Читать книгу Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott - Richard Holmes - Страница 16

La Tour has painted Madame de Charrière: a face too florid for beauty, a portrait of wit and wilfulness where the mind and senses are disconcertingly alert; a temperament impulsive, vital, alarming; an arrowy spirit, quick, amusing, amused.

Houdon has left of her a bust in his fine manner: a distinguished head, a little sceptical and aloof.

Both portraits are convincing; both were applauded as faithful likenesses by this lady and her admirers.

The interest to us of her life, its unadmitted but evident tragedy to her, is there in these two interpretations, both real, of a character so avid of living, so sceptical of life, which could find no harmony within itself nor acquiesce in the discord.

Madame de Charrière was not of marble, emphatically, nor even of the hardness of Houdon’s clay. But the coldness of Houdon’s bust – its touch of aloofness – corresponds to an intellectual ideal, more masculine than feminine, which she set before herself. It embodies a certain harsh clear cult of the reason which at every crisis falsified her life. She was not more reasonable, in the last resort, than the rest of humanity. She paid in full and stoically, the penalty of supposing herself to be so.

La Tour was nearer the truth: the painted shadow is less conventional than the carven image, and colour, with its changing lights, a little nearer to the stuff of which we are made.

But even in La Tour’s portrait, which misses her scepticism, it is not easy to see how the subject of it could well achieve happiness, or make others happy. Madame de Charrière, who entered on life with so confident a will to these two human ends, knew as she lay dying in that desolate Swiss manor, her chosen exile, that she had failed, immensely and poignantly, of both.

Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll – to give Madame de Charrière her Dutch name – was born at the château of Zuylen in 1740 of one of the oldest families in Holland. To give her a Dutch name: that was the first freak of malice which Providence played on this surprising woman. Every physical and moral law, she used to say, must have been suspended in the circumstances of so paradoxical a nativity. A Dutch woman and a Tuyll – she felt herself in every fibre of mind and nature a stranger to that phlegmatic world. The van Tuylls were famous even among the old-fashioned nobility of Holland for a stolid virtue, a conventional probity, a profound pride of birth. By what trick of heredity had ‘Belle de Zuylen’ sprung from that grave, imposing stock – she, with her mocking spirit, so eager, so unquiet?

The background of her life was the great moated house at Zuylen, from whose walls innumerable van Tuylls looked down in stiff disapproval of their too lively descendant; where mynvrouw sat upright at her needlework and mynheer with placid rectitude sat thinking about the dykes. Outside, a Cuyp landscape with eternal cattle motionlessly browsing – were they too thinking of the public good? – and somewhere a solitary horseman slowly, slowly ambling – perhaps a Tuyll, mindful of his ‘droit de chasse.’ Truly a land where it was always afternoon, nay Sunday afternoon: a land where nothing ever happened – where nothing ever ought to happen – to ruffle the dead surface of that Tuyll serenity, born of many quarterings and an unblemished life. The Romans of the great days of Rome were not more virtuous, she said. But those great days of Rome were not very gay either, and Zuylen was more provincial than the Seven Hills.

In winter the scene changed to Utrecht, to that other grave house, damp and gentlemanly and bordered by the still canal. On one side the empty street, on the other the severe garden; a place of austere dignity, sombre in winter and silent. But sometimes, within, candles lit up the quiet stateliness of the shadowy rooms, and faultless dowagers would assemble for polite and disapproving talk. Andante was signed upon their conversation: no wide ideas, no quick emotion ever jarred that scrupulous society. Across this decent picture of still-life Belle de Zuylen moved, a single unquenched flame of lonely animation, ‘Ici l’on est vif tout seul.’

The van Tuylls were sincere folk; it was one of their almost too numerous virtues. In Belle this traditional sincerity took the form of a disconcerting frankness. Impatient of restraint, conscious in herself of a fundamental goodwill, she placed no bridle on her feverish spirit, her Voltairean wit, her subversive criticism of accepted values. She wished to be ‘a citizen of the country of all the world’—a natural ideal to one whose sympathy and curiosity were, from the first, amazingly wide. She brought a French quickness, an English sans-gêne, and (on her own confession) some ardent touches of the South, into a slow and solemn and passionless Dutch world. It was as though a firework were to go off – to keep going off – at a nice, orderly funeral.

