Whatever great advantages nature may give, it is not she alone, but fortune also that makes the hero.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The seventeenth century drew on. D’Artagnan died in 1672. He had served Louis XIII, and in turn Louis XIV, the Sun King, but with the latter, the court had moved off to Versailles, and Rue Bonaparte resumed a calmer aspect. St.-Germain was fashionable now for its graceful social life, wit, and literary bent, the character it would keep, interspersed with periods of catastrophe.
I think of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld as the emblematic man for this time—sometime around 1660 he lived near here in the house of his uncle, on the Rue de Seine (14-18 Rue de Seine), a few hundred yards from where Queen Margot’s palatial residence had been. His pious and talented friend Madame de La Fayette lived not far away on Rue Vaugirard, other friends were a bit farther away at Port-Royal, a neighborhood at the south of the sixth arrondissement, at the border of the fifth (twenty minutes’ walk from here), immersed in the mood of the Jansenists. These devout crypto-Protestant Catholics reacted to the power and political status of the Church by encouraging private devotions, translations of the Bible, a return to simple forms of worship, and so on—a movement so menacing to Louis XIV, perhaps for the subtly seditious political implications of these criticisms of Jesuit and pope, that he had the convent of the Port-Royal nuns burned to the ground.
The sixth Duc de La Rochefoucauld was born in 1613 (two years before d’Artagnan), and had the career expected of a man in his position: He joined the army, was involved in most of the going conspiracies against Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, participated in the Fronde—an uprising of aristocrats against Mazarin—was wounded in battle, exiled, and jailed, but survived to end his days peacefully enough in Paris in a circle of his friends, including Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette, whose La Princesse de Cleves is thought of as almost the first and among the greatest of French novels, and his particular friend, Madame de Sablé. These were stately, or it could seem, mildly depressed, intellectuals who found solace in each other, in literature, and in witty topical dissections. In short, they had salons, a social form that had begun in the sixteenth century, and still characterized this period. With their famous interdiction of talk about politics and religion (respected to our day, if more in the breach than the observance, given everyone’s actual preoccupation with politics and religion) they were, after the court, major arbiters of taste.
They valued concise expression, purity of feeling, wit, and affection, but it was the barbed and even bitter mockery of La Rochefoucauld’s tone that would be widely adopted, even become characteristic in the eighteenth century with Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and so on. The salons gave considerable influence to women. The seventeenth-century salons, many of them around Port-Royal, must have lent to this whole quarter the sort of tone that would persist in the 1920s when American and English women, many of them lesbian or black, would find a congenial atmosphere of female self-sufficiency.
La Rochefoucauld’s epigrams convey the mood of the upcoming eighteenth century: harsh but undeniable, startling in the hypocrisies they exposed:
Whatever care we take to conceal our passions under the appearance of piety and honor, they are always to be seen through these veils.
Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
His maxims brilliantly characterize the dodgy life of a courtier:
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears.
Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters; even that of disinterestedness.
He is always preoccupied with death, with a very modern skepticism:
Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is not an easy undertaking.
By the end of the seventeenth century, La Rochefoucauld is dead (1680), as is Madame de La Fayette (who said of him, “He gave me wit, I gave him a heart.”) in 1692, and Madame de Sévigné (1696), too. The latter two ladies lived to see Louis XIV revoke the Edict of Nantes, and the country plunged again into religious turmoil, with an enormous exodus of Protestants to Holland, England, and the New World. (According to my aunts, one of our ancestors went to America soon after, one René Cossé or Cosset, whose name in the more dubiously educated colonies became “Ranna Cossit.” Was he a Huguenot? My aunt doesn’t know.)
No more do I know about La Rochefoucauld’s religion. Having become interested in Huguenots, despite the mysterious silence about which historical figures were and weren’t Protestants, I still find myself wondering who was who in this respect. Even in accounts of, for instance, the Fronde, the rebellions against Louis XIV and Mazarin that La Rochefoucauld fought in, though the Fronde involved many of the same families as in the former Huguenot period, no religious concerns are implied, at least that are apparent to the casual reader. (Leonard Tancock, introducing his translation of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, says of the Fronde: “Its events were industriously obscured by the memoirs and special pleadings of many of the participants, and no attempt has been made here to unravel the skein.”) Yet La Rochefoucauld’s great-grandfather died in the massacre of St.-Bartholomew’s Day. That earlier La Rochefoucauld was certainly a Huguenot, chief henchman of Jeanne d’Albret, the mother of Henri IV. Would not his memory be alive in the La Rochefoucauld family a mere hundred years later? Several at least of the leading Frondists were raised as Protestants, yet lurking religious rancor is not seen as having anything to do with their opposition to the two influential cardinals or any royal personages. At the least, people like La Rochefoucauld, if not any longer Protestant, were associated with the more individualistic pieties of Jansenism; but many things are unclear.
We can more easily imagine the rooms these people had. The decorative style in the seventeenth century was still more or less sumptuous, and more or less Italianate, with carved wood-paneled walls, sometimes painted, and dark wooden furniture in the style we associate with the Three Musketeers, or Romeo and Juliet: velvet or brocade upholstery, fringes, square-seated chairs with spiral-turned legs. This decor would give way in the eighteenth century to lighter woods, chairs upholstered in silk brocades, pastels and gilding—the style we associate with Louis XV.
Sometimes I dare to go into the antiques shops around the corner on the Quai Malaquais or the Quai Voltaire, just to look at the furniture and objets d’art being sold for ferocious prices. Though many now trade in the glamorous art deco furniture of the 1930s, eighteenth-century Louis XV and XVI (the default styles of the French aristocracy to this day) have their purveyors as well.
Whoever was living in our Paris apartment at the beginning of the eighteenth century (possibly Bernard Germain-Étienne de la Ville, Comte de Lacépède, the great eighteenth-century biologist) decided to update the decor, and had mirrors installed on all four walls of the salon in carved gold frames. In this way, the crystal chandelier is reflected in infinite regression in whichever direction you turn, and you see in the mirrors an immensely long corridor lit with dozens of chandeliers, a sort of metaphor for the Enlightenment, the mood during nearly a century, seemingly so civilized and wise, before the Deluge.
Mirrors, an Italian technology, were everywhere in Paris by the eighteenth century, a festival of glitter and glamour, reflecting fashionable beauties, everything was doré, gilded. People wore silk and began to powder their hair. The short rounded breeches, ruffled collars, and gartered stockings for men gave way to longer coats with deep cuffs and longer curls, and wavy wide-brimmed hats. The women wore wide skirts and higher necklines and decorous head coverings—hoods and lace caps with little trains down the back. What hadn’t been built in St.-Germain-des-Prés in the seventeenth century was being built now—the handsome mint, the Hôtel de la Monnaie, for instance—so everything assumed very much the look it has today.