The Queen's Necklace (20 page)

While French literature was moving into decline at home, the cult of French wit was reaching its zenith abroad. Count Haga was not an isolated phenomenon—the whole of Europe was just a larger version of him. To be a cultured person was to be like the French. Their language was as much a world language as Latin had once been. The Berlin Academy launched a competition under the heading “The Universality of the French Language”. It was won by the youthful, mad and faux-mad (for so he proclaimed himself) ‘Count’ Rivarol. The motto of his winning entry was:
Tu regere eloquio populus, o Galle, memento
—Remember, Gaul, that your calling is to rule all Europe by your eloquence.

But at the same time, given its sense of growing internal weakness, and the increasingly ossified nature of its classicism, the country was more receptive to literature from abroad than it had ever been before or has been since. In particular, there was an outpouring across the Channel of English pre-romantic cloud, storm and blackest night. The plaintive, sepulchral tone came strongly into fashion in France. Young’s tearful dirges,
and the gently mournful departing souls of Ossian, haunted everyone. The Comédie Italienne staged a play called
Le public vengé
, in which the allegoric figure of the National Genius laments:

“Since I was exiled, I have travelled in many lands; there is not one country that does not love my style; everywhere I am sought after—but now I am come home, and behold, I find that everything is given a friendly welcome here except me; here I am the only stranger.”

The French had truly broken through the Chinese wall of the neo-classical past, and made the foreign Muses welcome—but those Muses paid a high price in return. They were required to dress up in the formal garb of the French Court.

Bienséance
, the rules of decorum instilled by the ‘Great’ seventeenth century, still held sway, sacrosanct and not to be transgressed. The idea that lay behind them, and the myriad ways in which it was expressed, harmless enough as they might seem to a foreigner, continued to weigh on the delicate sensibility of the French.

Just what this
bienséance
entailed is shown in this graphic example from Taine. A young noblewoman, having arranged a pension for her tutor, the famous dancing master Marcel, ran to him in delight to show him the document. He dashed it to the floor and cried:

“Mademoiselle, is that what you learnt from me? To proffer a mere object in such a way?”

In literature,
bienséance
required a strict avoidance of words not current in aristocratic society, thus excluding all scholarly and other specialist terms, as well as diction favoured by the hoi-polloi and the more effusive poets, and, to maintain a lordly generality, nothing was to be described in excessive detail.

Hence Voltaire decided that, for the famous extended simile from the
Song of Songs
: “His eyes are like doves beside springs of water, bathed in milk”, the correspondingly
bienséant
version would read: “
un feu pur est dans ses yeux
”—a pure flame is in his
eyes. The example shows how bloodless was the poetry that truly conformed to classical taste. Ducis, who adapted Shakespeare’s plays for the French theatre, expunged the fateful handkerchief in
Othello
on the grounds that an object into which,
horribile dictu
, a man blows his nose (the French ‘
mouchoir
’ directly mimics this function), could have no place on the national stage, and Desdemona dropped a bit of ribbon instead—which was considered much more elegant.

Let us stay awhile with Ducis. He led Shakespeare to triumph on the French stage, but what he made of him in the process! The plot of
Hamlet
in his revised version
(‘imitée de l’anglais’)
runs as follows:

Claudius, is no longer the King but merely the
Premier Prince du Sang
(the King’s oldest brother, analogous to the Duc de Provence). He tells his confidant, Polonius, that he wants to step into his late sibling’s shoes, but the widow, Gertrude, will not consent to marry him, however politely he asks. Gertrude tells her confidant, Elvire, that, despite having long had an affair with Claudius, her main reason for refusing to marry him is that he incited her to give the poisoned cup to her husband, and she now feels remorse and fears the terrible revenge of her son Hamlet. So she sends for Hamlet’s confidant, Norceste, to come and cheer the prince up a little.

But this will not be easy. Hamlet is in a really bad mood. When we first encounter him, we only hear his voice behind the stage. Something is happening to him that only Voltaire among French playwrights could permit himself to show directly—he is seeing a ghost.

“Avaunt, hideous spectre,” he calls out from behind a backcloth. “What? Do you not see it? It hovers over my head, it dogs my footsteps—it is killing me.”

The ghost behind the backcloth disappears. Hamlet steps out and tells his confidant Norceste that he is in the difficult situation familiar to heroes of all French classical dramas since Corneille—he is torn between love and duty. On the one hand,
there is his filial duty to kill the wicked Claudius; on the other, he loves Claudius’ daughter Ophelia, who would take it rather badly if he butchered her father.

Earlier, Claudius has explained the cunning political manoeuvres which have won him prestige and the approval of the people; now he informs us that, as a lunatic, Hamlet could forfeit his claim to the throne. Ophelia tells Hamlet that the time has come for him to make her truly his wife, something not previously possible since his father had forbidden it. Hamlet’s reply is initially evasive, but he eventually tells her that he cannot marry her because he has to kill her father. Ophelia is not pleased to learn that his passion for revenge is stronger than his love for her. She really had not expected that, and she rebukes him in the following terms:

Thus the full formula of classical French drama is set in motion: on the one hand Hamlet’s struggle between love and duty, and on the other, the identical conflict inside Ophelia. Now indeed the shades of Corneille could come to terms with the fact that Shakespeare was being performed on the French stage.

Next, Hamlet produces the urn containing his father’s ashes, whereupon his mother confesses all (this is all that is left of their great scene). But, rather than kill her, Hamlet sends her away, since “In my present mood I am capable of anything”. Claudius bursts into the palace with his followers, but Hamlet stabs him
with a dagger, and Gertrude kills herself, whereupon Hamlet remarks that she “was a human being, and she was royal”, and tells us he has to live on in the interests of the people, however difficult things might prove.

Since he was four years old—whether you believe this or not, dear reader—the present writer’s single greatest interest has been in history. And yet I have always deeply distrusted the subject as a scholarly discipline. If we could travel in time as we do in space, we would surely have some devilish surprises. When you arrive in a new country for the first time there is usually one outstanding feature that really strikes you, which no one has ever told you about—in France, for example, on every wall you see written in large letters the words ‘
Défense d’ uriner
’, followed by the precise date on which the relevant law was promulgated. Surely the same sort of thing would apply if we were to return to the past. And if we did find ourselves back in 1784, perhaps the greatest surprise of all would be that everyone spoke with a lisp. Of course we would not dare assert this as a fact, having no other evidence than a note to the effect by Mercier, who remarks that sooner or later even stage actors will be starting to affect the mannerism in order to please their audiences. So it is at least a possibility, along with a thousand other oddities which contemporaries never mention since they found them entirely natural.

This matter of lisping makes me think that perhaps the biggest of all surprises awaiting our traveller to 1784 would be the phenomena associated with the cult of sensibility—the sentimental emotionalism one sees paraded, for example, in a painting of a pretty lace-maker, with its ostentatious display of good-heartedness and generosity towards the subject, expressed through the colours used for her physical form, her dress and facial expression. A brief glance at some of the pictures of the period will make this immediately clear.

The work of Greuz is not now thought of as being of the first rank. But he was the most popular painter of his time, and even the Academy deferred to this general opinion against their own better judgement. There is just one emotion conjured up in his well-known paintings: this same fashionable good-heartedness. It is not the good-heartedness we find in real life, but in the theatre; and behind it lurks a deep sensuality. To quote the Goncourts’ comparison, Greuze portrays his innocent maidens as one might parade a fresh young whore before an old man hoping for rejuvenation.

But the engravings are even more typical. I have two examples before me. One is entitled
The Abolition of Serfdom
, done by Née in 1786. In it, an obvious landowner, his arms held out in a gesture of giving, is hurrying out of the pillared entrance to his mansion towards the distant crowd standing below, whose predominant figure is a man, clearly a peasant, making the same open-handed gesture to the master—not as an offer to take his hand, but to indicate deep gratitude, and to embrace not him (that would be going too far) but the figure of Goodness hovering nearby. His face is ecstatic, raised upwards with a gentle happiness, while the arms of the women kneeling around are held aloft in corresponding gestures. The landlord too is accompanied by a train of followers (in those days no one ever went about alone)—an audience who contemplate the edifying scene with sweet emotion.

The title of the second picture is rather difficult to translate:
L’agriculture considerée
—perhaps The Two Sides of Agriculture? It depicts an interior, with a bowl of sugar placed on a table. Once again the landlord greets the simple land-worker with a proffered embrace that seems like an allegorical gesture, while the labourer, who, unlike him, has no wig, makes the same gesture of the hands towards him. The audience here can be found sitting around the table: two ladies wearing enormous hats, and two men in wigs, with somewhat impassive faces—the same figures and gestures of the arms, sentimental and awkward,
embracing and not embracing, expressing some mysterious, undefined but overwhelming love. We can be confident that gestures such as these would present themselves on every side to the occupant of our time machine.

The wave of sentimental passion for nature promoted by Rousseau sought out everything that was moving, good and profoundly human in nature. The nobility built themselves village-style houses—
ermitages
—to escape from the noise and bustle of the world, shedding the burdens of convention to spend their time in proximity to solid, upright village folk. We have already seen Marie-Antoinette’s little
hameau
. Such cottages were also a response to the mood of the times. In 1782 Grimm noted the same topics recurring, with titles such as
The Land, Gardens, The French Georgics, Nature, Fields
, and, once again, Nature. Among the most popular of these poems is the piece by the Abbé Delille on gardens. In it he speaks with scorn of the coldly geometric gardens of the previous age, which were so barely ‘natural’:

Delille goes on to state what it is that he and his contemporaries look for in a garden, and in nature—the human heart.