a bonobo humanity?

Thanks, Lucinda!

I don’t know if I’m a Francophile, but my first experience of any foreign language was when my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me, started teaching me French from his high school textbook before lights out, when I was about ten. I went on to do French at high school for three years, topping the class each year, which wasn’t hard. I left school at fifteen, but eventually went to university in my thirtieth year, and completed a 3-year arts degree majoring in French, I’ve no idea why. I did about half of an honours year, then dropped out due to poverty, and a realisation that my French writing was pretty shite. And that, the way things were going, I’d never get to France.

Since then I’ve managed to spend some eight days wandering cluelessly around Paris, which was great fun. And of course I’ve read a lot of French literature, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and such serious stuff as Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir and Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, although my favourite French writer has long been Stendhal, who basically turned his back on France and all things French, preferring the more demonstrative Italians – interestingly, as he seems to  have been the most sexually repressed of characters, though the most obviously feminist. 

A shame, for Stendhal might have been brought out of his shell by the salon society that was coming to an end by his time – the post-Napoleonic era. I’m reading a lovely little book, True Pleasures: a memoir of women in Paris, by an Australian, Lucinda Holdforth, who brings to life the salonistes and salon-creators of that city, and their admirers, from Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th century, to Nancy Mitford and Gertrude Stein in the 20th. It rather painfully reminds me of my solitary wanderings on the Rive Gauche and through the Marais during that week in 2016, hoping to find something associated with my very dissociated French readings. Will I ever get back there? Not likely.

So now, towards the end of Holdforth’s book, I’m reading about Germaine de Staël and her contretemps with Napoleon. I knew of her, of course, mainly through my reading of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and my researches around that work, but I wasn’t quite aware of just how viciously Bonaparte had treated her. She wrote at least two novels, Delphine and Corrine, and various political and literary tracts, none of which I’ve paid the slightest attention to. In fact many of these female salon-holders were quite voluminous writers, and I’ve read none of them. I’ll try to make up for it, maybe after I’ve found out what’s going on with that possibly non-existent dark energy. 

All of this makes me wonder about my take, as a man (of some kind), on female intellectualism and aesthetics through the ages, especially the last few centuries. When I was a teenager, still living in Elizabeth, I read some modern (at the time) feminist literature, including Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch, Eva Figues’ Patriarchal Attitudes and Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique (all of these were just books around the house, thanks to my mother and elder sister), but I can’t remember much about those readings, or whether I even finished any of them, except that I’m sure I patted myself heavily on the back for being so enlightened. Since those days I’ve come to realise just how difficult it is to get out from under the worldwide control of patriarchy, in spite of having encountered many powerful women in my life, for better and worse. And I’ve tried to imagine what a ‘world turned upside down’ would look like, hence my interest in bonobos, so vastly different from us, and yet so strangely inspiring. And my interest in women of intellect, trapped in a world which has deprived them of political power. At least in a direct sense, but they have exerted insidious influences. So here’s a potted account of some of those influential women – and I’m limiting myself to the French influencers, though not all were French by birth. 

Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665): Born in Rome, daughter of a couple of nobles (the male being a marquis, whatever that is) and married at 12 to the future marquis de Rambouillet, with whom she had seven children. They lived in Paris but she was unimpressed with court life and by 1620 she had gathered a circle of intellectual/influential friends at Hôtel Pisani, later renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, the  first recognised salon, in which ‘the fine art of conversation’ was overtly cultivated. The list of visitors and habitués is long, but some of those recognised by me are the tragedian Pierre Corneille, Madame de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Cleves, the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, letter-writer extraordinaire. So Madame de Rambouillet might be called, very simplistically, the inventor of the salon. 

Ninon de L’Enclos (1620-1705): Paris born, and perhaps the most interesting of them all, as there’s no obvious sign of the aristocracy in her background, though her father was an established musician and composer who taught her to sing and play. The family was exiled from the city due her father’s duelling habits, and Ninon was forced into a convent when her mother died in 1642, but it didn’t last long, and ‘for the remainder of her life she was determined to remain unmarried and independent’. She returned to Paris, becoming a frequenter of salons, and a courtesan (lovely word), soon establishing her own ‘court’. She was a friend and patron of the young Molière. As you can see, she lived a long and fruitful life, and among her lovers was Louis II de Bourbon, aka Le Grand Condé (one of France’s greatest generals), and La Rochefoucauld of Maxims fame. Her associates included the young Saint-Simon, one of France’s most influential writers, and fascinatingly, ‘when she died she left money for the son of her notary, a nine-year-old named François-Marie Arouet, later to become known as Voltaire, so he could buy books’. But of course, being a known courtesan had its down sides, what with patriarchy and all. In 1656 she was imprisoned (in a convent) at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen consort (and mother of Louis XIV), but was soon rescued by another, rather more interesting queen, Christina of Sweden, who interceded on her behalf through the formidable Cardinal Mazarin. She was also a noted author, writing in particular about morality without religion, and was a friend to intellectuals such as Jean Racine, and powerful women such as Mme de Maintenon, second wife to Louis XIV. Immanuel Kant and Saint-Simon wrote approvingly of her (and Saint-Simon rarely wrote approvingly of anyone else), and – well, that’s enough. 

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1696-1780): Convent-educated in Paris, and unhappily married for a time to another of those marquis blokes, generally known as Mme du Deffand, an intellectual  and skeptic, close friend of Voltaire, she established an aristocratic salon in the 1730s which attracted Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Fontenelle and Mme de Staal-Delaunay as well as Voltaire. She had become completely blind by 1754, at which time she received help from Mlle de Lespinasse (see later entry) in organising the entertainment, but they fell out due to the latter’s wit and other attractions, apparently, so Mlle de Lespinasse established another salon which drew away many of the intellectuals. In her later years she established a close relationship with the British politician and indefatigable letter-writer Horace Walpole. 

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721 -64): Although not born into the aristocracy, and possibly ‘illegitimate’ (though she had many scandal-mongering enemies due to later becoming the mistress of Louis XV), Mme de Pompadour was renowned for her beauty, as well as her personal charm. From Wikipedia:

When she was married aged 20, she was already somewhat famous throughout the salons of Paris for her beauty, intelligence, and abundance of charm. Her husband, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, though initially displeased with their marriage arrangement, was said to have fallen in love with Mme Pompadour swiftly. 

Let’s face it, it helps to be good-looking, even for a bloke. Her marriage produced two children, both of whom died young, sigh, but it also enabled her to attend salons, where she encountered Montesquieu, Duclos, Helvetius, Fontenelle and Voltaire, among others. Her reputation soon became known to the King, and so ended her marriage, and, presumably, her participation in salons. In latter years, her reputation as a generally civilising and humanising influence on the court has definitely increased. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 42. 

Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-76): An ‘illegitimate’ child of wealthy types, it was, much later, discovered that Mme de Lespinasse was the daughter of Mme du Deffand’s brother. Unhappy and neglected in childhood, she received an indifferent convent education and was largely self-taught, comme moi. Her success in that endeavour has been attested to by the many intellectuals with whom she conversed. Mme du Deffand, acting as a patron of sorts, brought her to Paris, where she quickly gained such a reputation in her aunt’s salon that a dispute arose between the two, with Mme de Lespinasse emerging as the intellectuals’ favourite. She started her own salon, which became a meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie, particularly Diderot and D’Alembert. D’Alembert moved in with her, though the relationship was platonic, apparently (check that with Plato). As to her intellectual bonafides, they were later proven to the world by the publication of her letters in 1809, long after her early death, possibly from tuberculosis, but exacerbated by depression and opium dependence. These letters, largely about her relations with men, have been favourably compared, by Sainte-Beuve among others, with Heloise (the 12th century French philosopher and nun – and suggested reading for me), and later romantics such as Rousseau and L’Abbé Prevost. A sad ending, but at least she didn’t live to face the Reign of Terror…

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817): aka Germaine de Staël, who should be better known than her nemesis, wee nappy bonaparte. Mme de Staël was another saloniste who was an important writer in the romantic tradition, though today her critical and historical writings are more valued. Her mother, Suzanne Churchod, was also a saloniste and writer, and her father, Jacques Necker, was France’s controversial finance minister under Louis XVI. As aforementioned, I knew of her through Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but I wasn’t sufficiently aware of her prominence. Always a political moderate, she went into exile during the Reign of Terror (1792-4) and was later forced into exile by wee nappy. Her marriage, at 19, to a Baron Staël von Holstein, was apparently a matter of convenience, though they tolerated each other. No doubt due to the position of her father amid the political turbulence of 18th century France, Mme de Staël wrote reflections on political theory, while wisely avoiding direct political involvement. Nevertheless, as political division and violence mounted, she was forced to flee the city. She eventually reached England, where she was unimpressed by the general voicelessness of women. She returned to Switzerland in 1793, and published a defence of Marie Antoinette, who was on trial at the time. Like Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (and guillotined for her moderation), Mme de Staël was an advocate of constitutional monarchy. It was at this time that Benjamin Constant became her lover. She returned with him to Paris in 1795, where her salon gained fame and notoriety. The rise of wee nappy, however, with his more or less fake, self-boosting misogyny, spelt big trouble for both Constant and de Staël, and – well the rest is history, and I’ve gone on too long.

I’ve described only a few interesting women of the place and period – other salonistes worth exploring are Juliette Récamier, Mme de Choiseul, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet, to name a few. Vive les salons! Je veux en être un!

References 

Lucinda Holdforth, True Pleasures: A memoir of women in Paris, 2004

Just about all the info on the above-mentioned women comes from their Wikipedia biographies.