The Queen's Necklace

Intermezzo. Figaro and Count Haga

THE READER who is interested only in the story of the necklace can confidently skip this chapter.

The Queen could never for a moment have imagined that a phantom figure dressed as herself would lure the dream-locked Cardinal to the edge of the tragic whirlpool. She went about her royal life totally unsuspecting, and in the summer of 1784 received a visit from, among others, King Gustav III of Sweden, who was travelling around Europe under the name of Count Haga.

Ever since she had met Axel Fersen, Marie-Antoinette had loved everything to do with Sweden. Or perhaps her love of the Swedes might be traced to an even earlier date — even before Fersen’s time she had had a Swedish protégé, Count Stedingk. However her initial feelings towards Gustav III were more likely to have been hostile. She had met him while she was still the Dauphine, when Gustav, as heir to the throne, was spending time at the French Court. But he had thought it wiser to bid for the favour of Mme du Barry and to ignore the young and powerless Princess — an error that, as we know, she and her normally indulgent husband found hard to forgive.

But since then, much had changed. News of his father’s death had summoned Gustav back to Stockholm. Before leaving he obtained full French support for the strange course of action he was planning. As is well known, Sweden in the eighteenth century was ruled by an anarchic oligarchy, just as Poland had been before its collapse. The King wielded rather less power than the prime minister of a republic: he voted in the state assembly like any other noble, his privileges amounting to no more than that his vote counted twice. The two factions in the assembly, the Hats and the Caps, were at loggerheads. Between them they were unable to agree on the crucial question of who they should sell the country to, the French, as the Hats wanted, or the Russians, favoured by the Caps. This constitutional anarchy was pushing the country, sooner or later, towards domination by the Tsars, just as had happened to Poland. Both Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great were counting on it.

But France, as Sweden’s traditional ally, was not content simply to watch this resurgence of the eastern powers. So Choiseul and Vergennes, the former ambassador to Stockholm who later became Louis XVI’s Foreign Minister, encouraged the returning Prince to make a stand. Gustav was made of considerably sterner stuff than his predecessors — he was in fact a nephew of Frederick the Great on his mother’s side. And he had the same love of light, and the civilised life — literature, the theatre and public pomp — as any French grand seigneur of the time. Ever since the Thirty Years War the Swedish nobility had received an annual subsidy from the French Court, but oligarchical rule meant in practice that this money no longer went into the pockets of the King but was shared among leading members of the nobility. Gustav proposed putting an end to this arrangement and reverting to the historic precedent whereby all the money from France came to the monarch. He received a promise from the French court that if he could put an end to the anarchy, one-and-a-half million livres would be placed in his hand.

For that happy result he had above all to thank one of the strangest episodes of the eighteenth century, the Swedish revolution of 1772. The revolution was unusual in that in this case it was the King who rebelled against his tyrannical subjects. Every detail of this revolt should be taught in that non-existent school in which ambitious young people are instructed in the art of politics. If we read the book by Jacques Le Scène Desmaisons that appeared in 1781 (and ended up in the bequest of the Palatine Joseph in the University Library in Budapest) we can see the extent to which the King planned and prepared every detail, in the manner of a great — and flamboyant — theatre director.

First, he allowed the Hats and Caps to quarrel for a full year over the drafting of an oath to the King, that is to say, over the best method for tying his power up in knots. Then, when the two parties duly came to heel, he secretly obstructed the distribution of grain, so that the people would go hungry and become dissatisfied. Next, he provoked a small local uprising so that his brother could raise an armed force ostensibly to put this ‘rebellion’ down. While the government was distracted by this supposed uprising, the real revolution took place miles away, on two fronts. Then he locked all the younger officers up in the palace and would not let them go until he had won them over to his cause.

Throughout all this he gave proof of his remarkable theatrical talent; to the very end he misled everyone around him as regards his intentions, and even allowed the Russian ambassador to think that he was preparing to pay his respects to the Tsarina in the near future. When it came to the final moment, he arrested his senators, occupied all the major strategic locations and toured the capital giving speeches. Everywhere he went the people saluted him as the man who had freed them from the tyranny of the nobles. “This was the king,” says Desmaisons, “who had woken that morning as Europe’s most politically hamstrung ruler, and within two hours had become a monarch as absolute as the Prussian King in Berlin or the Sultan in Constantinople.”

Next, having summoned the Diet, he set up a row of cannons outside the Palace and asked the members of the assembly whether anyone objected to what had taken place. Unsurprisingly, no one did, and the constitution was unanimously amended to ensure that every royal prerogative was returned to the Crown.

All this was done while punctiliously observing the niceties of eighteenth-century decorum. The King personally wrote to the wives and children of the detained senators asking their pardon for having unavoidably kept them as his guests for the duration. At the first opportunity the Diet, now sitting without benefit of cannons, expressed their courteous thanks to the King for depriving the nobility of their excessive privileges and restoring order to Sweden, and ordered a medal to be struck to commemorate the great event.

Considering how little the Swedish Revolution has to do with the story of the Queen’s necklace, we have dwelt on it at perhaps inordinate length. We do so partly because we think it an interesting chapter in European history and one that is far too little known, and, more importantly, because it reveals a course of action that arguably was also open to the French monarch. Here was an eighteenth century Swedish King accomplishing with elegance and humanity what, in the late middle ages, Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England had managed with altogether cruder instruments — reinforcing their own power by forging a bond with the people against the ranks of birth and privilege. The idea that something similar might be repeated in these later times entered the head of only one great statesman of the Ancien Régime, Turgot. He alone saw that the royal power should carry out the much-needed reforms itself, in the interests of the people and at the expense of the aristocracy, and that that was probably the only way in which they might have survived, sparing France the Revolution. But Louis XVI was not Gustav III, and Turgot, a proud man and a complete stranger to compromise and strategy, was easily seen off by the intrigues of the Court.

In Sweden, Gustav represented an enlightened absolutism. He did his best to compensate his people for the loss of freedom by improving their welfare, allowing free trade in grain and total freedom of worship (a purely hypothetical freedom in a country with only one denomination), and amending the Poor Law.

Like Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and many other rulers of the eighteenth century, Gustav considered himself to be French in mind and spirit. He promoted a French-style literary life in Stockholm, and himself wrote plays which Swedish literary historians continue to mention with great respect. But this domestic literary life simply intensified his interest in the Paris equivalent, and was one of the reasons why he yearned for France. The other was that in the end, in the usual melancholy way of these things, the long-awaited golden age never quite materialised under his rule, and Gustav had to look for other sources of revenue. He deliberated whether to sell himself to Russia or to turn again to France. Unable to decide between the two, he eventually travelled to Italy. He shared the late-eighteenth-century passion for relics of classical antiquity, and bought a vast collection of art works to be sent home to adorn the park of the palace he was building at Lille-Haga (Count Haga was the name he used when travelling incognito). The Italians cannot have been too greatly pleased by his standards of generosity, since they composed this epigram about him:

il Conte de Haga

che molto vede e poco paga

Count Haga,

who looks at everything and pays almost nothing.