Very orderly; very sedate and genteel. Nevertheless in Belle’s parents – and she was the first to admit it – there was nothing unduly puritanical or harsh. ‘My father,’ she wrote, ‘is a man accustomed to the paintings of a smiling landscape: he averts his eyes from the horrors of a tempest or St Laurence’s gridiron or the Last Judgment. The family dictionary is modelled on his thought. No exclamations, no lively expressions, nothing shocking.’ A good man, courteous and unaffected; a governor of the Province, conscientiously discharging his duty, and happy in works of building or administration, Monsieur de Tuyll’s only fault was to set a standard of virtue so high that one felt, in his presence, at a kind of moral disadvantage. ‘I never feel satisfied with myself in regard to him,’ is Belle’s reflection; for it was characteristic of her that she wanted the prize for goodness as well as the forbidden fruit. For the rest, he hated to interfere, and preferred not to notice whatever he might have to disapprove. He opposed a fin de non recevoir to her ‘lively expressions,’ and could he have seen into the very unconventional process of his daughter’s heart, or caught a glimpse of certain pages of her correspondence, no doubt he would have averted his eyes as from the gridiron of Saint Laurence.

The mother, thanks to her less noble origin, was more amenable. She had caught the Tuyll note: lively expressions had long since ceased to cross her kindly lips; but she was ‘known to joke’ and capitulated readily enough to an attack upon her sense of humour. And when disaster came, and those illicit letters did fall into her possession, she got over it. Belle was at pains to persuade her that, with it all, she was as good, nay better than another. ‘Et je voulais faire avouer à ma mère que telle que j’étais je valais encore mieux qu’une autre.’ The prize for goodness once more.

Tuyll to the bone, on the contrary, was the younger daughter, Jeanne-Marie. She figures but seldom in her sister’s letters; we discern her, clearly enough, tight, prim, conventional: a good girl, and likely to remain so. Plainly a prude, and favoured with a prettiness which failed to please, Jeanne distilled an atmosphere of disapproval not untainted with jealousy. She was, Belle frankly states, the kind of sister one would love better were she in America: in home life she showed a sulky temper and a taste for scenes of sentimental reconciliation conducted with unbearable solemnity. She married in due course a serious Dutchman who nevertheless consented to become the intermediary of that clandestine correspondence with Constant d’Hermenches in which Belle revealed herself so winningly – free, kindly, gay, spontaneous, Jeanne’s opposite at every point.

There were four brothers; the eldest was drowned while bathing, at eighteen; of the second she writes, ‘William is always out hunting, or else ill from having hunted too much: his temper is uncertain, his manner often hard and uncivil.’ She reads Plutarch with Vincent: ‘I try to separate in his mind the conceptions of book and pain.’ (‘Why is it,’ she once asked, ‘that the young should only know two categories of books – those they are forced to read, and those they read in secret?’) Vincent is slow, prudent, and systematic: in short, very Tuyll. He becomes a soldier, and Belle proposes to console herself for his loss by learning to play upon the lute. But Dietrich, three years older than Vincent, is her favourite. A simple-minded sailor, he returns from his long voyages and cannot leave his sister’s side; he sits on her bed at all hours listening to conversations ‘unlike anything in the world’ and confiding his naïve love affairs. Later on, it is to Dietrich that some of her most charming letters are addressed. He died, to her great sorrow, of consumption, in 1773.

If the problem of life had to be settled once for all on a fixed pattern, if no ideas should be revised and few be suffered to exist, this life at Zuylen, so harmless, so safely decent, and, all in all, so equably harmonious, might serve as well as any for the chosen type. But, for Madame de Charrière, ideas were the breath of existence, and life presented itself to her not as a tradition but as a great experiment. This proposition – that the world should be ruled by ideas and not by customs, was in itself the newest of ideas. Belle de Zuylen, alone in the world of Tuylls, had caught the breath of the new spirit which thirty years later was to make the Revolution. If she seemed eccentric to her countrymen, it was because she appealed at every point from usage to reason: her true eighteenth-century mind could not doubt for a moment that logic was the basis of human happiness. That man is an irrational animal, for whom logic lays a snare; that custom, like the heart, has its own reasons; that folly, as a human attribute, is entitled, if not to veneration, at least to a certain tenderness, she could not conceive. Yet, where her parents were concerned, an instinctive kindliness and a touch, perhaps, of Tuyll pride in their heroic sense of caste impelled her to obedience. ‘I could not change their ideas, and they will never change their conduct so long as their principles remain unchanged. Their intentions are pure, and they are firm, as they ought to be, in doing what to them seems right. If there is any excess on their side, I ought not, on mine, to submit myself the less to their will. I could not pardon myself if I caused them pain.’ That is, in plain English, she followed her own fancy, and tried to prevent them from finding it out.

