, flouris.h.i.+ng for that, budding ceaselessly in tropic profusion, until the dagger put by Marie in the hand of Ravaillac, extirpated it, but not its blossoms, which reflowered at Whitehall.

Henri's daughter, Henriette de France, was mother of Charles the Second.

The latter's advent in Puritan England effected a transformation for which history has no parallel. In the excesses of sanctimoniousness in which the whole country swooned, it was as though piety had been a domino and the Restoration the stroke of twelve. In the dropping of masks the world beheld a nation of sinners where a moment before had been a congregation of saints.

Previously, in the Elizabethan age, social conditions had made up in winsomeness what they lacked in severity. Whitehall, under James, became a replica, art deducted, of the hermaphroditisms of the Valois court.

Thereafter the quasi-divinity of the sovereign evaporated in a contempt that endured unsatiated until Charles I, who had discovered that a king can do no wrong, discovered that he could lose his head. In the amputation a crown fell which Cromwell disdained to gather. Meanwhile the false spirit of false G.o.dliness that generated British cant and American hypocrisy made a nation, as it made New England, glum. In Parliament where a Bible lay open for reference, it was resolved, that no person should be admitted to public service of whose piety the House was not a.s.sured. In committees of ways and means, members asked each other had they found the Lord. Amus.e.m.e.nts were sins; theatres, plague-spots; trifles, felonies; art was an abomination and love a shame.[68]

Israel could not have been more depressing than England was then. A reaction was indicated. Even without Charles it would have come. But when the arid air was displaced by the Gallic atmosphere which he brought, England turned a handspring. The G.o.dliness that hitherto had stalked unchecked was flouted into seclusion. Anything appertaining to Puritanism was jeered away. Only in the ultra-conservatism of the middle-cla.s.ses did prudery persist. Elsewhere, among criminals and courtiers, the new fas.h.i.+on was instantly in vogue. The memoirs and diaries of the reign disclose a world of rakes and demi-reps, a life of brawls and a.s.signations, much drink, high play, great oaths, a form of existence summarizable in the episode of Buckingham and Shrewsbury in which the former killed the latter, while Lady Shrewsbury, dressed as a page, held the duke's horse, and approvingly looked on.

The Elizabethan and intermediate dramatists, mirroring life as they saw it, displayed infidelity as a punishable crime and constancy as a rewardable virtue. By the dramatists of the Restoration adultery was represented as a polite occupation and virtue as a provincial oddity. Men wooed and women were won as readily as they were handed in to supper, scarcely, Macaulay noted, with anything that could be called a preference, the men making up to the women for the same reason that they wore wigs, because it was the fas.h.i.+on, because, otherwise, they would have been thought city prigs, puritans for that matter. Love is not discernible in that society though philosophy is. But it was the philosophy of Hobbes who taught that good and evil are terms used to designate our appet.i.tes and aversions.

Higher up, Charles II, indolent, witty, debonair, tossing handkerchiefs among women who were then, as English gentlewomen are to-day, the most beautiful in the world, was suffering from that nostalgia for mud which affected the fifteenth Louis.

The Du Barry, who dishonored the scaffold as well as the throne, has a family likeness to Nell Gwynne. Equally canaille, the preliminary occupations of these grisettes differed only in taste. One sold herrings, the other hats. The Du Barry's sole heirs were the cocottes of the Second Empire. From Nell, the dukes of St. Albans descend. From Barbara Palmer come the dukes of Grafton; from Louise de la Querouaille, the dukes of Richmond; from Lucy Walters, the dukes of Buccleuch. These ladies, as Nell called them, were early miniatures of the Chateauroux and the Pompadour.

Like them they made the rain and the fine weather, but, though dukes also, not princes of the blood. Charles cared for them, cared for others, cared for more but always cavalierly, indifferent whether they were constant or not, yet most perhaps for Nell, succ.u.mbing ultimately in the full consciousness of a life splendidly misspent, apologizing to those that stood about for the ridiculous length of time that it took him to die, asking them not to let poor Nelly starve and bequeathing to the Georges the excellence of an example which those persons were too low to grasp.

Anteriorly, before Charles had come, at the period of London's extremest piety, Paris was languis.h.i.+ngly sentimental. Geography, in expanding surprises, had successively disclosed the marvels of the Incas, the elder splendors of Cathay and the enchantments of fairyland. Then a paradise virgin as a new planet swam into the general ken. In Perrault's tales, which had recently appeared, were vistas of the land of dreams. Directly adjoining was the land of love. Its confines extended from the Hotel de Rambouillet.

In that house, to-day a department store, conversation was first cultivated as an art. From the conversation a new theory of the affections developed. For the first time people young and old learned the precious charm of sentiment. The originator, Mme. de Rambouillet, was a woman of much beauty who, in days very lax, added to the allurement of her appearance the charm of exclusiveness. It was so novel that people went to look at it. Educated in Italy, imbued with its pretentious elegancies, saturated with platonic strains, physically too fragile and temperamentally too sensitive for the ribald air of a reckless court, she drew society to her house, where, without perhaps intending it she succeeded in the chimerical. Among a set of people to whom laxity was an article of faith she made the observance of the Seventh Commandment an object of fas.h.i.+onable meditation. She did more. In gallantry there is a little of everything except love. To put it there is not humanly possible. Mme. de Rambouillet did not try. She did better. She inserted respect.