While thus engaged he received an invitation from the French royal couple. Marie-Antoinette wrote to him personally to say that if he found himself in the vicinity he should look up his old acquaintances at Versailles. The French Court understood the great struggle going on in his mind, and were prepared to make real sacrifices to rescue him from an alliance with Russia.

To avoid unnecessary suspense we can reveal that Count Haga’s visit was a complete success. Versailles promised him a substantial subsidy of 1,200,000 livres for six years, in addition to the existing generous support. Of course, payment of the full sum was prevented by subsequent historical events.

But these manoeuvres were not the only reason why Gustav visited Paris. Amongst other things, he was curious about the lady who was so much talked about. His Paris correspondents and diplomats faithfully reported all the current gossip surrounding the Queen, rather like events in a theatre, and these stories interested Gustav not only for political reasons but for personal ones. Like almost every other ruling prince of the century, he too had an exemplary bad marriage. He hated his wife, the royal Danish Princess, and refused to live with her. It was only after 11 years, in 1777, that he could bring himself to take the necessary steps in the interests of the succession, and that great event was undertaken as a ceremonial duty for the sake of the country. There was almost as much gossip in circulation about the Swedish Queen as there was about Marie-Antoinette, and so Gustav must have had a certain professional fellow sympathy for the French royal couple.

But as a rule he did not much enjoy contact with monarchs. Though it may seem strange, he had a sense of inferiority when dealing with the rulers of more powerful countries than his own, for which he overcompensated by behaving too familiarly or too uproariously. Thus he turned up at Versailles unannounced, like an old friend dropping in on a neighbour, and caused considerable distress to the pernickety Louis XVI, who was not attired in the manner in which he received foreign princes.

On one occasion, Mme Campan tells us, Gustav called unexpectedly on Marie-Antoinette just before lunchtime. The Queen sent Mme Campan to enquire whether he had sufficiently dined and, if not, to make the necessary arrangements. The Swedish King modestly replied that anything would do. The lady smiled, because she knew that nothing less than a full meal was ever served, and she found a way to point out the gaffe he had committed: she remembered that, in the world she had grown up in, what people did on such occasions was to scramble a few eggs. The Queen later let him know that this had been done as a lesson to him not to be overfamiliar.

Gustav was much happier dealing with people who were charmed by the fact that, although a king, he treated them in such a kind and informal way. This was especially true of writers and artists. Through his respectful yet unmistakably regal correspondence with the Baron Melchior von Grimm we can trace his passage through the intellectual world of Paris, where we find him mixing with the leading wits of the age. This Grimm was a Frenchman of German origin who wrote perceptive and witty letters to foreign rulers describing literary and artistic events in Paris. The letters, written very much in the manner of the period, show an equal fascination with theories of state economics and the epigrams about actresses quoted in the salons. Their lively shrewdness and rococo lightness of touch make them most enjoyable reading.

Above all, Count Haga frequented the theatre. In his honour the Royal Academy of Music staged some eight or ten operas in three weeks, more than they would normally do in two or three years. The Comédie Française obligingly put on every play he asked to see. This began, apparently, when he arrived unannounced at the theatre after the first act of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro had finished. The audience demanded that they begin again in honour of their distinguished guest. “Whatever that truly French, truly generous and perfectly proper act of attention cost the actors,” writes Grimm, “they never performed the piece better or earned greater applause.” The other major theatre, the Comédie Italienne (which was Italian only in name, since by then its last remaining Italian actor, the great clown Carlin, was dead) put on Le dormeur éveillé in his honour, with music by Piccini and libretto by Marmontel, whom Gustav had greatly admired since his youth.

Amongst the most celebrated people in Paris at the time were the Vestris family, famous opera dancers. Count Haga was naturally very curious about them, and when he paid his final visit to the Opera before his departure, Marie-Antoinette sent word on three separate occasions requiring the younger Vestris to appear without fail. But he had returned from a guest appearance in London “with an injured foot”, and the doctors “had forbidden him to appear”. “It could be that this reply pushed the degree of stupidity or impertinence beyond what was permitted to a dancer,” says Grimm. It was enough to persuade the Interior Minister Baron Breteuil to lock the young man up, and, in the heat of revolutionary fever, all Paris took sides for or against him. The older Vestris, the leader of the troop, observed with tears in his eyes:

“Helás! this is the first disagreement our house has ever had with the Bourbon family.”

(No less pleasing is what Vestris said when he heard that his son had incurred a debt: “Auguste! I want no Rohan-Guéménées in my family!”)

Naturally Count Haga, like the whole of Europe and especially the French, was greatly intrigued by the ‘Aerostatics’, or aeronautical experiments, of the brothers Montgolfier and their followers. The Montgolfiers, as is well known, had realised that warm air rises more readily than cold, so that if we take a strong balloon and fill it with hot air it will rise into the sky. Later they attached a basket underneath the balloon and flew in it. The notion of people flying drove the entire nation into ecstasies of amazement, and the general miracle-hungry mood of the times produced the suitably fairytale name for this—‘the conquest of the air’—to the great amusement of those of a more sober disposition.

The strange thing is, how many of those charming fairytales have since come true. For example, Grimm made great fun of the coffee house politicians who had already started to calculate how much more it would cost the state if they had to maintain a fleet of these machines. The time would come, joked Grimm, when people could fly off to China in the evening and be back the next morning. The King’s high-spirited younger brother the Comte de Provence composed an epigram on the subject:

Les Anglais, nation trop fière,

S’arrogent l’empire des mers—

Les Français, nation légère,

S’emparent de celui des airs.

The proud English claim empire over the seas — the French, in their levity, do the same for the skies.

Before the Montgolfiers, a canon named Desforges had designed a gondola fitted out with wings, in which he sat and threw himself off a height, in the hope that it would swim through the air. Apart from some minor damage, no harm was done, but he was very thoroughly bruised.

An almost equal degree of interest was provoked by our own countryman Farkas Kempelen, with his famous chess-playing automaton. In September 1783 Grimm quotes from a book which described the device in detail. The machinery consisted of two parts: a low chest of drawers covered by a chessboard, and the figure of a Turk with a pipe in his mouth, who lifted the pieces and set them up in their correct positions. There was no question of trickery: both the cupboard and the pipe-smoking Turk could be opened up to show the wheels and springs inside, so there was no one hiding there: after a few moves the Turk had to be wound up again. Nowadays it is impossible to believe that it was making the moves by its own volition and playing to win; that in some automatic way it was calculating the moves for itself. No, it was being operated by Kempelen, standing there just a short distance away but too far to be able actually to touch it. In his hand he held a strange device with which he was obviously manoeuvring it from where he stood, but he refused to reveal the secret to anyone.