From the outer world she had less regard, and her demeanour was not calculated to disarm it. The downcast eyes and modest blushes, which were looked for by Dutch dowagers in one of her age, were not in Belle de Zuylen’s repertoire. ‘Une demoiselle, cela, une demoiselle!’ exclaimed Madame d’Aincourt, seeing her sail into their midst with her whimsical sans-gêne and merry superiority. There were rumours, perhaps, of that clandestine correspondence, there was the certainty that she had actually published a very lively satire, ‘Le Noble,’ in mockery of their respect for quarterings, there was une belle gorge, dont elle se pare trop, a little too much in evidence, ‘Une demoiselle…cela!’

It is clear that to Belle de Zuylen the breath of public censure was not altogether displeasing. Or rather, she met disapproval as a natural consequence of her merits. The stupidity of most people being a plain datum of experience, she was too logical to desire their praise in any matter of the reason. And since reason was for her the key to everything, she accepted her isolation as a necessary fact. With it all, people were happier with her than away from her; she had in her a fire of vitality to which her coldest critics loved to hold their hands. As Hermenches said, she could warm the heart of a Laplander.

Her gaiety, which illumined the shadowy world she moved in, was nevertheless the mask to a profound melancholy. She was one of those whose inmost consciousness is born sceptical, and she was disillusioned even before life had destroyed the illusions she artificially created. Those around her who envied and caught the glow of her seeming happiness were in less need of it than herself; their very dullness was a kindly anaesthetic: they asked no ultimate questions and hungered for no ultimate satisfactions. ‘No one guesses,’ she writes, ‘that I am a prey to the darkest gloom: I can find health, nay, life itself, only by means of a ceaseless occupation of the mind.’

The occupation was ceaseless indeed; at thirteen she must be up at six to study mathematics; later, she is ‘determined to master Newton’; she ‘hates half learnings’ and wishes ‘to know all that can be known in our time of physics’ – a programme which must not exclude a decent proficiency on the harpsichord; she is deep in all the properties of conic sections. The vital fire burnt brightly on this stubborn fuel: ‘I find an hour or two of mathematics gives me a freer mind and a light heart; I eat and sleep better when I have grasped an evident and indisputable truth.’ Mathematics consoled her for the obscurity of religion: that door had been closed to her once for all by the minister who, in preparing her for confirmation, thought her scruples unworthy of discussion. For in Belle’s mind a proposition must be as clear as Euclid or it was nothing.

Yet all this was not fuel enough. Plutarch, first and foremost, then Pascal, Madame de Sévigné, St Evremond, Hamilton, and Voltaire: – these rivalled even the indisputable truth of conic sections; and she never travelled ‘without Racine and Molière in my box and Fontaine in my memory.’ From the earliest years French was the language of her thought. In French she wrote poetry, or what passed for such, and prose of a high order, lucid, witty, and sane. ‘You write better than anyone known to me, not excepting Voltaire,’ said Hermenches, a friendly critic it is true; ‘the authentic tongue of Versailles’ is the verdict of Sainte-Beuve.

One autumn evening she beguiled the tedium of her Dutch life by composing a slight essay on her own character. She saw herself very accurately. And the last words of this paper, written at the outset of her life, might truly, when her story was played out, have been written on her grave.

She called it ‘The Portrait of Mlle. de Z., under the name of Zélide.’

‘Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination, Zélide is patient only on principle; when she is indulgent and easy be grateful to her, for it costs her an effort. When she prolongs her civility with people she holds in small esteem, redouble your admiration: she is in torture. Vain at first by nature, her vanity has become boundless; knowledge and scorn of mankind soon perfected that quality. Yet this vanity is excessive even to her own taste. She already thinks that fame is worth nothing at the cost of happiness, and yet she would make many an effort for fame…

‘Would you like to know if Zélide is beautiful, or pretty, or merely passablê I cannot tell; it all depends on whether one loves her, or on whether she wishes to make herself beloved. She has a beautiful neck, and displays it at some sacrifice of modesty. Her hands are not white; she knows that also, and makes a jest of it; but she would rather not have this occasion for jest.

‘Excessively emotional, and not less fastidious, she cannot be happy either with or without love. Perceiving herself too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased to aspire to happiness and has devoted herself to goodness; she thus escapes repentance and seeks only for diversion.

