Free How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yalom Page A

intentions, she is unable to hide the pleasurable stirrings she feels in the duke’s presence. “A man less acute than he would perhaps not have noticed them; but so many women had already been in love with him that he could hardly fail to recognize the symptoms.” Emboldened by this knowledge, the duke commits a shameless act: he steals a miniature portrait of the princess while they are both in the room of the Queen Dauphine. Even though the princess sees the theft, she cannot bring herself to denounce him or ask that he return the portrait.
    At this point, the duke revels in the belief that he is “making her love him despite herself.” When the theft is discovered, Monsieur de Clèves is pained by its disappearance and says, in jest, that his wife must have given it to a lover. The princess is filled with remorse, yet unable to quell the storm of emotions raging inside her. So the trio of husband, wife, and would-be lover continue their dance of deception and hurtle toward an inevitable confrontation.
    From scene to scene, the princess descends the slope toward “the miseries of a love affair” against which her mother had assiduously warned her. She even discovers the torments of jealousy resulting from a far-fetched subplot: a letter from her uncle’s mistress falls into her hands, and she mistakenly believes that it is addressed to the Duc de Nemours. Once she learns the truth, she is relieved of her jealousy, but the hurt still lingers and opens her eyes to questions she has not been willing to face before. She asks herself bluntly: “Am I ready to embark on a love affair? to be unfaithful to M. de Clèves? to be unfaithful to myself?” At this point, she is still able to answer no.
    The plot becomes increasingly convoluted when the princess again retreats to the Clèves country home in a further effort to distance herself from her potential lover. And it is here that the most famous—and most incredible—scene of the book takes place. She confesses to Monsieur de Clèves that she loves someone else, a confession so remarkable that when the novel was published, the popular magazine, Le Mercure Galant , asked its readers this question: “Should wives confess to their husbands their passion for other men?” And if the confession wasn’t difficult enough for a reader to swallow, the author would have us believe that the conversation between husband and wife is overheard by none other than the duke, silently hidden in the garden pavilion where the prince and princess are sitting. Do we believe? Judge for yourself when you read the book.
    The Prince de Clèves is devastated. He asks his wife to try to resist her inclination, not only as her husband “but as a man whose happiness depends on you and who loves you more passionately, more tenderly, more violently than the man your heart prefers.” The prince is a very decent man, a nobleman in every sense of the word, the very antithesis of a laughingstock cuckold. He clearly deserves to be loved, but in this story, that is not to be. Instead, aroused by further suspicions, he falls into despair and, “unable to resist the crushing sorrow” that overcomes him, he is struck down by a violent fever. As he sinks toward death, the prince musters his strength one last time to express his love and his fears for his wife. His death will turn out to be another sacrifice, like that of her mother, on behalf of the princess’s character development.
    For it is her story that gives the novel its title, and it is her story that grips us to the end. Now that she is free to follow her heart and marry the Duc de Nemours, she chooses another path. Despite the duke’s continued attentions and her own rekindled passion at his sight, the princess turns down his offer of marriage. Why? The obvious answer is that she is filled with too much remorse at the thought of her husband’s death, which she attributes directly to the duke’s behavior and her own. The duke’s attempt to