There were other, more comical, inventions. A watchmaker, for example, caused a great sensation when he conceived the ‘flexible wooden shoe’, with the aid of which you could walk on water. At first people thought it was a fraud, but when they looked into it, it proved to be nothing of the sort — but nor was it very interesting. The worthy inventor had designed two little rafts, one for the left foot and the other for the right, and that was how you could travel on water. The people of Paris had expected more. It was a time when anything was thought probable. In London, for example, a vast crowd gathered when someone announced that he was going to squeeze himself into an empty wine bottle — and when he declined to do so on the pretext of a temporary indisposition, they smashed up the whole area around the theatre.

During his stay in Paris, Count Haga became involved in a purely private matter, which neither he nor any of the others involved suspected for a moment would feature in world history. This was the marriage of Baron Staël, Secretary to the Swedish legation.

The young Erik Magnus Staël-Holstein was not distinguished for any particular talent, but his good manners and sympathetic exterior had charmed the ladies at the Paris Court, and had even earned the goodwill of Marie-Antoinette, who was already well-disposed towards Swedes. Whatever she and her little circle, in their sophisticated flippancy, thought of the institution of marriage, they enjoyed matchmaking every bit as much as the women of the bourgeoisie, and were therefore much exercised by the question of who should marry the young Germaine Necker, daughter of the great banker and Finance Minister and one of the wealthiest heiresses in France. Since her family were Protestant, the French aristocracy were out of the running, so the plan was that she would be paired off with the handsome Count Alex Fersen. Although his father, one of the leaders of the Hats in Sweden, was extremely keen on the idea, Fersen himself gave it a very cool reception, and Marie-Antoinette felt somehow unable to press him with the required conviction. Nonetheless she stuck with the Swedes, and suggested the girl marry Baron Staël-Holstein instead.

The idea of giving his daughter away to a Scandinavian Baron pleased Necker, who was infinitely vain and a parvenu, but he was unimpressed by Staël-Holstein’s position and made it a condition of his consent that the young man should be made Ambassador. Marie-Antoinette asked Gustav to nominate him to replace Creutz, who had gone back home to become Chancellor, but the King, knowing Staël-Holstein’s lack of substance, dragged his heels for a considerable time.

The question was clearly much discussed at the garden festivity at the Le Petit Trianon. In due course Gustav did promote Staël, and in 1786 he married Germaine Necker. The marriage was not a particularly successful one: the feckless Baron cost his father-in-law and his wife (who became famous as Mme de Staël) a great deal of money. As Marie-Antoinette and Gustav strolled in the grounds of Le Petit Trianon they cannot for a moment have thought that in time the girl would become Napoleon’s feared antagonist, France’s ‘foremost exile’, and one of the best known figures of the romantic age of European literature.

On 5th June 1784 King Gustav attended a meeting of the Académie Française, where he was given an enthusiastic reception and eloquent speeches were read out in his praise. The actual agenda was somewhat less delightful. The new member, M de Montesquieu, eulogised the man he was replacing, Bishop Coetlosquet of Limoges, whose only achievement was to have lived to a ripe old age. Then the Director, M Suard, rose to reply. To inject an element of topicality into the discussion, he gave a spirited defence of the greatest success of the day, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. After that, La Harpe, that arid, sterile critic of his age, read out the second part of his didactic ode on women. According to Grimm, it was received very coldly — if it had to be something instructive, they would much rather have heard the Abbé Delille, La Harpe’s chief opponent in the ferocious row between followers of Gluck and Piccini that caused such dreadful civil war among the Immortals. (This was the war between French and Italian music, in which, for some strange reason, the French was represented by the German-born Gluck, Marie-Antoinette’s former music teacher, who had grown up with Italian music and was a wonderful example of the international spirit of the age. According to Grimm, Gluck was to music what Corneille had been to the theatre, and Piccini was its Racine. Perhaps it might be argued that Piccini was also what Verdi later became, while Gluck was a forerunner of Wagner. For the ‘Italians’, all that mattered in opera was the music, while Gluck wanted to subordinate the music to the drama, or rather, argued that it needed both music and text working together to raise the effect above mediocrity.) Finally, the Duc de Nivernois read out some of his simple and informal fairy stories. When the session was over, the King had a few private words with Suard. Grimm believed he knew what they were discussing: Gustav was telling Suard that he did not agree with him about The Marriage of Figaro, adding that he wanted to see it again.

From this account one might conclude that this was not one of the more interesting sessions of the Academy, but few of the others can have been much better. Some months later, Grimm tells us, a certain M Gaillard so spectacularly bored his audience with a performance so very unworthy of his immortal name that the Academicians met and decided that something needed to be done. At the following session the Abbé Boismont set about lecturing his listeners, whereupon they whistled like an audience in a theatre. From then on, they decided, fewer invitations would be issued, and only to reliable elements.

But the fact that the same sort of audience went to the Academy as did to the theatre shows that the great institution had lost none of its prestige during these years, and was by no means isolated from the literary life of the day. Earlier, in the middle of the century, far from being a conservative, traditionalist body, it had been a meeting place for revolutionary spirits, entirely under the control of the philosophes, the collaborators on the great Encyclopédie, at war with the Church and the Sorbonne. Since all the Encyclopedists were also members of the salons, the world of women followed the Academy’s elections and proceedings with the greatest of interest. It was genuinely part of the monde, of aristocratic society, as were the Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne.

By the end of the century the Academy had lost none of its relevance, but the original group of philosophes were no longer in the vanguard. As with all sects, persecution (imprisonment, the burning of their books and banishment) had simply made them stronger. But although official harassment continued until the end of the century, it had by then become something of a game, final proof of the saying that “the monarchy forbade everything and could prevent nothing”. For example, Brissot would be forewarned by the official responsible that his current pamphlet was to be confiscated; the copies would then be seized and sold on the black market by the same official’s wife. The Abbé Morelle, imprisoned in the Bastille for his writings, was comforted by his supporters with the thought that he should regard it as a welcome form of publicity. Morelle thought so too, and the calculation proved correct. Even the Church could no longer stand up to the philosophes in the decisive way it once had done. Fashionable preachers such as the Academician the Abbé Boismont did not try to refute their teachings — they merely insisted that the God of the Christian religion was rather more likely to inspire benevolent feelings in the human heart than the cold and distant Supreme Being of the philosophes. When the Spanish translation of the Encyclopédie appeared, its first purchaser was Don Bertram, the Archbishop of Salamanca and Head of the Inquisition.

The Marquis de Condorcet, the man chosen to succeed D’Alembert as leader of the philosophes, made his speech of acceptance into the Academy in January 1782. He began: “The eighteenth century has so thoroughly perfected the system of human knowledge that there is no means whereby the new enlightenment could be extinguished, unless some universal catastrophe covered the human race once again in darkness.” The philosophes had won.