‘Can you not guess her secret? Zélide is somewhat sensuous. Emotions too vivid and too intense for her organism, an exaggerated activity without any satisfying object, these are the source of all her misfortunes. With less sensibility Zélide would have had the mind of a great man; with less intelligence she would have been only a weak woman.’

Her tongue was French, and her intelligence; not so her nature. She was averse from all those conventions of gallantry which are founded on pretence. ‘No doubt a French platitude becomes a hundred times flatter in a Dutch mouth, but, believe me, without the French, a woman with no desire to be loved would not talk so much of the passion of a man who, in fact, does not love her; it would not occur to us to be witty for half an hour on an equivocation; and those light themes, without head, tail, or sense, would never have entered our thick heads.’ She preferred the English form of sociability, where men who have nothing to say, say nothing. Her own brilliance was always employed to light up a firm sobriety of thought: pose and paradox, mere wit, mere romanticism, she detested in literature as in talk. Frankness was ‘her favourite virtue’; her passion was for reality of intercourse.

To Mademoiselle de Tuyll’s engaging quality of frankness we owe our intimate knowledge of this lady’s chief occupation during the long years at Zuylen and Utrecht. This occupation was not the true prose of Versailles; it was not Newton, not the harpsichord, nor ‘all that can be known in our time of physics’; it was, briefly – getting married.

The theme is one for an epic poet rather than an essayist, the canvas is so crowded, the action so varied and prolonged, the energy displayed so heroic. Penelope had not more trouble with her Homeric suitors, and Mademoiselle de Tuyll was far from being a Penelope. Her suitors, too, were very different from Penelope’s: they had a way of taking flight. Yes, the prologue of Belle’s marriage is epic, decidedly; but the climax was comedy; and the end, tragedy.

Some twelve suitors are known to history as candidates (or probable candidates) for the hand of Mademoiselle de Tuyll. No doubt there were others. Her vicissitudes with regard to these twelve were confided to a thirteenth who, being married, was not a suitor. This was Constant d’Hermenches, baron de Rebecque, a dashing Swiss noble in the service of the Dutch Republic. It was said of Hermenches that he wished to be, at one and the same moment, courtier and man of letters, soldier and farmer, scholar and dévot. Ambition and vanity were clearly marked on his dark and rather effeminate features; a love of pleasure, also, and an extreme assurance in procuring it. His career was military, his talents were histrionic, his triumphs principally amorous. He was a friend of Voltaire’s, with whom he played Orosmane, and of ces dames, for whom he played Don Juan. The advent of this brilliant cavalier at the Hague aroused some misgiving and a lively curiosity. Belle marked him down at once; it happened, she reminds him, ‘four years ago, at the duke’s ball…Monsieur, vous ne dansez pas?’ She was not one to be shy of taking the initiative. ‘With our first words we quarrelled; with our second we were friends for life.’

Well, hardly for life; but for twelve years, at least, these two kept up a correspondence of the most singular intimacy. ‘You are the man in whom, of all the world, I have the completest and most instinctive confidence,’ she writes, ‘for you I have no prudence, no reserve, no prudery: nay, what is more remarkable, no vanity either. I am always ready to tell you of every folly which lowers me in my own esteem. If we lived together I would have no secrets from you.’ It is natural, therefore, that she should write again, ‘Monsieur, in God’s name burn my letters!’ But the letters were a great deal too good to burn. And, later, when, before her marriage, Belle made repeated and desperate appeals for the return of the dossier, Hermenches turned a deaf ear on her entreaties. Vanity or a fine taste in literature may have been the motive of his refusal; the result in any case is that a hundred and seventy-eight of these intimate documents repose at this date, duly catalogued, in the public library of Geneva. So fortunate are the consequences of the most inexcusable actions!

If Mademoiselle de Tuyll took the first step in this unconventional friendship, it was she, no less, who dictated the terms of it. ‘I hear it said on all sides, and even by your admirers, that you are the most dangerous of men and that no caution is too great in dealing with you…The friend I want to keep would not have your eagerness nor your ways of expression. I cannot take all you say as the mere language of politeness: I think, Monsieur, that you are or that you feign to be something more than a friend, and I would wish neither to permit a folly nor be the dupe of a deceit. How can you expect me to look upon you as a man whose advice I can trust?…You are for me one of those rare and precious possessions which one is mad enough to wish to obtain and to keep at any price, though one can put them to no use when acquired. I have too much sought your notice and then your esteem, since in the end we have gained so little that we can neither see each other nor write openly.’

