True Pleasures (12 page)

The buildings on this street seem to have sprung from the soil, so harmonious is their composition. This is civilization, old and sure, calm and resigned. And quiet. If I were to so much as cough I'm sure my voice would bounce and echo crudely off the seventeenth-century buildings. I'm looking for numbers 10–12, the former Couvent des Filles de St Joseph, built in 1641.

Oh. I see now why it's so quiet around here. This whole block is the Ministry of Defence complex. I stop at a courtyard gate, in front of two soldiers with machine guns. They combine high fashion with extreme menace.

I peek past them as I say, ‘Could you point out to me Madame du Deffand's apartment?'

They look at each other blankly, two distractingly handsome killers.

‘Never heard of her,' says one.

Not again
.

‘But you must,' I protest. ‘She was a famous salonnière.'

‘Well,' says the other one, ‘there was Madame Mère, Napoleon's mother, she lived here in the Hôtel de Brienne.'

Really? But I know he's talking about the other building in the block.

‘No,' I say stubbornly, shaking my head, ‘it's Madame du Deffand. She lived here. In the old convent.'

The killers smile at me. Then their faces revert to their default expression of immaculate boredom.

Madame du Deffand was the greatest salonnière of all, but that's not the real reason I am interested in her. I care about what she created, but even more, I care about what she overcame.

Brace yourself, for this is the voice of utter despair:
For myself, Monsieur
, writes Madame du Deffand to Voltaire,
I admit that I have only one fixed idea, one feeling, one sorrow, one misfortune, it is the pain of having been born; there is no part to be played on the world's theater to which I do not prefer nothingness, and, what will appear to be of no consequence to you, is that when I have the final proof of having to return to it, my horror of death will be none the less
.

This is the real Madame du Deffand, whose salon was the gayest in Paris, but whose voice is as modern, as sterile and as empty as the twentieth century. All conditions were the same to her,
from the angel to the oyster
. The great, overriding misfortune was to have been born at all.

Madame du Deffand spent her whole life trying to
manage the intolerable burden of existence. She found comfort nowhere. Even as a child she saw through the idea of God. Anyway, the Bible lacked taste. Nature she never cared for, and the boredom of country life was insupportable. Relationships? As far as she could tell, the ties that bound people together were more about habit or mutual need than sincere, disinterested affection. Married off to a rural Marquis, Madame du Deffand found nothing in him or family relationships to give value to her life. When her sister, who came specifically to Paris to live near her and look after her, died, Madame du Deffand merely commented:
She was a good woman, but for whom one could have no feeling
. She never wanted a child: Madame du Deffand was glad she had not condemned another person to the torment of life's long blank meaninglessness.

Even the tragedy of her blindness did not distract Madame du Deffand from her misery; as she maintained to Voltaire:

You do not know and you cannot know from personal experience, the condition of those who think, who reflect, who have some activity, and who are at the same time without talent, without passion, without occupation, without diversion; who have had friends but who have lost them without being able to replace them; add to that a delicacy of taste, a little discernment, a great love of truth; put out those people's eyes, and place them in the middle of Paris, of Peking, in fact of anywhere you like and I maintain that it would be happier for them not to have been born … all physical ills, however great (except for pain), sadden and depress the soul less than human converse and society
.

What do you do if you are an eighteenth-century aristocrat for whom life is utterly meaningless? In 1718 you go
straight to Paris, of course, on your way to hell. When Madame du Deffand arrived in the capital at the age of twenty-two she turned to
continuous excessive dissipation
. She gambled and drank too much and slept around. She used people. She wearily scaled the social heights: she even had a brief affair with the Regent of France and extracted a lifelong pension from him. Nothing satisfied, of course, and in the end she was bored, bored, bored. Not only this, but at thirty-two, after the death of the Regent, she became a social outcast. They said of her that she was a
laughing stock, blamed by everyone, despised by her lover, abandoned by her friends; she no longer knows how to untangle it all
. But no one despised Madame du Deffand more than she despised herself:
I am left to myself, and I cannot be in worse hands
, she said.
I search for my soul and I find only the remainder of it
.

In Lawrence Durrell's
The Alexandria Quartet
, a character observes that each of us lives by
selective fictions
. I think he meant that, perhaps unconsciously, each of us devises a narrative to impose some structure and meaning on our random, chaotic lives. But Madame du Deffand denied herself the consolations of grand explanations like religion or fate or genetics. She equally refused to indulge herself in the little lies that make life bearable. Instead she lived her life bravely in the cold, bleak vacuum of doubt.

Anita Brookner, in her survey
Romanticism and its Discontents
, quotes Madame du Deffand's searching question:
Mais, M. de Voltaire, vous combattez et détruisez toutes les erreurs, mais que mettez-vous à leur place? Monsieur de Voltaire, you combat and destroy all the errors, but what do you put in their place?