But, year by year, the great generation of the French Enlightenment were dying out. Voltaire went in 1778, after his triumphal return to the Paris from which he had been exiled for so many years. Two months later, his great adversary Rousseau died. In 1780 it was Condillac, in 1784 Diderot. In 1783 it was the leader of the philosophes, the director of the Encyclopédie and the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, D’Alembert himself.

It happens very rarely in literary history that one great generation is followed by another. The void left by the death of the great Encyclopedists could not be filled by their heirs. D’Alembert’s successor at the Academy was the hardworking, many-sided and inconsequential Marmontel, the literary populariser of the philosophes’ ideas. Its greatest lyric poet was considered to be the Abbé Delille — perhaps because he behaved as a poet was expected to, was permanently distracted and dreamy and “was forever letting himself go at the feet of some pretty girl”, as we might colloquially but faithfully translate Grimm’s phrase, so expressive as it is of the times. His great rival, as we have mentioned, was the leading critic of the age, La Harpe. La Harpe was a timid conservative who extolled everything from the past and pronounced everything that was antiquated in classical French literature to be ‘correct’. He was an outstanding example of the French literary pedant, a proponent of that schoolmasterly deference to the bookish ‘rules’ that foreigners always find so surprising. La Harpe had been a French tutor to Grand Prince Paul Petrovics, the son of Catherine the Great. When the Grand Prince was in Paris, La Harpe would pay his respects every time the Grand Prince showed an inclination to receive him. Finally La Harpe announced:

“I have discussed the art of ruling with him on two separate occasions, and I can assure you that I found him most satisfactory.” (There were a great many reasons why this could not have been true: Paul I, as he became, was the stupidest and most timid of all the stupid and timid Russian Tsars.)

Although the most severe of critics, La Harpe could not bear to be criticised himself. After the press had savaged his play Les brames, he petitioned the Keeper of the Seal to ban the newspapers from commenting on his new plays before a certain number of performances had taken place, to stop the audiences from staying away — a playwright’s dream that has never yet come to pass.

La Harpe was not a great poet, but he was one of the most representative people of his time. There was only one great poet alive in France in this period, and he was certainly not typical of his age, nor had anyone heard of him. This was André Chénier, who was to die young on the revolutionary scaffold. In Chénier the chrysea phormix Apolonos was heard again: the golden lute of Apollo, the glory of Ancient Greece. The oldest voice is always the newest, and Chénier is much more modern to our ears than any other poet of his century. We feel instantly at home in his verses. They are the lyre that will sound again in the work of Baudelaire and Verlaine. We cannot refrain from quoting a few lines to show how very fine his voice is, and how little dated. The extract is from an allegorical poem about a queen — perhaps he was thinking of Marie-Antoinette, so the passage is not unconnected with our theme:

Sur la frivolité

Mère du vain caprice et du léger prestige,

La Fantasie ailée autour d’elle voltige …

La déesse jamais ne connut d’autre guide.

Les rêves transparents, troupe vaine et fluide,

D’un vol étincelant caressent ses lambris …

La reine, en cette cour, qu’anime la Folie,

Va, vient, chant, se tait, regarde, écoute, oublie.

Et dans mille cristaux, qui portent son palais,

Rit de voir mille fois étinceler ses traits.

Frivolity — mother of shallow Caprice and empty Prestige, with winged Fantasy flitting around her, the only guide this goddess has ever known … In this court, so animated by Folly, transparent dreams, fluid and insubstantial, flicker caressingly over the marble panels as the Queen comes and goes, breaks into song, falls silent, stares, listens, forgets … then, seeing her face reflected a thousand times in the thousand mirrors that hang in the palace, erupts into laughter.

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:

Ah! tu m’as fait frémir. Va, tigre impitoyable,

Conserve, si tu peux ta fureur implacable!

Mon devoir désormais m’est dicté par le tien—

Tu cours venger ton père, et moi, sauver le mien.

Ah! you make me shudder. Go, implacable tiger,

Maintain, if you can, your implacable fury!

My duty henceforth is dictated by yours:

You fly to avenge your father, I to save mine.

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’:

Loin donc ces froids jardins, colifichet champêtre,

Insipides réduits, dont l’insipide maître

Vous vante, en s’admirant, ses arbres bien peignés,

Ses petits salons verts, bien tondés, bien soignés.

Far from these cold gardens, these rustic baubles,

These insipid retreats whose insipid owners

Brag, self-admiringly, of their well-groomed trees,

Their little green salons, so well cared-for and tended.

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

Il est des soins plus doux, un art plus enchanteur,

C’est peu de charmer l’oeil, il faut parler au coeur.

Avez-vous donc connu ces rapports invisibles

Des corps inanimés et des êtres sensibles?

Avez-vous entendu des eaux, des prés, des bois

La muette eloquence et la secrète voix?

There are sweeter cares, a more enchanting art:

To charm the eye is nothing: you must speak to the heart.

Have you ever known the invisible rapport

Between inanimate things and conscious beings?

Have you listened to the wordless eloquence

Of the waters, the fields and the woods?

Bernadin de Saint Pierre, the author of Paul et Virginie, writing in this period found in nature the love of God and a benign and sensitive Providence. In his Études de la nature—Studies of Nature — he asserts that volcanoes exist because if Nature did not locate its great chimneys beside the oceans, then oils and fats from plants and animals would coat the surface of the water; that cows have four udders and only one or perhaps two calves at a time because Providence reserves two of the udders for supplying humans with milk, and that fleas are black so that they will stand out against human skin and thus be easier to pick off.

This sentimentality is simply a loftier, more sublime form of hedonism. People want to take pleasure in the soul, in the human heart, in their own sensitivity and in the fatal présent du ciel—the fateful gift from Heaven. Above all, they want to enjoy the emotions and the sensitivity that their own goodness, or that of others, inspires in them. The War of American Independence, which the French supported, gave rise to a sort of sentimental patriotism — the enthusiasm was intense. They even shed their blood for the fine, upstanding Americans, for Benjamin Franklin, with his great clumsy shoes that stood for everything simple and natural, for the gentle-souled Quakers, and for the brave and open-hearted pioneers of the virgin forests, who were taming the lands so they could be worked by a peace-loving people.

In the theatre, these sensitive hearts, kindly fathers, chaste maidens, heroic fiancés, faithful lovers and steadfast spouses abound, and virtue is everywhere. Actors praise the virtue of princes to storms of applause, and a minute later the princes sitting in their boxes renew the applause when the same actors praise the virtues of the common people. And the newspapers run columns devoted to Traits d’humanité in which heart-warming good deeds are recorded.

