True Pleasures Read online

  For Edith Wharton the salon represented the very best of France in all its urbanity, gaiety and intellect. Above all, it represented the triumph of the intellectual woman.

  The famous French ‘Salon’, the best school of talk and of ideas that the modern world has known, was based on the belief that the most stimulating conversation in the world is between intelligent men and women who see each other often enough to be on terms of rank and easy friendship. Think what an asset to the mental life of any country such a group of women forms! And in France, they were not then, and they are not now, limited to the small class of the wealthy and fashionable. In France, as soon as a woman has a personality, social circumstances permit her to make it felt.

  I very much doubt if Edith Wharton is right when she says that access to salons was not limited to a small class: by their nature they were elite. But it was true that money and status weren’t enough: to make the grade in the salon you had to contribute something special to the discourse.

  I gave up early on a career as salonnière, but it seems to me now that I have spent a lot of time trying to find an analogue. The search for the best conversations led me down some curious paths. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation was one. As a university student I was a part-time research assistant in the rural department and later, briefly, worked on an international current affairs program. I imagined men and women of noble intent, carefully distilling truth and disinterestedly conveying it to the nation. And I did meet some men and women like that, but mostly I found a lot of tired male sexists with seventies’ hairdos who were still banging on about their pet causes. The modern world seemed a faraway place in the laminated corridors of Gore Hill.

  I was accepted into the Foreign Affairs Department in 1987. This was quite something, a sign that I was on a career path at last. On our first day in the great old building in Canberra, one of our lecturers was a former High Commissioner to Fiji. He was still wearing his pale green safari suit with a shark’s tooth around his neck. I was shaken but not deterred. The next day our training course topics included Diplomatic dinners: how to make people feel at home who you wish were at home and What to do when Australians send their mad relatives to YOUR post. Mmm. Eventually, of course, I did get to eavesdrop on serious conversations, but not nearly as often as I had expected.

  Things got a lot better when I joined the Prime Minister’s Department, and worked in the international affairs area. This was the real deal. I wrote briefing notes for the Prime Minister, I attended his meetings, I tiptoed the corridors of power. I got to listen in on a really high class of conversation. The first Gulf War happened during my time in the Prime Minister’s Department, and the Dili massacre in East Timor. Serious matters were at hand, the national interest was at stake, I played my own small role.

  I would like to say that working for the Deputy Prime Minister was the most intellectually fascinating time of my life. It was amazing in many ways. But as a rule, stimulating and equal conversation between men and women is not a Labor Party strong point, maaaaate.

  And as for the management consultants … but that, of course, is why I am here.

  The philosopher David Hume, one of those enlightened Scots who found France so delightful in the eighteenth century, relished the difference between the British and French approaches to women and society. An evening in England generally concluded with the ladies gracefully exiting the room, leaving the men to cigars, port and politics. In France, by contrast, men and women mixed in all circumstances of life. Women were considered indispensable to the creation of fine society. Women and men were equally expected to step up to the conversational mark – to be familiar with the great ideas, issues and arts of the age – and to be able to discuss them with wit and intelligence.

  David Hume knew a lot about French women because he was lucky enough to attend the greatest salon of all. In some respects Madame du Deffand seems an unlikely candidate for salonnière. Separated from her provincial husband, modest in title and means, she lived most of her life on the generosity of others. At fifty she went blind. Yet, through the force of her intellect and personality, she rose to become the greatest salonnière in history.

  Night after night, year after year, from 1746 until her death in 1780, in colored silks, satin shoes and matching stockings, with their powdered hair and beauty patches, aristocrats and scientists, authors and diplomats, foreign visitors and local wits came gratefully to Madame du Deffand’s dramatic gold and crimson salon. Perched on pretty chairs, they flirted, joked, played cards or discussed the latest books. Benjamin Franklin came by, as did Horace Walpole and yes, the delighted Scot, David Hume. One of the assembly might read aloud a letter from one of Madame du Deffand’s many correspondents: the French ambassador in Constantinople sending tales of Turkish splendor; her good friend Madame de Choiseul with insider gossip from the court at Versailles; best of all, the great Voltaire himself, firing philosophical bombshells and political bons mots from the safety of his estate in Switzerland.

  Framed like a statue in her winged chair, the sovereign of this tiny kingdom of pleasure was Madame du Deffand herself. Having slept all day, she was ready to sit up all night. As her guests arrived, Madame du Deffand’s blank eyes would turn towards them and her knowing fingers would roam in light greeting over their faces, as if to dissect the personality within. And her guests needed their composure, for Madame du Deffand’s salon was no place for the socially feeble. This was the peak of the eighteenth century, the age of wit and ridicule, brilliance and bel esprit, and most of all, reason. Not earnest, cardigan-wearing, look-at-all-sides-of-the-question kind of reason, but sparkling, kitten-heeled, stay-up-all-night and fuck-you kind of reason. Madame du Deffand’s restless hands once paused lightly on the heart of the reserved man of letters, Monsieur Fontenelle. There too, lies a brain, she said, approvingly.

  Madame du Deffand was a martinet about gaiety. She banned the serious, the didactic, the improving. And in this she rendered herself a conservative, for the world around her was changing. As the gay and refined Age of Reason headed towards its revolutionary climax, Madame du Deffand clung to the old codes. She and her friends scoffed at the encyclopedists’ faith in progress; they derided the new vogue for sentimentality. They wore their licentiousness and cynicism with ancient pride.

  A night at Madame du Deffand’s was a festival of one-liners.

  When Monsieur de Plessis-Chatillon lamented his first wife’s death to his second wife, she replied, quick as a flash: ‘Let me assure you, Monsieur, no one regrets that tragedy more than I.’

  When an ageing admirer humbly admitted to the Duchesse de la Vallière that he had long loved her without having the courage to declare himself, the equally decrepit libertine laughed out loud. ‘My God, why did you not tell me?’ she mocked. ‘You could have had me like all the others.’

  Madame du Deffand was the hardest and funniest of them all. Once she was invited to supper at the home of Madame de Marchais. Madame du Deffand replied that she would need to spend time with her lover of nearly fifty years, Monsieur de Pont de Veyle, who was very ill. She agreed, however, to try to stop by for a moment before going to her friend’s sickbed. Madame du Deffand arrived promptly for the party at nine o’clock. To everyone’s surprise, she announced gaily: ‘I’ve come to have supper with you all.’ Of course, the assembly asked for news of her lover. ‘Oh,’ said Madame du Deffand, airily, ‘he died. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.’

  These anecdotes are all well-documented, for Madame du Deffand’s gatherings and guests regularly featured in a select newsletter sent to Enlightened monarchs around Europe, including Frederick of Prussia, Catherine the Great in Russia and Gustav III in Sweden, all of whom hungered for news of Paris, the capital of the world. Imagine the grateful guest storing mental notes and arriving home to record the bons mots in the pale light of dawn.

  One of the great pleasures of salon life lay in promoting your friends and feuding with your enemies. Madame du Deffand and Voltai
re shared a particular loathing for the fashionable philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau claimed that man was better off in a state of nature than in sinful human society. Madame du Deffand hated this concept: her entire life had been devoted to getting as far away from nature as possible. Voltaire was outraged by the idea, which he saw as turning back the clock on human progress.

  On receiving Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality in 1755, Voltaire wrote to the author.

  I have received your book against the human race. I thank you for it. No one has ever employed so much intellect in the attempt to prove us beasts. A desire seizes us to walk on all four paws when we read your work. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it.

  There was another thing about Rousseau. He, along with other important intellectuals like Diderot, was promoting an essentially bourgeois ideal of women’s behavior. These philosophers wanted women to be stoic mothers, moral guides and patient, silent, faithful supporters of their men. It was the intellectual equivalent of the artistic gulf between the frivolous aristocratic Boucher and dour bourgeois Chardin. As vigorously as they advocated the rights and liberties of men, they simultaneously endorsed stricter limitations on women. Madame du Deffand’s rigorous adherence to the aristocratic model was, in its way, a defence of the existing social order that guaranteed her own freedoms.

  A few years ago, French intellectual Mona Ozouf explained this paradox, arguing that the ancien régime was good for women: In a monarchical society, every man’s passions are exerted in defending his privileges, holding and marking his place, which opens a wide field of action for women’s savoir-faire, the sureness of their psychological sense, the fertility of their imagination … It is therefore not surprising that they reigned in France.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was well aware of the importance of Madame du Deffand, so much so that he tried to explain away their lack of social connection.

  I at first began by being very interested in Madame du Deffand, the loss of whose sight made her an object of pity in mine, but her way of life, so unlike mine that one of us rose almost as the other retired, her unlimited passion for the trivialities of the ‘bel esprit’, the importance she attached, good or bad, to the least scribblings which appeared, the despotism and passion of her judgements, her exaggerated infatuation with things or hatred of them which caused her to speak of everything convulsively with unbelievable prejudice, her invincible stubbornness, the unreasoning enthusiasm into which she was thrown by the obstinacy of her passionate opinions; all that soon discouraged me from giving her the attention I had wished.

  He concludes on a note of high vanity. I neglected her and she noticed it. That was enough to put her into a rage and although I sense how much a woman of her character was to be feared, I preferred to expose myself to the scourge of her hatred than that of her friendship.

  No one was fooled – whatever illusions he may have comforted himself with, friendship with Madame du Deffand was never an option for the sexist, dullish Mr Rousseau.

  There’s the real Paris and there’s another Paris, a three-dimensional model formed in my mind’s eye after months of looking at maps. This Paris is compact, neat, with a twisting Seine, the spiral swirl of the arrondissements, the white bump of Montmartre, and the cartoon pop-ups of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. Now, as I wander down the seemingly never-ending rue Saint-Dominique in the quiet Faubourg Saint-Germain, I’m reminded again that the real Paris always comes up bigger and grander than my imaginings.

  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 st
ock, 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.