The situation was characteristic. Belle had capitulated from the start, frankly and without a trace of conventional amour propre: ‘j’étais éprise de l’empire que vous exerciez sur moi.’ Hermenches, on the other hand, who might seem to have made in her one of the easiest of his conquests, found himself confronted with a will as strong as his own. This masterful woman was always seeking a master: she could never accept one. She could never surrender her reason, and her cold sense of fact perpetually nipped the bud of romance. No one, in that age of gallantry, ever had less use for the comedies of flirtation or wasted less time with the business of coqueterie. She states things exactly as they are: neither more nor less. ‘It would be easy for me to use all the commonplaces of modesty, to tell you that in seeing me more often you would cease to love me. That would not be true. On the contrary, I think that, whatever small degree of feeling you may have for me at present, you would love me much more in the future. Allow me, Hermenches, the pride of believing that no woman will ever take in your heart precisely the place that I might hold in it. But as for love – all, I mean, that is necessary to enable you to be with me without agitation – you will feel that perhaps, any day, for some more beautiful woman. You will see a thousand whose charms, coupled with a sufficiency of sense, will restore you to all the peace of mind you may desire in regard to me. Since we have known each other, I have never failed to keep your esteem and your predilection; but how many times has your heart been otherwise occupied?…It is absolutely necessary that we should write less often, that we should think of each other less. Ah! Dieu, si jamais, comptant sur vos doigts les femmes qui vous ont trop aimé, je me trouvais entre la Martin et quelque autre de son espèce!’

Hermenches had to content himself, therefore, with the rôle of confidant. He writes to her on the tone of worldly wisdom; his letters are a blend of philosophy and gallantry; but, play-actor though he essentially is, his feeling takes by reflection the sincerity of hers. There is a true affection between the pair, and beneath this affection the instinctive war of two consummate egoists. It was, upon the whole, a drawn battle. Belle may seem to impose herself at every point: she chooses her antagonist; she defines the rules of the action; she makes herself the principal figure in the piece. The subject of every letter is herself: it is of her character, her doings, her needs, her aspirations that she writes. But, after all, it is to Hermenches she confides them: his male assurance is satisfied with that; and she, in turn, is dominated by his assurance. ‘I was in love with the empire you assumed.’

They cannot marry: they cannot even meet. Yet he is the audience before whom she enacts her life, and she holds him by his vulnerable point of vanity. That this girl, who might soon be acknowledged in Europe as one of the brilliant women of her time – she who wrote ‘better than Voltaire’ – should declare herself his pupil in the art of living, meant more to this dilettante than all his conquests. Untamed, Belle flattered his pride more subtly than if she had lowered her worth by a complete surrender. But what could be the future of such a friendship?

It was as a solution to this problem that Hermenches proposed to marry Mademoiselle de Tuyll to his best friend, the Marquis de Bellegarde. Hermenches was a constant visitor on his friend’s estates; the separation would thus be less complete. If Hermenches had any arrière pensée in making this proposal, Belle is too generous to suspect it. ‘What you are doing seems to me a fine, a noble, and a difficult thing. A person who knew nothing of love might say – “She cannot be yours; it is therefore no sacrifice to give her to your friend.” I judge you very differently: I am too much aware that to add, by your own act, new separations to old, to place a lasting and invincible obstacle in the way of your desires, demands a courageous and sublime generosity. It is a very different thing to marry the woman you love to your closest friend, than to acquiesce in her union with another man.’

That ‘favourite virtue of frankness’ in Mademoiselle de Tuyll will be much in evidence in her dealings with the Marquis; but once more she finds herself in a crooked situation. Bellegarde was a Catholic, the Tuylls were Protestant: pride and conviction were both involved in the question of faith, and the obstacle of religion was likely to prove an insuperable one in the eyes of Belle’s parents. It was necessary, therefore, to go gently. Monsieur de Bellegarde was neither very ardent nor very adroit; he went too gently; he could hardly be said to go at all. Every stage of his suit had to be planned and carried through by the two conspirators. Belle confesses a scruple – ‘not for the project itself, which still seems a good one, but for the means to be employed. Sometimes I hate this roundabout path, this sense of plot. I feel that I am guilty towards my father, that I am deceiving him, that you yourself will think I am acting against my honesty and my frankness – the virtue I hold to most and would make the ransom of all my faults. You, Hermenches, must be my casuist; you who know women so well, and how they are judged, must prevent my doing anything unworthy. I would not be despised by the man whose wife I desire to become; above all I would not have him think me false, for that I am not.’

The casuist was well chosen, and Mademoiselle de Tuyll, with her qualms sufficiently at rest, set to work with her accustomed energy. The suitable moment at last arrived for approaching the parents, and the inert Marquis entrusted Hermenches with the task of pleading his suit. But characteristically, it was Belle herself who composed the letter of proposal. She informed Hermenches that her father should be addressed in the following terms: ‘You are, Sir, no less aware than I that the talents which heaven has showered upon your daughter – talents which a distinguished education has refined and united with every virtue

– are precious gifts, more desirable in themselves than any alliance however advantageous, yet capable also of proving an obstacle to such a union. There are few men in whom those talents do not inspire fear; fewer still who may hope to find favour with their possessor, who knows and can appreciate their worth. My friend has intelligence enough to desire that his wife may have it in abundance. It is your daughter, gifted as she is, who charms him, whom he loves and desires, who is necessary to his happiness.’ Then followed arguments calculated to allay the prejudice of religion, and Mademoiselle de Tuyll concluded, ‘If you think well to add a few words as to the eagerness and passion evinced by the Marquis’ (the Marquis, it may be observed, was far from evincing these inducements), ‘you must do that for yourself. I have already suffered enough in this ridiculous self-praise.’

It may be supposed that such expressions as these could not fail to gratify the paternal pride of Monsieur de Tuyll; the reception of the letter was, nevertheless, icy. Silence reigned at Zuylen. The unfortunate family, always formal, became rigid with constraint. Monsieur de Tuyll pronounced that the religious obstacle was, for him, insuperable; that his daughter would be of age in two years and might then choose for herself without regard to her parents’ judgment, which must remain adverse. Belle at once replied that she could not desire, or obtain, her happiness at the expense of theirs. There were long conferences up and down the quiet corridor, long letters written from her locked room, and agitated pour-parlers in the garden. Belle shows herself at her best in this diplomacy; she abounded in admirable arguments, daughterly duty, and ingenious appeals to the ideal of tolerance which Monsieur de Tuyll, like so many unbending persons, believed to be his rule of life. But her efforts were unavailing: the frontal attack had failed, and the two conspirators fell back upon the strategy of attrition.

Bellegarde was urged to bestir himself, to move the Vatican for the necessary dispensations, and to put a little more passion into his suit. Alas, he has reached the middle time of life ‘when he can no longer flatter himself with the hope of evoking the ardour of love’; ‘the solid sentiments to which I aspire,’ he writes, ‘lead me to look for a better happiness than can be procured by such transitory intoxication – (cette agréable ivresse toujours passagère)’; he trusts to these ‘substantial feelings’ to replace ‘those of a Corydon.’ He also trusts that her dowry will be sufficient to pay his debts.

It is on record that Belle read this letter three or four times with great pleasure. The fact is she was entirely free from vanity, and readily admired in others the frankness which she claimed for herself. Nevertheless the feelings which Mademoiselle de Tuyll proposed to herself were not precisely the ‘substantial’ ones of the Marquis. She was entirely explicit on this point. She despatched to Hermenches an immense dissertation – a very masterpiece of frankness – on the exact gradation of ardour which her husband must maintain in order to enjoy a reasonable hope of her fidelity. Nothing could be more just, or more businesslike than her observations. The romantic movement was not yet astir, and Mademoiselle de Tuyll’s self-knowledge was veiled in no misty half-lights. There is a quality of truth and goodwill in this honest letter which is of finer style than all the draperies of sentiment.

Monsieur de Bellegarde, on his part, was far less exercised as to his bride’s eventual fidelity than upon the score of her formidable intellect. ‘Those talents which heaven has showered upon your daughter’ were far from giving the satisfaction attributed to him by Belle in her draft of proposal; her sense of fact alarmed, her subtleties distressed him; he was in mortal terror of marrying a blue-stocking; he wished she would not write him such long letters. ‘Shorter letters, above all, shorter!’ is the anxious advice of Hermenches. ‘If I have too much wit by half for the Marquis,’ is Belle’s rather crestfallen reply, ‘let him marry a woman with half my wit. If I am neither to see nor to write to Monsieur de Bellegarde, why does he not take an heiress out of Africa, and leave me to make a marriage by proxy with the Grand Mogul?’