Count Haga, whom we have joined on his travels through France, had, as his favourite reading when young, a novel by Marmontel entitled Bélisaire. What was it about, this tale that so captivated the heart of the youthful prince? Belisarius, the Byzantine general, has in his old age been the victim of a court intrigue, has gone into exile, and is now a beggar making his way back to his ancestral mansion. Along the way, he comforts all who take pity on him, explaining that they should not be angry with the King — he certainly feels no anger himself — because he had been misled by others, and besides, being exiled was no great hardship, since what mattered was to have a benevolent heart. No one today would be able to read such a tale of good-heartedness and virtue through to the end, but at the time frivolous and worldly young men were bowled over by it, as must have been the case with Count Haga.

All this virtue and good-heartedness was of course principally to be found on the stage and in books. A great many people found it absurd. Amongst them was a Hungarian contemporary, György Alajos Szerdahely, the Jesuit father and Latin poet. Satirical Verses for our Times is the title of his poem, “which celebrates nothing so much as the love of one’s fellow man”:

Nullum odium, nulla est dissentio, nulla simultas.

Aurea Saturni tempora Phoebe vehis!

Otia securae ducant mollissima Gentes.

Est sincera fides, regnat amicitia.

Estne? vel esse potest, qui non loqueretur Amorem?

Cor riget at sermo totus Amore calet.

No hatred or dissension, no envy or rivalry.

Apollo, you have restored the golden age of Saturn!

Secure nations live in sweet tranquillity.

Faith is sincere, and amity rules.

Is there, could there possibly be, anyone, who does not speak of love?

Their hearts are cold, yet all their talk is aglow with love.

Thus Szerdahely. But we must not be untruthful. The age did love and cultivate charity, and actually practised it. The relevant French word ‘bienfaisance’—doing good — is itself a product of the times. It is significant that in its derivation and morphology it recalls ‘bienséance’, meaning ‘courtesy’. The two concepts were connected at the time. We know how charitable the royal family could be. The Dauphine would jump down from her carriage and rush to the aid of an injured postillion or a peasant who had been wounded by a stag. The King and the Comte d’Artois would help pull a transport wagon out of the mud. In the severe winter of 1784 the royal couple gave enormous sums to the needy from their personal allowances — the King three million livres and the Queen 200,000. Similar deeds were performed by the Court aristocracy.

Mme de Genlis and the Duc de Lauzun, who was notorious for his cynicism, founded the Order of Perséverance—Steadfastness — which soon acquired ninety noble members. To be accepted, one had to solve a riddle, to answer a question on morality and give a talk on one of the virtues. Every knight or lady who uncovered and reported three authenticated acts of virtue received a gold medal. Every knight had a chosen ‘brother in arms’, and every lady a ‘friend of the heart’. And each had their own motto, which hung in the Temple of Honour, at the centre of Lauzun’s park.

It became the fashion for landowners every year to crown a village girl with garlands if she distinguished herself by her innocence and virtue.

And even the Academy, that austere marketplace of cool scholarship and ethereal art, could not stand aloof from charity. “It appears,” says Grimm, “that the example of Christian virtue now has a rival, and Philosophy strives equally to shine in the doing of good deeds, in its charitable institutions and pious foundations.” He made this remark in 1782, when announcing the Montyon Prize. The enormously rich Baron Montyon, the Comte de Provence’s chancellor, had set up a fund of 12,000 francs with the idea that every year the Academy would reward the man or woman of lowly origins who had performed the most virtuous action in the last twelve months. He also offered a prize to the person who had in the same year written the most morally improving work of literature. It was said, Grimm chuckles, that the lower classes of Paris were so enraged by the way the Academy had begun to exceed its powers that they set up a prize for the best madrigal of the year.

The Montyon medal was first won, in 1783, by a woman called Lespanier, who had spent two years nursing the ‘Comte’ de Rivarol, during which time she not only received no fee, but sacrificed her own fortune and whatever other funds she could raise on credit, for her patient. The Academy thus made adroit use of the prize to humiliate Rivarol, who only the year before had written a savage critique of the poetry of the celebrated Abbé Delille.

The following year, in the presence of the Prussian Duke Henrik, brother of Frederic the Great, Marmontel gave the prize to another woman who had nursed someone at her own expense, and in 1785 it went to a certain M Poultier, who had refused a legacy of 200,000 livres and persuaded the person planning to leave it to him to bequeath it instead to his natural heirs. M Poultier then gave further evidence of his generosity by making a gift to the value of the medal to a concierge who had done the same as he had some twelve months before (the terms of the foundation allowing it to reward only deeds done in the current year). At the same meeting Marmontel announced that a person of high rank who wished to remain anonymous had donated a gold medal worth 3,000 livres to reward the poem which, in the view of the Academy, most worthily celebrated the self-sacrifice of the Duke of Brunswick, who had died in the river Oder trying to rescue two peasants from drowning.

Taine explains the prevailing sensibilité of the second half of the eighteenth century as the result of people looking for some sort of compensation for everything that had been denied them under the cold rationalism and severe neoclassical tastes of the years dominated by the Court. They could no longer bear the spiritual aridity (to which the French mind has a strong tendency, though Taine does not mention this), but the reaction was taken too far, and began to foster sentimentality. “At that moment,” writes Taine, “as this particular world approached its end, some degree of fellow-feeling, a softening of the emotions, came into being, and, like the flaming colours and ethereal mists of autumn, dissolved the severity that still lingered in the arid spirit of the age, bathing the elegance of its final moments with the scent of dying roses.”

But sentimentality was not a uniquely French phenomenon — it prevailed even more strongly in Germany and England. So it is not possible to see it as simply a reaction against French aridity. On the one hand, that reading does not properly explain why, in France, it took so essentially practical and moral a form, and was so concerned with love of one’s fellow man. A more satisfactory account lies in the second, more current, explanation, which argues that since the Enlightenment had undermined the basis of religion, and thus the moral code that depended on it, it became necessary to provide something to guide people through life, and in consequence people discovered social morality, altruism and philanthropy. The transcendent love of one’s fellow man was replaced by an immanent sense of fellow-feeling, whose practitioner helps others for the sake not of God, but of man.

However it was, and however amusing the simpler manifestations of that charitable impulse might have been, there is no doubt that the late eighteenth century had discovered for the Western world what can be called social values in the modern sense. Of course it was hardly by chance that the virtue of charity emerged among the privileged classes precisely at a time when the underprivileged were feeling ever more dissatisfied with the social arrangements. The two forces were linked together. The upper classes came to realise that members of the lower orders were human beings too, whereupon the self-esteem and yearning for equality simply increased among the latter, thus preparing the way for the Revolution.

So, in the final analysis, the origins of this cult of sensibility lay in the guilty conscience of the privileged classes. The situation greatly resembles the last half-century of the Russian Tsars. In Russia too the upper strata came to feel a deep ‘Slavic’ compassion for the lower orders, at precisely the moment when growing industrialism was starting to promote self-respect among the bourgeoisie and a growing resentment among the proletariat. In Russia too, it was the aristocratic writers, Turgenev and Tolstoy, who wrote the finest works expressing pity for the people. So the Tsars too were brought down by their own guilty conscience. It is possible to see similar symptoms in the English literature of the twenties and thirties, perhaps most strongly of all in the later writings of Galsworthy, which deal with the upper bourgeoisie and their troubled consciences, though we have of course yet to see any of the developments anticipated by those particular omens.

