Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. Richard Holmes
a curious irony, a woman [Zélide] whose own emotional life had been singularly unhappy, brought for a few months, harmony to another woman’s marriage. In the absorption of bringing Zélide and Boswell, d’Hermenches and Constant, to life again, Geoffrey and his wife suspended the relentless analysis of their own feelings; they laughed and worked together. Perhaps, too, there was in all this a certain process of self-identification’ (Images and Shadows)
After the initial excitement of discovery, Scott’s work on the biography which he had intended to finish in a year, slowed down. Like Philippe Godet, he underwent the classic ‘transfer experience’ of the modern biographer, starting as the detached scholar but gradually being drawn hypnotically into all the domestic details and dramas of Zélide’s world. The historical story becoming more and more a weird reflection of his own life, and emotional entanglements.
In 1922 Geoffrey Scott wrote to Nicky Mariano: ‘The thing that makes me stick in the mud with that book, is that [Zélide’s] relations with Benjamin Constant, after his marriage, have an uncanny likeness to Mary [Berenson’s] feelings and actions four years ago. I understand it almost too well to write about it in the detached and light manner which the tone of the book requires…The idea of Mary’s reading the manuscript and drawing the inevitable parallels at each point embarrasses me a good deal in writing it.’
When not working on Zélide, Scott drifted away from Lady Sybil and his marriage. He spent the summer of 1923in England and embarked on a refreshing new affair, this time with Harold Nicolson’s wife, the aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West. Vita was another powerful literary woman with a country estate, the beautiful manor house of Long Barn in Kent (near her ancestral home of Knole). As an established writer she too encouraged Scott with his work on Zélide. He could confide in her without ceremony, and revealed his increasingly intense involvement with Zélide’s story.
‘I’m going to busy myself this week with Madame de Charrière,’ he wrote to Vita in October 1923. ‘I’ve dragged her by the scruff of the neck round two or three difficult corners. I’ve done the meeting with Benjamin and the first fantastic part of their friendship: it’s good that part, I hope, and goes with a swing. I give it mostly through Monsieur de Charrière’s eyes, bewildered and misunderstanding, watching rather breathlessly the spectacle of Zélide coming back to life. I’ve got Mme de Staël in the wings just ready to pop in…with her private theatricals, negroid beauty, her tramping insensibility and impeccable bad taste.’
He emphasized the daring speed he had set himself in the narrative. ‘I’ve struck a very quick tempo, and can’t afford now to slow it: the book will be quite shockingly short.’ But above all Scott stressed his own personal excitement with the work, and the way he was now inspired by Vita. ‘It’s fun, though, doing it. I do it for you.’
So the tangled web of Geoffrey Scott’s relationships (not in fact unduly tangled by the standards of post-War Bloomsbury), each generated an extensive correspondence about the biography, and curiously mimicked different aspects of Zélide’s own story. Indeed Mary Berenson, Edith Wharton, Lady Sybil, and Vita Sackville-West were each separately told by Scott that Zélide’s biography was secretly and lovingly dedicated to them alone, and contained their disguised portraits as Zélide.
Similarly, it was to be understood that Scott himself was sometimes the mercurial Constant, sometimes the worldly Chevalier d’Hermenches, and sometimes (though rarely) the long-suffering and inadequate M. de Charrière. On the other hand, he was never James Boswell. Mostly he identified with Benjamin Constant, writing to Mary Berenson that drawing Constant’s portrait gave him the most trouble: ‘he is so many sided, so inexhaustible, it is difficult to bring him out fully within the compass of my small scale.’
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Far from softening or sentimentalizing the texture of the biography, this secret shimmer of subjectivity gives it an almost unnatural sharpness and stylistic brightness. From the opening Scott makes brilliant metaphoric use of the pastel portrait of Zélide by George de la Tour, and the contrasting monotonies of Dutch landscape (and society) stretching behind her. The whole book has a strong visual sense, and Scott continually presents Zélide’s moods in terms of beautifully conjured landscapes or interiors, a series of Dutch still-lives.
Yet just as he planned, he moves the narrative forward at a dazzling pace, compressing and summarizing the story, foreshortening perspective, and playing off the immobility of Zélide’s life at Zuylen and Colombier against the frantic gyrations of Boswell or Constant. The arrival and departure of carriages forms a choric motif, reaching its apotheosis in the fatal carriage of Madame de Staël. Scott is so enraptured by Constant’s peripatetic adventures in England (chapter 7), and later in Germany (chapter 9), that they almost threaten to leave Zélide entirely behind.
He wonderfully catches minor characters, by impish anecdote and ironic aside. His handling of the inquisitive Pastor Chaillet with his miniscule handwriting, and the well-meaning and foolish Madame Huber at Le Pontet, are masterly. While Constant’s animal-obsessed German princess, Wilhelmina, is immortalized in a single footnote.
Scott’s attitude to Zélide herself is complex, shifting, and unexpectedly contradictory. From the outset he has pronounced her life a tragedy and a failure, yet he cannot prevent himself treating it gallantly, humorously and even at times romantically. In fact one suspects that Geoffrey Scott is always in two minds about Zélide, and part of him is always in love with her. The most beautiful and memorable images in the book are always dedicated to her. ‘So Zélide lay, lost to the world, like a bright pebble on the floor of the Lake of Neufchâtel.’
It is true that he ignores or distorts several elements in her story. He underplays the significance of her published writing (apart from its autobiographical aspect), and fails to see the importance of the later work for the feminist canon, notably the brilliantly plotted moral fable, Three Women. It is difficult to imagine that Zélide was the author of twelve short novels, twenty-six plays, several libretti for opera, and much harpsichord music as well. Nor does he connect her extensive output with younger English writers addressing similar themes, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, or Fanny Burney. But this, perhaps, is a failure of historical rather than biographical perspective.
More problematically, Scott does not seem to sympathize – or should one say empathize – with what Zélide called the difficulties of having a woman’s ‘susceptible body’. He does not seem to allow sufficiently for the devastating effect of her physical inability to have children with M de Charrière, or relate this to her clandestine affair with the handsome (but still unknown) young man in Geneva sometime in 1784–5. Zélide was then in her mid-forties, feeling life slipping away, and was perhaps making her one, last serious attempt to act like Ninon de Lenclos. As Benjamin Constant pointed out, this adulterous episode, perhaps Zélide’s only real adulterous episode, produced her masterpiece, Caliste.
Above all perhaps, Geoffrey Scott undervalues the happiness that her last circle of young women friends and protegées brought her after 1790, when she was fifty. They included the flirtatious and incorrigibly pregnant maid Henriette Monarchon; the handsome and talented Henriette l’Hardy (who became her literary executor); the dazzlingly beautiful Isabelle de Gélieu; the clever sophisticated Caroline de Sandoz-Rollin; and the ‘wild, gorgeous, defiant’ sixteen-year-old Suzette du Pasquier.
These produced Zélide’s own kind of salon des dames at Colombier, and exchanges of letters, poems, and confidences quite as full as her masculine ones. Such a circle was, after all, part of Zélide’s original plan to consecrate her life to friendship as well as love. And who is to say that some of these young women, with their new independent ways, did not bring Zélide love as well as friendship?
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For all these limitations of sympathy and perspective, Geoffrey Scott’s biography remains a subtle triumph, and a considerable landmark. It changed forever the way English biographers wrote (or simply failed to write) about women. It recognised that women’s lives had different shapes from men’s, different emotional patterns of achievement and failure. It stressed the value of