reflection; for it was characteristic of her that she wanted the prize for goodness as well as the forbidden fruit. For the rest, he hated to interfere, and preferred not to notice whatever he might have to disapprove. He opposed a fin de non recevoir to her ‘lively expressions,’ and could he have seen into the very unconventional process of his daughter’s heart, or caught a glimpse of certain pages of her correspondence, no doubt he would have averted his eyes as from the gridiron of Saint Laurence.
The mother, thanks to her less noble origin, was more amenable. She had caught the Tuyll note: lively expressions had long since ceased to cross her kindly lips; but she was ‘known to joke’ and capitulated readily enough to an attack upon her sense of humour. And when disaster came, and those illicit letters did fall into her possession, she got over it. Belle was at pains to persuade her that, with it all, she was as good, nay better than another. ‘Et je voulais faire avouer à ma mère que telle que j’étais je valais encore mieux qu’une autre.’ The prize for goodness once more.
Tuyll to the bone, on the contrary, was the younger daughter, Jeanne-Marie. She figures but seldom in her sister’s letters; we discern her, clearly enough, tight, prim, conventional: a good girl, and likely to remain so. Plainly a prude, and favoured with a prettiness which failed to please, Jeanne distilled an atmosphere of disapproval not untainted with jealousy. She was, Belle frankly states, the kind of sister one would love better were she in America: in home life she showed a sulky temper and a taste for scenes of sentimental reconciliation conducted with unbearable solemnity. She married in due course a serious Dutchman who nevertheless consented to become the intermediary of that clandestine correspondence with Constant d’Hermenches in which Belle revealed herself so winningly – free, kindly, gay, spontaneous, Jeanne’s opposite at every point.
There were four brothers; the eldest was drowned while bathing, at eighteen; of the second she writes, ‘William is always out hunting, or else ill from having hunted too much: his temper is uncertain, his manner often hard and uncivil.’ She reads Plutarch with Vincent: ‘I try to separate in his mind the conceptions of book and pain.’ (‘Why is it,’ she once asked, ‘that the young should only know two categories of books – those they are forced to read, and those they read in secret?’) Vincent is slow, prudent, and systematic: in short, very Tuyll. He becomes a soldier, and Belle proposes to console herself for his loss by learning to play upon the lute. But Dietrich, three years older than Vincent, is her favourite. A simple-minded sailor, he returns from his long voyages and cannot leave his sister’s side; he sits on her bed at all hours listening to conversations ‘unlike anything in the world’ and confiding his naïve love affairs. Later on, it is to Dietrich that some of her most charming letters are addressed. He died, to her great sorrow, of consumption, in 1773.
If the problem of life had to be settled once for all on a fixed pattern, if no ideas should be revised and few be suffered to exist, this life at Zuylen, so harmless, so safely decent, and, all in all, so equably harmonious, might serve as well as any for the chosen type. But, for Madame de Charrière, ideas were the breath of existence, and life presented itself to her not as a tradition but as a great experiment. This proposition – that the world should be ruled by ideas and not by customs, was in itself the newest of ideas. Belle de Zuylen, alone in the world of Tuylls, had caught the breath of the new spirit which thirty years later was to make the Revolution. If she seemed eccentric to her countrymen, it was because she appealed at every point from usage to reason: her true eighteenth-century mind could not doubt for a moment that logic was the basis of human happiness. That man is an irrational animal, for whom logic lays a snare; that custom, like the heart, has its own reasons; that folly, as a human attribute, is entitled, if not to veneration, at least to a certain tenderness, she could not conceive. Yet, where her parents were concerned, an instinctive kindliness and a touch, perhaps, of Tuyll pride in their heroic sense of caste impelled her to obedience. ‘I could not change their ideas, and they will never change their conduct so long as their principles remain unchanged. Their intentions are pure, and they are firm, as they ought to be, in doing what to them seems right. If there is any excess on their side, I ought not, on mine, to submit myself the less to their will. I could not pardon myself if I caused them pain.’ That is, in plain English, she followed her own fancy, and tried to prevent them from finding it out.
From the outer world she had less regard, and her demeanour was not calculated to disarm it. The downcast eyes and modest blushes, which were looked for by Dutch dowagers in one of her age, were not in Belle de Zuylen’s repertoire. ‘Une demoiselle, cela, une demoiselle!’ exclaimed Madame d’Aincourt, seeing her sail into their midst with her whimsical sans-gêne and merry superiority. There were rumours, perhaps, of that clandestine correspondence, there was the certainty that she had actually published a very lively satire, ‘Le Noble,’ in mockery of their respect for quarterings, there was une belle gorge, dont elle se pare trop, a little too much in evidence, ‘Une demoiselle…cela!’
It is clear that to Belle de Zuylen the breath of public censure was not altogether displeasing. Or rather, she met disapproval as a natural consequence of her merits. The stupidity of most people being a plain datum of experience, she was too logical to desire their praise in any matter of the reason. And since reason was for her the key to everything, she accepted her isolation as a necessary fact. With it all, people were happier with her than away from her; she had in her a fire of vitality to which her coldest critics loved to hold their hands. As Hermenches said, she could warm the heart of a Laplander.
Her gaiety, which illumined the shadowy world she moved in, was nevertheless the mask to a profound melancholy. She was one of those whose inmost consciousness is born sceptical, and she was disillusioned even before life had destroyed the illusions she artificially created. Those around her who envied and caught the glow of her seeming happiness were in less need of it than herself; their very dullness was a kindly anaesthetic: they asked no ultimate questions and hungered for no ultimate satisfactions. ‘No one guesses,’ she writes, ‘that I am a prey to the darkest gloom: I can find health, nay, life itself, only by means of a ceaseless occupation of the mind.’
The occupation was ceaseless indeed; at thirteen she must be up at six to study mathematics; later, she is ‘determined to master Newton’; she ‘hates half learnings’ and wishes ‘to know all that can be known in our time of physics’ – a programme which must not exclude a decent proficiency on the harpsichord; she is deep in all the properties of conic sections. The vital fire burnt brightly on this stubborn fuel: ‘I find an hour or two of mathematics gives me a freer mind and a light heart; I eat and sleep better when I have grasped an evident and indisputable truth.’ Mathematics consoled her for the obscurity of religion: that door had been closed to her once for all by the minister who, in preparing her for confirmation, thought her scruples unworthy of discussion. For in Belle’s mind a proposition must be as clear as Euclid or it was nothing.
Yet all this was not fuel enough. Plutarch, first and foremost, then Pascal, Madame de Sévigné, St Evremond, Hamilton, and Voltaire: – these rivalled even the indisputable truth of conic sections; and she never travelled ‘without Racine and Molière in my box and Fontaine in my memory.’ From the earliest years French was the language of her thought. In French she wrote poetry, or what passed for such, and prose of a high order, lucid, witty, and sane. ‘You write better than anyone known to me, not excepting Voltaire,’ said Hermenches, a friendly critic it is true; ‘the authentic tongue of Versailles’ is the verdict of Sainte-Beuve.
One autumn evening she beguiled the tedium of her Dutch life by composing a slight essay on her own character. She saw herself very accurately. And the last words of this paper, written at the outset of her life, might truly, when her story was played out, have been written on her grave.
She called it ‘The Portrait of Mlle. de Z., under the name of Zélide.’
‘Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination, Zélide is patient only on principle; when she is indulgent and easy be grateful to her, for it costs her an effort.