This is one side of the coin. There is another. Guilty conscience can manifest itself in other ways.

Mercier not only reveals that everyone in Paris lisped, but also that everyone went about with one shoulder held higher than the other — which gave the citizens a somewhat diabolical appearance.

The young Grimod de la Reynière, the son of an enormously wealthy man, sent out a grotesque invitation to dinner to a motley company of writers, tailors’ assistants, actors and doctors. It was bordered in funeral black, and was so unusual that the King had the example that came into his hands framed. On arrival the guests were asked by the porter which Reynière they were calling on — the old man, that bloodsucker of the people, or the young, the protector of widows and orphans. After they had been kept waiting for a quarter-of-an-hour in a darkened room, they were finally shown in to the dining area, which was lit by a thousand candles. In each of its four corners stood an altar-boy swinging a censer.

“Whenever my parents have visitors,” the host explained, “there are always three or four who feel the need for purification by incense, so I thought I’d save you the trouble of asking.”

This same rather interesting young man was once asked why he hadn’t bought himself a seat on the bench (at that time in France you paid to become a judge), and why he remained a simple lawyer.

“Because if I were a judge,” he replied, “I might easily find myself in the position of having to hang my father. At least as a lawyer I would be free to defend him.”

The situation of the wealthy father and the son rebelling against wealth was often repeated in this sort of grotesque, jocular way in the period. “It is typical of the age,” Sainte Beuve would write later, “that what began in frivolity ended in bloodshed.” But the underlying and wholly serious fact was that young Grimod de la Reynière had a guilty conscience.

There were those who attempted to silence their pangs of conscience through sensibility and charitable deeds; others simply revelled in their own wickedness the way the first group did in their benevolence. Both responses combined in one man: the Duc de Lauzun was the most dedicated roué of his time, an inveterate gambler and womaniser, and at the same time the sentimental co-founder of the Order of Steadfastness. Some of the writers, like Marmontel, Florian or Thomas, were so naively sensible and idyllic that it is difficult for us to understand how anyone at the time could read anything so false to nature; others were not at all naive — learned, cynical and acerbic — indeed, surprisingly modern. Their work was the sincere expression of a group purged of all self-delusion. And these are the really good writers: Choderlos de Laclos, Chamfort, Beaumarchais.

The rococo impulse sought to distance love from everything that was deep and passionate: it became a matter of charming games. No one ever died, relationships could be lightly broken and everyone was easily consoled. In Laclos’s wonderful novel Les liaisons dangereuses the rococo idea of love is pushed to the point of absurdity, perhaps to reveal it in all its danger. Love is shown in this book not as charming but as a pitiless toying with other people’s hearts, with the perpetrator revelling in the misery he produces, like a dramatist enjoying the writhings of his own characters. The hero, Valmont, is an aimable roué; his coldly superior deceptions are naturally always adored by the ladies (in life just as much as they were in books), and Valmont is unquestionably a forerunner of Richardson’s Lovelace, for whom women readers wept for a hundred years. But there is a crucial difference between the two. Lovelace first seduces the middle-class Clarissa but then comes truly to love her, though he refuses to marry her for reasons of aristocratic pride. But Valmont deceives the pure-souled Mme Tourvelt out of simple vanity, according to Taine. And this is still to understate, because Valmont is motivated not only by vanity but by a self-regarding wickedness which is actually satanic. Moreover, Valmont is not the real driver of events, but his cold ex-mistress Mme de Merteuil. She directs his amours simply in order to destroy the lives of the women who become her prey. The novel is a handbook of sexual psychopathology, and is often invoked as an example of mental cruelty.

It is interesting too, how strongly the events in the novel found an echo in aristocratic society. Chamfort referred to it constantly, and the Comte de Tilly speaks of it, and of its harmful influence, at some length in his memoirs. He calls Laclos the genius of wickedness, and says: “His book was one of the waves pouring into the ocean of the French Revolution to cleanse the throne.” And yet there is nothing revolutionary about it — it is just a love story, nothing more.

So that was how this society saw itself: so fundamentally wicked that it seemed almost to revel in the artistic perfection of its own wickedness. Tilly thought that the novel helped prepare the way for the Revolution by laying bare the immorality of the aristocracy, whether real or supposed. But he himself is an example of the way the aristocrats themselves delighted in the revelation. It is rather like those American financiers who take pleasure in reading the novelistic indictments of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.

A rather less open hostility to the ruling class is found in the dis-illusionment and cynicism of Chamfort. The illegitimate son of a nobleman, he was an embittered and defiant déclassé. As a young man — when, according to one of his mistresses women would begin by thinking of him as an Adonis but then discover he was a Hercules — he enjoyed the favour of high-born ladies. Later his body and life were blighted by venereal disease, which in those times struck down the dissolute like the workings of an ancient curse. There is scarcely a memoir in which it does not feature.

Chamfort’s resentment of the aristocratic world is an unusual and complex phenomenon. Certainly he had no cause for complaint about not being accepted by it. He received two pensions from the King by right, was made secretary to the Duc de Condé, reader to the Duc d’Artois and secretary to Mme Elisabeth. He became an Academician, and lodged with the Comte de Vaudreuil. But his bitterness arose from precisely the fact that he was accepted. As a pampered writer proud of his gifts he refused to play the role of court jester assigned to the intellectual in an aristocratic society. “It is a ridiculous thing to grow old as an actor in a theatrical company in which you count as only half a man.” Later he provided the single most celebrated slogan for the Revolution. He is said to be the source of the opening words of the famous pamphlet by Sieyès: “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? Tout. Qu’a-t-il été jusqu’à présent dans l’ordre politique? Rien.”—What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it ever been in the political order? Nothing. And again: “Guerre aux châteaux! Paix aux chaumières!”—War on the chateaux! Peace among the cottages!

Chamfort is the most important forerunner of nineteenth-century pessimism. Schopenhauer learnt much from him. Many of his sayings still in circulation are wrongly attributed to the great German philosopher, who occasionally forgot to mention his sources. But their construction is lighter, altogether more French, than Schopenhauer’s, and thus more ‘modern’. His aphorisms might have come from the pens of such contemporary French ironists as Paul Morand, Montherlant or Cocteau. With the reader’s permission, we shall translate a few of these, since there is no other document that so consistently and concisely expresses the guilty conscience of the years preceding the Revolution.

The poor are the blacks of Europe.

They govern the people the same way as they think. They feel free to utter stupidities the way ministers feel free to commit blunders.

In France they spare the arsonists and punish those who sound the alarm.