In her drawing-room--historically the first salon that the world beheld--this lady, in conjunction with her collaborators, exacted from men that deference, not of bearing merely, but of speech, to which every woman is ent.i.tled and which, everywhere, save only in Italy, women had gone without. Hitherto people of position had not been recognizable by their manners, they had none; nor by their language which was coa.r.s.e as a string of oaths. They were known by the elegance of their dress. In the Hotel de Rambouillet, and thereafter little by little elsewhere, they became known by the elegance of their address. It was a great service and an enduring one and though, through the abolition of the use of the exact term, it faded the color from ink, it yet induced the lexical refinement from which contemporaneous good form proceeds. In polis.h.i.+ng manners it sandpapered morals. It gave to both the essential element of delicacy which they possess to-day. Subsequently, under the dissolvent influences of Versailles and through ridicule's more annihilating might, though manners persisted morals did not. But before the reaction came attar of rose was really distilled from mud. Gross appet.i.tes became sublimated. Instead of ribaldry there were kisses in the moonlight, the caress of eyes from which recklessness had gone. Petrarchism returned, madrigals came in vogue, the social atmosphere was deodorized again. Into gallantry an affected sentimentality entered, loitered awhile and languished away. Women, hitherto disquietingly solid, became impalpable as the Queens of Castile whom it was treason to touch. Presently, when, in the _Precieuses Ridicules_, Moliere laughed at them, the shock was too great, they disintegrated. In the interim, sentiment dwindled into nonsense and love, evaporating in pretentiousness, was discoverable, if anywhere, only on a map.

That surprising invention was the work of Mlle. de Scudery, one of the affiliated in the Hotel de Rambouillet. A little before, Honore d'Urfe had written a pastoral in ten interminable volumes. Ent.i.tled _Astree_ it was a mirror for the uncertain aspirations of the day, a vast flood of tenderness in which every heart-throb, every reason for loving and for not loving, every shape of constancy and every form of infidelity, every joy, every deception, every conscience twinge that can visit sweethearts and swains was a.n.a.lyzed, subdivided and endlessly set forth. To a world still in fermentation it provided the laws of Love's Twelve Tables, the dream after realism, the high flown after the matter of fact. Its vogue was prodigious. Whatever it omitted Mlle. de Scudery's _Clelie_, another novel, equally interminable, equally famous, equally forgotten, supplied.

The latter story which was translated into all polite tongues, Arabic included, taught love as love had never been taught before. It taught it as geography is taught to-day, providing for the purpose a Carte du Tendre, the map of a country in which everything, even to I hate you, was tenderly said.

A character described it.

The first city at the lower end of the map is New Friends.h.i.+p. Now, inasmuch as love may be due to esteem, to grat.i.tude, or to inclination, there are three cities called Tenderness, each situated on one of three different rivers that are approached by three distinct routes. In the same manner, therefore, that we speak of c.u.mes on the Ionian Sea and c.u.mes on the Sea of Tyrrhinth, so is there Tenderness-on-Inclination, Tenderness-on-Esteem, and Tenderness-on-Grat.i.tude. Yet, as the affection which is due to inclination needs nothing to complete it, there is no stopping place on the way from New Friends.h.i.+p there. But to go from New Friends.h.i.+p to Tenderness-on-Esteem is very different. Along the banks are as many villages as there are things little and big which create that esteem of which affection is the flower. From New Friends.h.i.+p the river flows to a place called Great Wit, because it is there that esteem generally begins. Beyond are the agreeable hamlets of Pretty Verses and Billets Doux, after which come the larger towns of Sincerity, Big Heart, Honesty, Generosity, Respect, Punctuality, and Kindness. On the other hand, to go from New Friends.h.i.+p to Tenderness-on-Grat.i.tude, the first place reached is Complaisance, then come the borough of Submission, and, next, Delicate-Attentions.

From the latter a.s.siduousness is reached and, finally, Great Services. This place, probably because there are so few that get there is the smallest of all. But adjoining it is Obedience and contiguous is Constancy. That is the most direct route to Tenderness-on-Grat.i.tude. Yet, as there are no routes in which one may not lose one's way, so, if, after leaving New Friends.h.i.+p, you went a little to the right or a little to the left, you would get lost also.

For if, in going from Great Wit, you took to the right, you would reach Negligence, keeping on you would get to Inequality, from there you would pa.s.s to Lukewarm and Forgetfulness, and presently you would be on the lake of Indifference. Similarly if, in starting from New Friends.h.i.+p you took to the left, one after another you would arrive at Indiscretion, Perfidiousness, Pride, t.i.ttle-Tattle, Wickedness and, instead of landing at Tenderness-on-Grat.i.tude, you would find yourself at Enmity, from which no boats return.

The vogue of _Astree_ was enormous. That of _Clelie_ exceeded it.

Throughout Europe, wherever lovers were, the map of the Pays du Tendre was studied. But its indications, otherwise excellent, did not prevent Mlle.

de Scudery from reaching Emnity herself. The Abbe d'Aubignac produced a history of the Kingdom of Coquetry in which were described Flattery Square, Petticoat Lane, Flirtation Avenue, Sweet Kiss Inn, the Bank of Rewards and the Church of Good-by. Between the abbe and the demoiselle a conversation ensued relative to the priority of the idea. It was their first and their last. The one real hatred is literary hate.

Meanwhile the puerilities of _Clelie_ plat.i.tudinously repeated across the Channel, resulted at Berlin in the establishment of an Academy of True Love. Then, into the entire nonsense, the _Cid_ blew virilly a resounding note.

In that splendid drama of Corneille, Rodrigue and Chimene, the hero and heroine, are to love what martyrs were to religion, all in all for it and for nothing else whatever. They moved to the clash of swords, to the clatter of much duelling, a practice which Richelieu opposed. Said Boileau:

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue, Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue.