a bonobo humanity?

If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honour in it which have won you rights over my soul forever.

Julie de L’Espinasse, to the Comte de Guibert, 1773

Although I managed to spend a bit of time at a university in my thirties, I think I’m largely self-educated, being reluctant to follow any course set down for me, and allergic to too much discipline, and so I’m always fascinated to hear of historical characters of a similar type – Montaigne, Rousseau and Stendhal come to mind (not that I’m comparing my ‘achievements’ to theirs!), and it’s probably not coincidental that they’re all French, though I’ve no idea what this signifies.
So the other day, finishing Aldous Huxley’s strange, well-meaning but unconvincing utopian novel Island, I wondered at the passing mention of Mlle de Lespinasse, a woman I ‘knew’ from my recent rereading of Stendhal’s Love. So here’s a couple of key passages about her from Wikipedia:

Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs.

Looked down on for her poverty and illegitimate birth, Mlle de Lespinasse had an unhappy childhood marked by neglect. She acquired a basic education at a convent, but she was largely self-educated, an impressive feat given that she was later able to hold her own among France’s top intellectuals.

This second passage in particular captured my heart, so to speak. I wouldn’t say that I was neglected, or impoverished, growing up, and the term ‘illegitimate’ seems quaint if not grotesque in today’s WEIRD world, but I identify with the thrill, and much of the isolation, of self-education. I feel I’ve spent much of my life talking to myself. As for salons, today’s equivalent, if there is any, would be the meet-ups I’ve occasionally been part of, for humanists, skeptics, ‘literature-lovers’ and the like. Somehow, though, they’ve never quite worked for me. I’m not one for ‘holding forth’, and am pretty easily overwhelmed by others. 

But let me focus on Mlle de Lespinasse, a rather formal title, and a rather more tragic figure. She died at 43, probably of tuberculosis, exacerbated, it seems, by an impassioned and immiserated spirit, not to mention liberal quantities of opium. One might say that she died of a broken heart. When I was a kid and first heard the notion of a broken heart, I imagined it snapping like a biscuit, and then you fell down dead. But even then it wasn’t quite so silly, it was awe-inspiring in fact, that the heart could be so brittle, so damaged by a love unrequited or rejected. Now of course, I see this sinking, this despair, this death of a highly intelligent and admired woman, confidante of the likes of d’Alembert and Condorcet, as more of a ‘feminist’ issue. In Saint-Beuve’s introduction to her life and letters, he refers to her emotionality:

But of what use is it to become clear-sighted? Did a woman’s mind, great as it may be, ever check her heart? “The mind of most women serves to strengthen their folly rather than their reason!” La Rochefoucauld says that, and Mlle. de Lespinasse proves the truth of it.

Of course this is just another patronising, patriarchal comment, from a world that largely debarred women from being movers and shakers in any political, scientific and enterprising arenas. Partnership with and encouragement of the males who dominated those arenas was all that could be hoped for. It seems that Julie de Lespinasse, along with Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (aka Mme de Staël), her mother Suzanne Churchod (known at the time as Madame Necker), and other salonistes of their time, were all expected to play the purely nurturing role that has been woman’s lot since religio-cultural politics reduced women to vassalage, whenever that might have been – since the rise of agricultural society, at least. The notes to her published letters present a nice example of this nurturing:

In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe [to L’Académie française]. “M. de La Harpe”, says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, “was one of her nurslings; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them.” 

So that would have been in 1776. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to L’Académie française, in 1980.  

So I’m currently learning more of Julie de Lespinasse, as she was known, and I’m nervous about my experience of her being filtered through the notes to her letters by “D’Alembert, Marmontel, De Guibert, etc”, who seem all to be male. Having said this, it’s impossible not to be moved by the genuine affection and regard so many of these men had for her. D’Alembert in particular, co-editor of the Encyclopédie with Diderot, a brilliant mathematician, physicist and philosopher, was totally devoted to her, and lived with her in the final years of her life. 

So I’ve read the first letter in the 1809 collection, addressed to the Comte de Guibert, one of the two men who most occupied her passionate and guilt-ridden thoughts, the other being the Marquis de Mora. Obviously these  weren’t your Mellors the gardener types. Guibert was an ambitious army officer, later a General, and Mora was a tubercular semi-invalid. Both were quite a bit younger than Julie (I can’t help thinking of la nouvelle Héloïse), who was forty at the time of the first letter, in 1773. It’s a bit hard to make sense of this letter, being a bit in medias res – she writes a lot of ‘him’ – Mora? – and of ‘you’, and seems almost terrified of her own thoughts – what she thinks and what she should think, as one passion rises and the other falls. Here’s how the letter ends:

But tell me, is this the tone of friendship, the tone of confidence? What is it that is drawing me?Make me know myself; aid me to recover myself in a measure; my soul is convulsed; is it you, is it your departure, what is it that persecutes me? I can no more. At this moment I have confidence in you, even to abandonment, but perhaps I shall never speak to you again of my life. Adieu, I shall see you to-morrow; possibly I shall feel embarrassed by what I have now written to you. Would to heaven that you were my friend, or that I had never known you! Do you believe me? Will you be my friend? Think of it, once only; is that too much?

That is the question – is it too much? I try, and largely fail, to imagine receiving such a convoluted letter, from a person I admired but didn’t love, in the romantic sense. What would a bonobo do? No, that’s not a joke question – I mean of course, what would a ‘bonobo-ised’ human do? I think he would offer comfort, hugs and kisses, but not eternal, undivided devotion. That may not seem enough, but then a bonobo-ised Julie de Lespinasse wouldn’t be placing all her hopes in one individual – especially not a male. 

So I may or may not continue reading these letters, and reflecting on what they reveal about human need and pain in an individual surrounded, it seems, by gifted admirers. Sad but uplifting too. It’s a privilege to ride along with someone who feels so much. 

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Éléonore_de_Lespinasse

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c005633001&seq=65