An Intriguing Chanoinesse--Her Singular Fascination--Her Salon --Its Philosophical Character--Mlle. Aisse--Romances of Mme. de Tencin--D'Alembert--La Belle Emilie--Voltaire--The Two Women Compared
It was not in the restless searchings of an old society for new sensations, new diversions, nor in the fleeting expressions of individual taste or caprice, which were often little more than the play of small vanities, that the most potent forces in the political as well as in the intellectual life of France were found. It was in the coteries which attracted the best representatives of modern thought, men and women who took the world on a more serious side, and mingled more or less of earnestness even in their amusements. While the Duchesse du Maine was playing her little comedy, which began and ended in herself, another woman, of far different type, and without rank or riches , was scheming for her friends, and nursing the germs of the philosophic party in one of the most notable salons of the first half of the century. Mme. de Tencin is not an interesting figure to contemplate from a moral standpoint. "She was born with the most fascinating qualities and the most abominable defects that God ever gave to one of his creatures," said Mme. du Deffand, who was far from being able to pose, herself, as a model of virtue or decorum. But sin has its degrees, and the woman who errs within the limits of conventionality considers herself entitled to sit in judgment upon her sister who wanders outside of the fold. Measured even by the complaisant standards of her own time, there can be but one verdict upon the character of Mme. de Tencin, though it is to be hoped that the scandal-loving chroniclers have painted her more darkly than she deserved. But whatever her faults may have been, her talent and her influence were unquestioned. She posed in turn as a saint, an intrigante, and a femme d'esprit, with marked success in every one of these roles. But it was not a comedy she was playing for the amusement of the hour. Beneath the velvet softness of her manner there was a definite aim, an inflexible purpose. With the tact and facility of a Frenchwoman, she had a strong, active intellect, boundless ambition, indomitable energy, and the subtlety of an Italian.
An incident of her early life, related by Mme. du Deffand, furnishes a key to her complex character, and reveals one secret of her influence. Born of a poor and proud family in Grenoble, in 1681, Claudine Alexandrine Guerin de Tencin was destined from childhood for the cloister. Her strong aversion to the life of a nun was unavailing, and she was sent to a convent at Montfleury. This prison does not seem to have been a very austere one, and the discipline was far from rigid. The young novice was so devout that the archbishop prophesied a new light for the church, and she easily persuaded him of the necessity of occupying the minds of the religieuses by suitable diversions. Though not yet sixteen, this pretty, attractive, vivacious girl was fertile in resources, and won her way so far into the good graces of her superiors as to be permitted to organize reunions, and to have little comedies played which called together the provincial society. She transformed the convent, but her secret disaffection was unchanged. She took the final vows under the compulsion of her inflexible father, then continued her role of devote to admirable purpose. By the zeal of her piety, the severity of her penance, and the ardor of her prayers, she gained the full sympathy of her ascetic young confessor, to whom she confided her feeling of unfitness for a religious life, and her earnest desire to be freed from the vows which sat so uneasily upon her sensitive conscience. He exhorted her to steadfastness, but finally she wrote him a letter in which she confessed her hopeless struggle against a consuming passion, and urged the necessity of immediate release. The conclusion was obvious. The Abbe Fleuret was horrified by the conviction that this pretty young nun was in love with himself, and used his influence to secure her transference to a secular order at Neuville, where as chanoinesse, she had many privileges and few restrictions. Here she became at once a favorite, as before, charming by her modest devotion, and amusing by her brilliant wit. Artfully, and by degrees, she convinced those in authority of the need of a representative in Paris. This office she was chosen to fill. Playing her pious part to the last, protesting with tears her pain at leaving a life she loved, and her unfitness for so great an honor she set out upon her easy mission. There are many tales of a scandalous life behind all this sanctity and humility, but her new position gave her consideration, influence, and a good revenue. "Young, beautiful, clever, with an adorable talent," this "nun unhooded" fascinated the regent, and was his favorite for a few days. But her ambition got the better of her prudence. She ventured upon political ground, and he saw her no more. With his minister, the infamous Dubois, she was more successful, and he served her purpose admirably well. Through her notorious relations with him she enriched her brother and secured him a cardinal's hat. The intrigues of this unscrupulous trio form an important episode in the history of the period. When Dubois died, within a few months of the regent, she wept, as she said, "that fools might believe she regretted him."
Her clear, incisive intellect and conversational charm would have assured the success of any woman at a time when these things counted for so much. "At thirty-six," wrote Mme. du Deffand, "she was beautiful and fresh as a woman of twenty; her eyes sparkled, her lips had a smile at the same time sweet and perfidious; she wished to be good, and gave herself great trouble to seem so, without succeeding." Indolent and languid with flashes of witty vivacity, insinuating and facile, unconscious of herself, interested in everyone with whom she talked, she combined the tact, the finesse, the subtle penetration of a woman with the grasp, the comprehensiveness, and the knowledge of political machinery which are traditionally accorded to a man. "If she wanted to poison you, she would use the mildest poison," said the Abbe Trublet.
"I cannot express the illusion which her air of nonchalance and easy grace left with me," says Marmontel. "Mme. de Tencin, the woman in the kingdom who moved the most political springs, both in the city and at court, was for me only an indolente. Ah, what finesse, what suppleness, what activity were concealed beneath this naive air, this appearance of calm and leisure!" But he confesses that she aided him greatly with her counsel, and that he owed to her much of his knowledge of the world.
"Unhappy those who depend upon the pen," she said to him; "nothing is more chimerical. The man who makes shoes is sure of his wages; the man who makes a or a tragedy is never sure of anything." She advises him to make friends of women rather than of men. "By means of women, one attains all that one wishes from men, of whom some are too pleasure-loving, others too much preoccupied with their personal interests not to neglect yours; whereas women think of you, if only from idleness. Speak this evening to one of them of some affair that concerns you; tomorrow at her wheel, at her tapestry, you will find her dreaming of it, and searching in her head for some means of serving you."
Prominent among her friends were Bolingbroke and Fontenelle. "It is not a heart which you have there," she said to the latter, laying her hand on the spot usually occupied by that organ, "but a second brain." She had enlisted what stood in the place of it, however, and he interested himself so far as to procure her final release from her vows, through Benedict XIV, who, as Cardinal Lambertini, had frequented her salon, and who sent her his portrait as a souvenir, after his election to the papacy.
Through her intimacy with the Duc de Richelieu, Mme. de Tencin made herself felt even in the secret councils of Louis XV. Her practical mind comprehended more clearly than many of the statesmen the forces at work and the weakness that coped with them. "Unless God visibly interferes," she said, "it is physically impossible that the state should not fall in pieces." It was her influence that inspired Mme. de Chateauroux with the idea of sending her royal lover to revive the spirits of the army in Flanders. "It is not, between ourselves, that he is in a state to command a company of grenadiers," she wrote to her brother, "but his presence will avail much. The troops will do their duty better, and the generals will not dare to fail them so openly . . . A king, whatever he may be, is for the soldiers and people what the ark of the covenant was for the Hebrews; his presence alone promises success."
Her devotion to her friends was the single redeeming trait in her character, and she hesitated at nothing to advance the interests of her brother, over whose house she gracefully presided. But she failed in her ultimate ambition to elevate him to the ministry, and her intrigues were so much feared that Cardinal Fleury sent her away from Paris for a short time. Her disappointments, which it is not the purpose to trace here, left her one of the disaffected party, and on her return her drawing room became a rallying point for the radical thinkers of France.
Such was the woman who courted, flattered, petted, and patronized the literary and scientific men of Paris, called them her menagerie, put them into a sort of uniform, gave them two suppers a week, and sent them two ells of velvet for small clothes at New Year's. Of her salon, Marmontel gives us an interesting glimpse. He had been invited to read one of his tragedies, and it was his first introduction.
"I saw assembled there Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Mairan, Marivaux, the young Helvetius, Astruc, and others, all men of science or letters, and, in the midst of them, a woman of brilliant intellect and profound judgment, who, with her kind and simple exterior, had rather the appearance of the housekeeper than the mistress. This was Mme. de Tencin. . . . I soon perceived that the guests came there prepared to play their parts, and that their wish to shine did not leave the conversation always free to follow its easy and natural course. Every one tried to seize quickly and on the wing the moment to bring in his word, his story, his anecdote, his maxim, or to add his dash of light and sparkling wit; and, in order to do this opportunely, it was often rather far-fetched. In Marivaux, the impatience to display his finesse and sagacity was quite apparent. Montesquieu, with more calmness, waited for the ball to come to him, but he waited. Mairan watched his opportunity. Astruc did not deign to wait. Fontenelle alone let it come to him without seeking it, and he used so discreetly the attention given him, that his witty sayings and his clever stories never occupied more than a moment. Alert and reserved, Helvetius listened and gathered material for the future."
Mme. de Tencin loved literature and philosophy for their own sake, and received men of letters at their intrinsic value. She encouraged, too, the freedom of thought and expression at that time so rare and so dangerous. It was her influence that gave its first impulse to the success of Montesquieu's esprit DES LOIS, of which she personally bought and distributed many copies. If she talked well, she knew also how to listen, to attract by her sympathy, to aid by her generosity, to inspire by her intelligence, to charm by her versatility.
Another figure flits in and out of this salon, whose fine qualities of soul shine so brightly in this morally stifling atmosphere that one forgets her errors in a mastering impulse of love and pity. There is no more pathetic history in this arid and heartless age than that of Mlle. Aisse, the beautiful Circassian, with the lustrous, dark, Oriental eyes," who was brought from Constantinople in infancy by the French envoy, and left as a precious heritage to Mme. de Ferriol, the intriguing sister of Mme. de Tencin, and her worthy counterpart, if not in talent, in the faults that darkened their common womanhood. This delicate young girl, surrounded by worldly and profligate friends, and drawn in spite of herself into the errors of her time, redeemed her character by her romantic heroism, her unselfish devotion, and her final revolt against what seemed to be an inexorable fate. The struggle between her self-forgetful love for the knightly Chevalier d'Aydie and her sensitive conscience, her refusal to cloud his future by a portionless marriage, and her firmness in severing an unholy tie, knowing that the sacrifice would cost her life, as it did, form an episode as rare as it is tragical. But her exquisite personality, her rich gifts of mind and soul, her fine intelligence, her passionate love, almost consecrated by her pious but fatal renunciation, call up one of the loveliest visions of the century--a vision that lingers in the memory like a medieval poem.
Mme. de Tencin amused her later years b writing sentimental tales, which were found among her papers after her death. These were classed with the romances of Mme. de La Fayette. Speaking of the latter, La Harpe said, "Only one other woman succeeded, a century later, in painting with equal power the struggles of love and virtue." It is one of the curious inconsistencies of her character, that her creations contained an element which her life seems wholly to have lacked. Behind all her faults of conduct there was clearly an ideal of purity and goodness. Her stories are marked by a vividness and an ardor of passion rarely found in the insipid and colorless romances of the preceding age. Her pictures of love and intrigue and crime are touched with the religious enthusiasm of the cloister, the poetry of devotion, the heroism of self-sacrifice. Perhaps the dark and mysterious facts of her own history shaped themselves in her imagination. Did the tragedy of La Fresnaye, the despairing lover who blew out his brains at her feet, leaving the shadow of a crime hanging over her, with haunting memories of the Bastille, recall the innocence of her own early convent days? Did she remember some long-buried love, and the child left to perish upon the steps of St. Jean le Rond, but grown up to be her secret pride in the person of the great mathematician and philosopher d'Alembert? What was the subtle link between this worldly woman and the eternal passion, the tender self-sacrifice of Adelaide, the loyal heroine who breathes out her solitary and devoted soul on the ashes of La Trappe, unknown to her faithful and monastic lover, until the last sigh? The fate of Adelaide has become a legend. It has furnished a theme for the poet and the artist, an inspiration for the divine strains of Beethoven, another leaf in the annals of pure and heroic love. But the woman who conceived it toyed with the human heart as with a beautiful flower, to be tossed aside when its first fragrance was gone. She apparently knew neither the virtue, nor the honor, nor the purity, nor the truth of which she had so exquisite a perception in the realm of the imagination. Or were some of the episodes which darken the story of her life simply the myths of a gossiping age, born of the incidents of an idle tale, to live forever on the pages of history?
But it was not as a literary woman that Mme. de Tencin held her position and won her fame. Her gifts were eminently those of her age and race, and it may be of interest to compare her with a woman of larger talent of a purely intellectual order, who belonged more or less to the world of the salons, without aspiring to leadership, and who, though much younger, died in the same year. Mme. du Chatelet was essentially a woman of letters. She loved the exact sciences, expounded Leibnitz, translated Newton, gave valuable aid to Voltaire in introducing English thought into France, and was one of the first women among the nobility to accept the principles of philosophic deism. "I confess that she is tyrannical," said Voltaire; "one must talk about metaphysics, when the temptation is to talk of love. Ovid was formerly my master; it is now the turn of Locke." She has been clearly but by no means pleasantly painted for us in the familiar letters of Mme. de Graffigny, in the rather malicious sketches of the Marquise de Crequi, and in the still more strongly outlined portrait or Mme. du Deffand, as a veritable bas bleu, learned, pedantic, eccentric, and without grace or beauty. "Imagine a woman tall and hard, with florid complexion, face sharp, nose pointed--VOILA LA BELLE EMILIE," writes the latter; "a face with which she was so contented that she spared nothing to set it off; curls, topknots, precious stones, all are in profusion . . . She was born with much esprit; the desire of appearing to have more made her prefer the study of the abstract sciences to agreeable branches of knowledge; she thought by this singularity to attain a greater reputation and a decided superiority over all other women. Madame worked with so much care to seem what she was not, that no one knew exactly what she was; even her defects were not natural." "She talks like an angel"--"she sings divinely"--"our sex ought to erect altars to her," wrote Mme. de Graffigny during a visit at her chateau. A few weeks later her tone changed. They had quarreled. Of such stuff is history made. But she had already given a charming picture of the life at Cirey.
Mme. du Chatelet plunged into abstractions during the day. In the evening she was no more the savante, but gave herself up to the pleasures of society with the ardor of a nature that was extreme in everything. Voltaire read his poetry and his dramas, told stories that made them weep and then laugh at their tears, improvised verses, and amused them with marionettes, or the magic lantern. La belle Emilie criticized the poems, sang, and played prominent parts in the comedies and tragedies of the philosopher poet, which were first given in her little private theater. Among the guests were the eminent scientist, Maupertuis, her life-long friend and teacher; the Italian savant, Algarotti, President Henault, Helvetius, the poet, Saint-Lambert, and many others of equal distinction. "Of what do we not talk!" writes Mme. de Graffigny. "Poetry, science, art, everything, in a tone of graceful badinage. I should like to be able to send you these charming conversations, these enchanting conversations, but it is not in me."
Mme. du Chatelet owned for several years the celebrated Hotel Lambert, and a choice company of savants assembled there as in the days when Mme. de Lambert presided in those stately apartments. But this learned salon had only a limited vogue. The thinking was high, but the dinners were too plain. The real life of Mme. du Chatelet was an intimate one. "I confess that in love and friendship lies all my happiness," said this astronomer, metaphysician, and mathematician, who wrote against revelation and went to mass with her free-thinking lover. Her learning and eccentricities made her the target for many shafts of ridicule, but she counted for much with Voltaire, and her chief title to fame lies in his long and devoted friendship. He found the "sublime and respectable Emilie" the incarnation of all the virtues, though a trifle ill-tempered. The contrast between his kindly portrait and those of her feminine friends is striking and rather suggestive.
"She joined to the taste for glory a simplicity which does not always accompany it, but which is often the fruit of serious studies. No woman was ever so learned, and no one deserves less to be called a femme savante. Born with a singular eloquence, this eloquence manifested itself only when she found subjects worthy of it . . . The fitting word, precision, justness, and force were the characteristics of her style. She would rather write like Pascal and Nicole than like Mme. de Sevigne; but this severe strength and this vigorous temper of her mind did not render her inaccessible to the beauties of sentiment. The charms of poetry and eloquence penetrated her, and no one was ever more sensitive to harmony . . . She gave herself to the great world as to study. Everything that occupies society was in her province except scandal. She was never known to repeat an idle story. She had neither time nor disposition to give attention to such things, and when told that some one had done her an injustice, she replied that she did not wish to hear about it."
"She led him a life a little hard," said Mme. de Graffigny, after her quarrel; but he seems to have found it agreeable, and broke his heart--for a short time--when she died. "I have lost half of my being," he wrote--"a soul for which mine was made." To Marmontel he says: "Come and share my sorrow. I have lost my illustrious friend. I am in despair. I am inconsolable." One cannot believe that so clear-sighted a man, even though a poet, could live for twenty years under the spell of a pure illusion. What heart revelations, what pictures of contemporary life, were lost in the eight large volumes of his letters which were destroyed at her death!
While Mme. de Tencin studied men and affairs, Mme. du Chatelet studied . One was mistress of the arts of diplomacy, gentle but intriguing, ambitious, always courting society and shunning solitude. The other was violent and imperious, hated finesse, and preferred burying herself among the rare treasures of her library at Cirey.
The influence of Mme. de Tencin was felt, not only in the social and intellectual, but in the political life of the century. The traditions of her salon lingered in those which followed, modified by the changes that time and personal taste always bring. Mme. du Chatelet was more learned, but she lacked the tact and charm which give wide personal ascendancy. Her influence was largely individual, and her have been mostly forgotten. These women were alike defiant of morality, but taken all in all, the character of Mme. Chatelet has more redeeming points, though little respect can be accorded to either. With the wily intellect of a Talleyrand, Mme. de Tencin represents the social genius, the intelligence, the esprit, and the worst vices of the century on which she has left such conspicuous traces.
"She knew my tastes and always offered me those dishes I preferred," said Fontenelle when she died in 1740. "It is an irreparable loss." Perhaps his hundred years should excuse his not going to her funeral for fear of catching cold.
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