Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. Richard Holmes
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. When she prolongs her civility with people she holds in small esteem, redouble your admiration: she is in torture. Vain at first by nature, her vanity has become boundless; knowledge and scorn of mankind soon perfected that quality. Yet this vanity is excessive even to her own taste. She already thinks that fame is worth nothing at the cost of happiness, and yet she would make many an effort for fame…
‘Would you like to know if Zélide is beautiful, or pretty, or merely passablê I cannot tell; it all depends on whether one loves her, or on whether she wishes to make herself beloved. She has a beautiful neck, and displays it at some sacrifice of modesty. Her hands are not white; she knows that also, and makes a jest of it; but she would rather not have this occasion for jest.
‘Excessively emotional, and not less fastidious, she cannot be happy either with or without love. Perceiving herself too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased to aspire to happiness and has devoted herself to goodness; she thus escapes repentance and seeks only for diversion.
‘Can you not guess her secret? Zélide is somewhat sensuous. Emotions too vivid and too intense for her organism, an exaggerated activity without any satisfying object, these are the source of all her misfortunes. With less sensibility Zélide would have had the mind of a great man; with less intelligence she would have been only a weak woman.’
Her tongue was French, and her intelligence; not so her nature. She was averse from all those conventions of gallantry which are founded on pretence. ‘No doubt a French platitude becomes a hundred times flatter in a Dutch mouth, but, believe me, without the French, a woman with no desire to be loved would not talk so much of the passion of a man who, in fact, does not love her; it would not occur to us to be witty for half an hour on an equivocation; and those light themes, without head, tail, or sense, would never have entered our thick heads.’ She preferred the English form of sociability, where men who have nothing to say, say nothing. Her own brilliance was always employed to light up a firm sobriety of thought: pose and paradox, mere wit, mere romanticism, she detested in literature as in talk. Frankness was ‘her favourite virtue’; her passion was for reality of intercourse.
To Mademoiselle de Tuyll’s engaging quality of frankness we owe our intimate knowledge of this lady’s chief occupation during the long years at Zuylen and Utrecht. This occupation was not the true prose of Versailles; it was not Newton, not the harpsichord, nor ‘all that can be known in our time of physics’; it was, briefly – getting married.
The theme is one for an epic poet rather than an essayist, the canvas is so crowded, the action so varied and prolonged, the energy displayed so heroic. Penelope had not more trouble with her Homeric suitors, and Mademoiselle de Tuyll was far from being a Penelope. Her suitors, too, were very different from Penelope’s: they had a way of taking flight. Yes, the prologue of Belle’s marriage is epic, decidedly; but the climax was comedy; and the end, tragedy.
Some twelve suitors are known to history as candidates (or probable candidates) for the hand of Mademoiselle de Tuyll. No doubt there were others. Her vicissitudes with regard to these twelve were confided to a thirteenth who, being married, was not a suitor. This was Constant d’Hermenches, baron de Rebecque, a dashing Swiss noble in the service of the Dutch Republic. It was said of Hermenches that