But here, too, she can be sympathetic with the alarm of her suitor. ‘I find it entirely fitting that the Marquis cannot endure me in the ro? le of prodigy. Nothing in the world is more detestable. My intellectual pretensions were a kind of childhood which I have left behind. I have no longer any desire to exhibit a quality which, if it exists, is sure to show itself sufficiently, and loses half its charm in being advertised. I do not spend ten minutes a month in speculating on what I do not understand, and have come to rest in a very humble and quite contented scepticism. If I am on excellent terms with my own wits, it is because I find they serve so well for every day use, because they can discover amusement in anything and amuse everybody, because they make the happiness of those around me. The Marquis will have no complaints to make on this score. I am laughed at every day, and do not mind anything so long as I am allowed to go my own way with my studies and my writings. But I would not for a throne renounce the occupations of my own room. If I ceased to learn I should die of boredom in the midst of every pleasure and grandeur in the world. If the Marquis cares to read aloud I will learn history while I embroider his waistcoats.’ ‘If I bewilder him he has only to tell me to hold my tongue. He will find me now a musician, now a geometer, now a so-called poet, now a frivolous woman, now a passionate one, and now a cold and equable philosopher. Perhaps the diversity will amuse him. The background of my heart he will find always the same.’ ‘After all, it is necessary, is it not, to know where Archimedes placed his lever to lift the world?’

Not necessary, certainly, to Monsieur de Bellegarde. His wits did not move in the abstract: they were not even at all serviceable ‘for everyday use.’ After a year of courtship he had not yet found out whether Mademoiselle de Tuyll, with her Protestant faith, could become his legal wife, or her children his legal heirs. When Monsieur de Tuyll politely suggested that a little light on this point was to be desired, the Marquis sent him his mother’s marriage contract, a hundred pages long, which had no bearing whatever on the subject. This incompetence rather favoured his suit by provoking the mirth of the orderly parent. ‘When one laughs one is half way to being pleased, and the spectacle of the entire incapacity of a man with whom we are doing business leads one to think of him affectionately and to desire that the affair should reach the conclusion he desires: his incapacity seems to compel us to take charge of his interests.’ And, in fact, Belle, who makes this observation, took charge of Bellegarde’s interests to such purpose that we find her escaping to pay a visit, incognito, to the Bishop of Utrecht in order to settle these technical matters for herself; and – after a fall – she carries a letter for the Pope about her person until it becomes so infected with the balms of a poultice ‘that it could only serve the Holy Father for a medicament if he should chance to tumble from the Holy See.’

The Marquis came to pay his court. He was stiff and polite. ‘I am on the tight rope with him, we are very upright, very measured in our movements; point de gambades hasardées.’ He had, as Belle remarked later, ‘the least persuasive manner in the world; his conscience should be easy – seduction cannot be numbered among his sins.’ Yet she excused his awkwardness, his coldness, his incompetence; she pleaded his suit, she managed his business. What was the motive of this persistence, one might almost say of this pursuit?

It is most certain the motive was not a worldly desire to become Madame la Marquise. No one was ever more genuinely democratic, by instinct, taste, and conviction than Mademoiselle de Tuyll. All her life she detested the constraints of society. She loved simplicity, and sought to surround herself with simple folk. When the gay Hermenches described to her the delights of a country house party of seventy guests she replied with horror; a dance of Dutch peasants was more to her taste. She held the tenets of Rousseau with the assurance of a grande dame. Her brilliance and her reputation would have secured her a great place in the world of Paris: it was precisely the position she did not want. ‘My desire to see Paris might be chilled, if I were Bellegarde’s wife, by the fact that he is too grand seigneur, and his family have too many great names. I might have to conform to their grand manner, and I do not like the great, nor the grand manner, nor to conform. My chief wish would be to see Paris on foot, or in a cab; to see the arts, the artists, and the artisans; to hear the talk of the crowd and the eloquence of Clairon. I would make some chance acquaintances whom I should like and some others who would make me laugh. I would pay a big price for the lessons of Rameau, and a week before I left, for the sake of completeness, I would make acquaintance with the hairdresser and the world of fashion.’

But if the motive was not worldliness, neither, certainly, was it passion. With the best will in the world she failed to fall in love with Bellegarde. At most, and very precariously, this difficult task might be achieved (so she hoped in her more facile moods) with sufficient encouragement from the Marquis; the encouragement was not forthcoming. Yet passion was eminently part of her scheme. ‘If I did not love my husband, he would be the unhappiest of mortals…But if I love – if I love! I can do nothing by halves, I am capable of no feeble desires, no limited ambitions’; and this fervent lady proposed to marry Monsieur de Bellegarde, the ‘unseductive’ nobleman whose ‘more substantial sentiments were to replace those of a Corydon’; and what is more she meant to make him happy.

The cause of Belle’s persistence lay in her singular egoism. All her other suitors had been proposed to her by her parents, or had come forward of their own initiative; Bellegarde was her own creation, the hero of her private scheme, the puppet of her own conspiracy with Hermenches. He had loomed up, a shadowy figure, which her imagination could shape as it pleased. When the outlines became distinct and forbidding he was already a part of her will; a struggle had been engaged; her egoism was committed; and her reason worked unrestingly to justify her choice.

And Hermenches was involved. Hermenches, her choice, on whom her egoism had fastened even more profoundly, Hermenches the confidant of her unending self-analysis. Truly, as she said, it was ‘an odd thing to upset heaven and earth, to fight with monsters, for the sake of a tepid marriage.’ But marriage with Bellegarde meant freedom from Zuylen, a gratifying defeat of the monsters,…and a future for this embarrassed friendship. For embarrassed it was. ‘I fear you may hold too large a part in my thoughts, that I may be forming the habit of preoccupying myself with you too constantly, and too keenly (avec un certain mouvement trop vif). I am determined that this shall not happen. What would be the end of it? A passion perhaps, perhaps a rupture…I am convinced my parents will never give a formal consent to this marriage; if the Marquis insists on this point, you and I, Hermenches, will not pass our lives together; you will live in Bellegarde’s châteaux without me. What shall we do then with the habit that unites us? Will you be satisfied to write to me all your life, and to see me never? Our letters have been all fire, always ardent and tender: after such letters we need to meet. We shall seek each other out, Hermenches – unless we quarrel – and then beware of passion, of jealousy, instinct, madness, and confusion! If I do not marry your friend, if I think always of you, some day we shall be lovers, unless we are separated to the ends of the earth, or unless you care for me no longer.’ What is to happen to them, she asks, if she does not marry Bellegardê What is to happen, one cannot help asking, if she does?

This letter to Hermenches reveals a state of mind in Mademoiselle de Tuyll of a somewhat complicated order; a state of mind which may well have been disquieting to Monsieur de Bellegarde and the other eleven suitors. The cautious Marquis hung back. Mademoiselle de Tuyll was perfectly sympathetic: ‘I hold to the formula of liberty: every morning the Marquis must wake up with the freedom not to wish what he wished the day before’; and when she dismisses another suitor she is at pains that Bellegarde should not know it lest he should conceive his obligations to be increased. The Marquis availed himself of this liberty to the full: every morning, for the space of about four years, he woke up wishing what he had not wished the day before. But at last his painful dubiety gave place to a settled conviction. For this temperament, these conic sections, this alarming wit, this unsparing frankness, he was no match. But he found it very difficult to say so.

Unhappy Mademoiselle de Tuyll! After so many letters, after so much self-scrutiny and analysis, after ‘combats with monsters’ and visits to bishops, she was twenty-eight; and still at Zuylen the cattle browsed on, the windmills slowly turned, the barges drifted by; and still she endured the ‘privation péniblè of her unmarried state.

But all this time there had been other strings to her formidable bow. The King of Prussia, for example, had heard tell of this enchantress. A Dutch gentleman at his court, Belle said, ‘used to send His Majesty to sleep with the story of my charms.’ The King ‘liked this story as well as another,’ and desired to see Mademoiselle de Tuyll at the Prussian court. Monsieur le Comte d’Anhalt was to wed the paragon and bring her to Potsdam. The mother, sister, and friends of the Count were full of this desirable project; the Count himself, if not precisely full, was at any rate favourably disposed.

The circumstances of this proposal were eminently flattering. The Anhalts, it was said, were to receive back their princely rank; the King took a lively interest in Belle; he had seen her portrait, and advised her to give up reading Fénelon. The Count was on the point of starting for Utrecht. He was always about to start. He remained in Germany; the trepidation which Belle never failed to inspire, even at a distance, kept him rooted to the spot. Mademoiselle de Tuyll observed the process of his collapse with an amused detachment. The Count d’Anhalt served very well as a pawn in her matrimonial diplomacy; she threatened her parents with him when they were too obdurate against Bellegarde; she used him as an excuse in order to discourage the ardour of a love-sick cousin; and with complete indifference she watched him gradually vanish over the horizon.

She had, near at hand, a more eloquent admirer, who provided for her – and for us – a richer fund of comedy.