Today, of course, we would rush Madame du Deffand to pharmacologists, who would prescribe drugs for her depression.
Chemical imbalance
, they'd say.
Childhood
trauma. Hormones
. Voltaire himself saw the deep emotional factors involved in Madame du Deffand's agony:
You give me great pain, Madame; for your sad ideas result not only from reasoning: they come from the feelings
.

Voltaire thought the answer was to encourage Madame du Deffand to use her considerable intellectual gifts.
All that is beautiful and luminous is of your element
, he wrote to her in 1736.
Do not be afraid of discussion. Do not be ashamed to add the strength of your intelligence to the charms of your person. Make your ties with the other women, but speak reason to me
.

But Madame du Deffand refused to indulge in the fiction that her talents were in any way comparable to those of the great Voltaire. She wrote back:

Happy is he who is born with great intelligence and great talents! And how much to be pitied is he who has just enough to prevent him from vegetating. I find myself in that class and am among many. The only difference between me and my fellows is that they are pleased with themselves and that I am far from being pleased with them and even further from being pleased with myself
.

So here is Madame du Deffand, painfully alive to the moral and spiritual agony of conscious existence. And her response? Not a conventional one, that's for sure. Not suicide, nor faith, nor drink or drugs as diversions from doubt. No. She chose a most unlikely path for survival. She chose society, gaiety,
reason
.

Deffand took the salon code as a kind of regime. She chose logic over instinct, reason over feeling, art over nature. With an unwavering commitment she upheld an aristocratic code of living based on careless erudition, classical impartiality and casual wit. Society became her salve, if not her salvation.

It gave her a reason to get up in the evening.

And it worked. In the candle-lit glitter of her gold and crimson salon she created a whole world. Even when she was seventy years old, the English aesthete Horace Walpole thought she was
an old blind debauchée of wit
. She was
very old and stone blind
, Walpole acknowledged,
but retains all vivacity, wit, memory, judgement, passions and agreeableness. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers
.

But it must be said: Madame du Deffand was not a nice woman. She was never happy or kind. Even her friends were frightened of her, and her lovers treated her with wary caution as though she were a particularly dangerous prized pet. Her enemies were delighted when she developed an unlikely and unrequited passion for the younger, homosexual Walpole – at last she exhibited the needs of an ordinary woman.

Madame du Deffand took a
protégée
once, her lovely niece Julie de Lespinasse, and then expelled her when the young woman attracted her own circle of admirers. In 1764, Julie's supporters gave her a house, literally on the next corner from Madame du Deffand in rue de Bellechasse.

As I wander back down the street I can see a few Defence bureaucrats lounging on the grass in the sunshine: this little park is all that remains of Julie's place. There must have been extraordinary human traffic here on moonlit nights as guests left Madame du Deffand's to sneak off to Julie's rival salon down the road. Julie died romantically young at age forty-four in 1776, mourned by all except the woman who introduced her to Paris. Madame du Deffand merely observed:
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse died this night, two
hours after midnight; it would have meant something to me once, today it is nothing at all
.

Madame du Deffand died at home in 1780 at the age of eighty-four, surrounded by people, as always. On her deathbed she consented to receive the priest, but it was said that she couldn't resist lecturing him on the proper style:
Father, you will be very pleased with me; but grant me three favours: no questions, no reasons, no sermons
.

Back down the road, I make my way to a modest family restaurant with lace curtains. Monsieur welcomes me with cool formality. There's no phoney assumption of familiarity. No cheesy questions. Even the facial expressions are sober, discreet. Paradoxically, perhaps, this creates a space in which I have my personal privacy and my comfort. It's why being a woman alone for lunch feels perfectly comfortable.

As I sit down to look at the menu it occurs to me that many people would not admire Madame du Deffand for choosing ‘society' as a way of life, as a meaning for life. To many this would seem unbearably shallow.

Partly the modern disdain for social forms arises because we are, all of us, Romantics. It's not a matter of choice: this is the point of history in which we find ourselves. Ever since Rousseau idealized the noble savage and Beethoven refused to bow his head to a nobleman and Byron tossed his raven curls, good manners, forms, etiquette, courtesies, all these have been devalued. The individual has been encouraged to raise his or her feelings above the interests of the social group. Moreover, in the Romantic world view, civic society itself is downgraded – in the cities the individual finds only the stale rituals of a worn-out world.
In nature alone can man find genuine honesty and grand sensations.

But agreed forms of social discourse are not foolish things. They are necessary to civilization. In the course of the French Revolution, as French society was trying to recover from the end of the monarchy and the Terror and to find some way to reconstruct itself as a Republic, politician and novelist Germaine de Staël offered this caution against barbarousness, against wilfully abandoning all the old courtesies:

Civilized manners, like the good taste they are part of, have great literary and political importance … Politeness is the bond established by society between men who are strangers to one another. Virtues attach us to family, friends and people less fortunate than ourselves; but in every relationship which we do not characterise as a duty, civilized manners prepare the way for affections, make belief easier, and preserve for each man the position his merit should give him in the world …