Only the history of a free people is worth studying. The history of a people under a tyranny can be nothing more than a collection of anecdotes.

Consider this: for thirty or forty centuries we have struggled to enlighten ourselves, and the result is that the three hundred million people living in the world are the slaves of some thirty tyrants.

Courtiers are like beggars who have grown rich by begging.

Society, and the world at large, are like libraries. At first glance everything seems to be in perfect order, because the books are arranged by size and shape. But in reality everything is chaotic because the books are not grouped by subject, contents or authors.

There are two great orders of society: those who have more to eat than they have appetite, and those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger.

Life is a sort of illness which is eased every sixteen hours by sleep. But this is just a palliative. The only cure is death.

I have my doubts about wisdom. According to the scriptures it begins with fear of the Lord. I rather think it begins with the fear of mankind.

In some centuries public opinion is the worst opinion.

Society was made necessary by physical disasters and the misfortunes of the human condition. But society merely adds to the calamities of nature: its problems make governments necessary, and governments simply aggravate the misfortune. Such is the history of the human condition.

It was only the failure of the first floodwaters that prevented God from unleashing the second.

And here are a few aphorisms about women and love—

However badly a man may think of a woman, there is always some woman who thinks even worse of her.

Do you know any woman who does not assume, when she sees another paying attention to one of her male friends, that she is taking too much of an interest in him?

It is a very unlucky man who can bear in mind, when he meets a woman close up, what he knew about her from afar.

In our time, the piquancy of secrets has been replaced by the piquancy of scandal.

I remember meeting a man who broke off with an opera singer when he discovered that she was just as insincere as any respectable woman.

Is it my fault that I always prefer women who are loved by others to those who are not loved?

And so we make our way down the social ladder: Laclos, nobleman; Chamfort, déclassé; and the third, Beaumarchais, plebeian. Beaumarchais is from the same layer as his own Figaro — the non-privileged person who lives off the privileged: the flunkey. The Revolution, unfortunately, brought this layer above all others to the surface. The future was with Beaumarchais. Figaro was the New Man.

Or perhaps not. Not yet a bourgeois, only a non-aristocrat, Beaumarchais, like Laclos and Chamfort, is the antithesis of the aristocracy.

Here we might mention an episode from Beaumarchais’s truly dazzling life, as it is distantly connected with our little history. Its title might well be: Figaro as Diplomat.

When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in June 1774, Beaumarchais informed his Chief of Police, a M Sartine, that a pamphlet was being printed in London and Amsterdam that was extremely insulting to the royal couple. He asked for authorisation to travel to the scene to stop the writer, one Angelucci, from publishing. As always in his dealings with Beaumarchais, Louis procrastinated for ages and then, as always, ended by granting permission. The writer received a letter of commission from him which he wore at all times around his neck, hanging from a gold chain in a gold box, out of respect for the King.

His negotiations went well. Angelucci agreed to abandon publication on payment of one thousand four hundred English pounds. Beaumarchais personally saw the pamphlet burnt in London, then the two men travelled to Amsterdam and destroyed the print run there. But what a cunning fellow this Angelucci was! He secretly kept back a copy and took it to Nuremberg, where it was finally printed.

But Figaro was still himself. “I am like a lion,” he wrote to Sartine. “True I have no money (author’s note — neither do lions), but I have my diamonds. I shall convert everything into cash and continue on my way with fire in my heart. I don’t speak German, but I shall travel night and day, and woe to the rascal who has forced me to cover three or four hundred miles when I’d much rather have my feet up. When I catch up with him I shall seize all his papers and murder him, as he deserves, for all the trouble he has caused me.”

On 14th August he overtook the scoundrel in a wood in Liechtenstein. Beaumarchais leapt from his coach, grabbed hold of Angelucci, tore the pamphlet from him, plus 35,000 francs, but then gave him back some of the money out of the kindness of his heart. However Angelucci reappeared shortly afterwards, accompanied by another ruffian. Beaumarchais overpowered the two of them but was wounded in the process.

Beaumarchais’s rather less imaginative coachman gave a different version of the story. According to him, Beaumarchais got out in the wood to shave himself, leaving the driver to go slowly on ahead. When they met again, his hand was bandaged up. He claimed he had been attacked by robbers, but the driver had the impression that he had simply cut himself while shaving.

In Vienna Beaumarchais was received with considerable suspicion. It transpired that he had not given Angelucci the one thousand four hundred pounds, but had promised him an annuity instead. They thought it best to lock the eccentric diplomat up.

He was however subsequently released. He returned to Paris and presented his bill. Louis XVI’s government generously, if reluctantly, met his claim for expenses amounting to 72,000 pounds. Sartine excused the actions of the Viennese court with the words:

“Look here, old chap, the Empress took it into her head that you were some sort of adventurer.”

The suicidally bad conscience of the French ruling class is best seen in connection with Beaumarchais’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro. Its popularity, together with the outcome of the necklace trial, is regarded as the most notable harbinger of the Revolution.

The King read the play in manuscript and expressed the view that it should not be performed. The Censor was of the same opinion, as were the Keeper of the Seal (the Minister of Justice) and the Chief of Police. This aroused so much popular discontent, Mme Campan relates, that “Never, in all the years preceding the collapse of the monarchy, were the words ‘oppression’ and ‘tyranny’ uttered with more passion than at this time.” After much wrangling, the play was performed in April 1784. In the leading role was the Comte de Vaudreuil, Marie-Antoinette’s intellectual friend and thus an indirect link to the Queen herself. The King’s two brothers were present on the opening night. The aristocratic audience received it with wild enthusiasm, whereupon Beaumarchais became even more impudent than ever. To a duke who had asked for a box in the theatre so that his female relatives could see the play masked and incognito, he sent this churlish reply. “I cannot respect, Your Excellency, the sort of woman who is willing to see a play she considers immoral provided that she herself is not seen …”

Not long afterwards Breteuil did lock him up for one of his impertinences — not in the Bastille, which would have been too good for someone like him, but in St Lazare. But by then the time of reckoning was close at hand. The few days Beaumarchais spent in prison produced a far greater outcry than the fate of all of the thousands who, under the three successive Louis, spent years, or their entire lives, without access to trial, in the Bastille, St Lazare and other prisons.

The royal family did their best to placate enraged public opinion and its orchestrator, the mutinous Figaro, by staging The Barber of Seville at Trianon with Marie-Antoinette as Rosina. Moreover, which perhaps pleased the great financiers even more, they finally honoured the claim brought against them for 2,150,000 livres.

Meanwhile, night after night at the Comédie Française, Figaro continued to pour his irony and impertinence onto the enthusiastic nobles filling the auditorium.

“No, Count, don’t do it!” he roars, when he hears that his master Count Almaviva intends to seduce his bride Suzanna. “Don’t even try! Just because you are a grand seigneur, do you think that instantly makes you a genius? My, how birth, riches, rank and office make a man proud! But what did you ever do in return for those privileges? You took the trouble to be born, and that was all. Otherwise you’re just like anyone else. But I, damn it, when I was just one of the nameless crowd milling around down there, I had to show more learning and wit just to make ends meet than the entire Spanish Empire did in a hundred years; and you want to start something with me? …”

And sitting there in their boxes, Almaviva and all the other counts rejoiced that at last someone had spoken the truth.

Viewed from a distance, Beaumarchais was not the most ‘left-wing’ of the writers in his time. The Marquis de Condorcet was much more of a revolutionary. In his works he waged war on every kind of social abuse, from forced labour to Negro slavery, and later, when a prisoner of the Revolution, wrote his most resolutely optimistic masterpiece, in which he showed how humanity progresses irresistibly towards freedom and equality … and then took poison. The Abbé Reynal described the behaviour of Europeans in the two Indias, East and West, combining geographical, historical and economic facts with eloquent diatribes against the wars of conquest against the natives. He was introduced to Frederick the Great, and given a ceremonial reception by the Lower House in England; for twenty years his book was a Bible on two continents, and even the young Bonaparte, in his student days, would echo his sayings.

And then “the party of the lost children”, as Taine calls them: “Naigeon and Sylvain Maréchal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics who laid down the binding dogmas and highest duties of atheism, the socialists who proclaimed a common weal in order to exterminate selfishness, and wanted to establish a society in which all who sought to retain their ‘contemptible private property’ would be declared public enemies, treated as dangerous lunatics and locked away for lifelong solitary confinement.”

These people were sometimes imprisoned by the Ancien Régime, sometimes not, but Mably addressed one of his books to the Duke of Parma, and the Poles asked him to write them a constitution.

“The writers and the ruling class waged a bitter war against each other,” says Mercier, “but there was never any doubt that the former would emerge victorious.”

But the war was not quite as bitter as he suggests. We should not forget that just as the nobility played the role of friends of the people, the writers posed as the upholders of a persecuted but defiant middle-class morality. In reality those who spoke for the Court and the aristocracy were actually in agreement with the writers and the common people: some sort of change was bound to come — in short, revolution. Except that the word ‘revolution’, as used at the time, did not have its present meaning. The Latin revolvere comes from the verb ‘to turn’ (hence the rotating-barrel ‘revolver’), and its early usages all imply a sense of turning, as in ‘la révolution des saisons’—the ‘revolving’ seasons of the changing year. As we have already said, in that idyllic and optimistic period, with its predisposition to expect miracles, the coming changes were imagined as being entirely peaceful. Never in their wildest dreams did people imagine that when they did arrive they might be for the worse. “Nothing serves better than the history of our Revolution to persuade philosophers and statesmen of the virtues of humility,” says Tocqueville. “Never was there an event of such magnitude, or one that was more thoroughly prepared for, over a longer period of time, that was less foreseen.”

Count Haga, looking around the city of Paris in 1784, must surely have noticed all the signs, but even he failed to see what was coming. On that negative note I would like to conclude my general survey.

After the Revolution, the often-mentioned La Harpe wrote a little story which better than anything registers the unsuspecting innocence of the years before the Revolution. This account, which we quote word for word in the following, is not a true history, rather a retrospective fiction. But if a prophet, such as Cazotte claimed to be, really had appeared during those years, it might well have been one.

It is as if it all happened yesterday, but in fact we were in the early days of 1788. Some members of the Academy were sitting at table — all noblemen and people of high intellect, since the membership was large and included people from all levels of society: courtiers, high-ranking officials, writers and academics. As usual we had dined extremely well. Over dessert the excellent Malmsey and Rhenish wines had freed up the mood … Chamfort was reading aloud from his godless and outspoken stories, and the more aristocratic ladies had not yet required the assistance of their fans. There was a flood of jokes against the Church; one came from Voltaire’s La pucelle, another from Diderot’s philosophical verses. One of the guests told a story that put a sudden stop to the laughter. His hairdresser had said to him, while applying the powder: “You see, sir, I’m just an oppressed starveling, but that doesn’t make me any less religious than the next man. It’s getting to the point where there could soon be a revolution. It’s absolutely essential that all this superstition and fanaticism should make way for philosophy and take some account of reality. But when that day comes, and who those people will be who bring the triumph about …”

Only one person held aloof from the ensuing uproar of discussion. This was Cazotte, an otherwise congenial if eccentric fellow, sadly given to visionary dreaming. Finally he spoke. In a voice of deadly seriousness he declared:

“Gentlemen, you can be quite sure we will all live to see the great and glorious revolution that people so heartily desire. You know I am something of a prophet, and I repeat, we shall all live to see it.”

The guests poured loud mockery on this. Condorcet led the way.

“You, M Condorcet, will end your days on the floor of a dungeon. You will die of poison you have taken to escape the scaffold — poison you will have been forced to keep about you at all times, in the happy days that lie ahead.”

There was laughter, and Chamfort sprang to Condorcet’s defence. Cazotte told him he would soon know that Eteokles and Polyneikes were brothers, when those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger set aside a hideous fifteen minutes to attend to those who have more than they can possibly eat. (When the time came, Chamfort opened his veins with twenty-two slashes of a razor.) Next, Vicq-d’Azyr (the Queen’s doctor), Nicolai (a leading member of Parlement), Bailly (the astronomer) and Malesherbes, the Minister of Justice, were each addressed in turn. And always with the one refrain — the scaffold.

“This is incredible,” people cried out from all sides. “Cazotte has sworn that we’ll all be annihilated.”

“I haven’t sworn …”

“So the Turks, or the Tartars, really are within the gates?”

“Not at all; what I said was that men will be governed by philosophy and reason alone.”

“Wonderful,” said La Harpe. “And have you no prophesy for me?”

“You will be the greatest miracle of all. You will become a Christian.”

“Well, then,” laughed Chamfort, “no harm there. So long as we don’t perish before La Harpe becomes a Christian, we shall all live for ever.”

The Duchesse de Grammont spoke next:

“It’s lucky we women won’t be part of the revolution. Or rather, I think, we might get involved to some extent, but no one will harm us because of our sex …”

“Your sex, ladies, will not protect you, and it will make no difference whether you involve yourselves or not. They’ll deal with you the same as they do with the men. No distinction will be made.”

Cazotte was warming to his theme. His words swelled up in waves, like the bars of the scaffold, every one a ghastly prophesy.

“So you see,” said the Duchesse de Grammont with a smile, “you won’t even grant me the benefit of a confessor.”

“No, my lady, there will be no confessor, neither for you, nor for anyone else. The last condemned person to have that privilege …”

He stopped for a moment.

“Well, which happy mortal will have that privilege?”

“It will be his last: that person will be the King of France.”

The host instantly rose from the table, and everyone followed his example.