Free How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yalom Page B

discount her rejection of him as a “phantom of duty” does not work. She is adamant, and not only because she is consumed with guilt for the past. Another, deeper reason lies in her fears for the future with a husband such as Nemours. She presents this reason lucidly and eloquently in their spellbinding last meeting. Let us listen.
        What I fear is the certainty that one day the love you feel for me now will die. . . . How long does men’s passion last when the bond is eternal? . . . it seems to me, indeed, that your constancy has been sustained by the obstacles it has encountered. There were enough of them to arouse in you the desire for victory. . . .
            I confess . . . that my passions may govern me, but they cannot blind me. . . . You have already had a number of passionate attachments; you would have others. I should no longer be able to make you happy; I should see you behaving towards another woman as you had behaved towards me. I should be mortally wounded at the sight. . . . A woman may reproach a lover, but can she reproach a husband who has merely stopped loving her? . . .
        I intend to remove myself from your sight, however violent the pain of separation. I implore you, by all the power I have over you, not to seek any opportunity to see me.
    This long monologue plumbs the soul of an extraordinary lady, who has grown into her nobility through the course of two years and 150 pages. She has evolved from a naïve teenager into a mature woman who has learned from her own experience, including the experience of being in love. For how could she judge love’s true worth without having undergone its delights and its torments? Anyone who has ever fallen in love, who has fantasized a meeting with a lover, who has woken up with the enhanced pleasure of knowing she will see him, who has put on a flattering dress and more makeup than usual—that person knows there is little in life so intense as being in love. Madame de Clèves knows all this and yet renounces a future with the man she loves.
    Whether we agree with her decision or not, one thing is clear: henceforth love will have to bear the burden of trenchant psychological scrutiny. Henceforth love will be accompanied by a certain skepticism. Can it last? Is it worth it? Are men congenitally inconstant?
    With La Princesse de Clèves , the medieval tradition of courtly love collides with seventeenth-century skepticism. Descartes and La Rochefoucauld, following on the heels of Montaigne, question the reliability of our most cherished beliefs. They bring critical thinking into the realm of human relationships, religion, philosophy, and what we now call psychology. Madame de La Fayette does not deny the power of love. She masterfully describes it, even inflates it, then analyzes and deflates it. She would have heard from her friend La Rochefoucauld some of his caustic maxims that warn against the folly of love: “All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.” “The mind is always the dupe of the heart.” “True love is like seeing ghosts: we all talk about it, but few of us have ever seen one.”
    Perhaps the Princess de Clèves had another quote attributed to La Rochefoucauld in mind when she mustered the strength to refuse the Duc de Nemours: “Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.” Observing the fate of other women at court—wives and mistresses, women who had been loved, betrayed, and abandoned—she did not want to end up like them. She chose caution and renunciation over the hope of enduring love. We have come a long way from the reciprocal passion of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere. Madame de La Fayette and many of her contemporaries regarded passion as a recipe for disaster.
    La Princesse de Clèves marks a notable shift in the French erotic saga. While romantic love will return in various