14 DECEMBER 1861, Page 21

FRENCH WOMEN OF LETTERS.*

Tax influence of women in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one of the great facts of modern European civilization. What we now call "society," was the natural result of the cessation of civil war, and the decay of feudalism. And this form of life demanded its code of rules as much as the military form which was expiring. Hence the origin of manners, which are among civilians what discipline is among soldiers ; and of which as an art we discover no traces previous to the seventeenth century. These Articles of polite war we owe almost exclusively to that dynasty of brilliant women who regulated Parisian life for a period of two hundred years. Of these the women of letters formed no insignifi- cant portion, for although Moliere did his best to make learned women ridiculous, and succeeded so far as to make ignorance fashion. able, yet a counter influence was at work upon the other side, which secured to the women of Paris a higher place in the intellectual movement of the age than they enjoyed in either Germany or England. Debarred from politics and law, cut off from all local interests and provincial jurisdictions, the French aristocracy were compelled to rely upon society for that mental exercise of which all men feel the necessity in one shape or another. Thus, however illi- terate the women of the time might be, they were forbidden to be mere butterflies. The masculine intellect must have something on which to whet itself, and in France the women were compelled to supply the substance. Hence it is possible to understand what otherwise would be inexplicable—the singular union of ignorance with influence for which they were conspicuous. M. de Tocqueville vouches for the first. The young ladies of the old regime, he says, were taught abso- lutely nothing. But they bad tact and wit; and picked up know- ledge from the men. Ignorance, it would seem, was necessary to ob- tain a husband; for to know anything would have been considered a mark of forwardness and immodesty. But wit and power were re- quired to enslave a lover. The authority of Moliere could not go beyond a certain point. He might teach men to laugh at pedantry, but he could not make them relish insipidity : and the woman accord- ingly who should give law to French society was compelled to be something more than a mere agreeable beauty. Under these circum- stances it is clear that women of letters must have occupied an im- portant social position, however far they might have shared in the general disfavour with which literature as a profession was regarded. For the French noblesse, we must remember, no more thought of as- sociating with men of letters as their equals, than did any of the other aristocracies of the eighteenth century. It was necessary, says Miss Kavanagh, for Mademoiselle Scndery frequently to remind the coin- • French Women of Letters. By Julia Kavanagh. In two volumes. Hurst and Blacken.

pany of her own aristocratic origin, in order to make any head against the prejudice which her mode of life excited. Her constant allusions, to the ruin of " our House," as though it had been a European ea. tastrophe, became at last a standing joke. But the practice was not caused by pride, but by necessity. Still, in spite of these draw- backs, the authoresses of the period enjoyed an influence and popu- larity quite unknown to their English sisterhood till many.years later : and Miss Kavanagh, therefore, is under no necessity of apologising for these two volumes. They are extremely interesting, as they tell ua in. a short compass much that we are very glad to know of so splen- did a society as existed under the Bourbon monarchy/

The original sources of the peculiar esprit of French women is found by Miss Kavanagh in the Hotel de Rambouillet. This hotel, the residence of the Marchioness of that name, was, though for a. much longer time, and on a much larger scale, what Gore House and Holland House were in England. Here, for exactly half a century,

from 1600 to 1650, the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of intellect continued to be brought together. The presence of a woman at the head of this brilliant coterie naturally inspired other women with a desire for literary fame. The success which attended her assemblies in- spired men. of letters with a desire for something less desultory. From the first feeling sprang the French blue-stockings, "Les Premenses." From the second sprang the French Academy. the learned ladies were attacked byMoliere in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" and "Les Femmes Savautes," with the effect we have already seen. But not until, ac- cording to Miss Kavanagh, they had effected much real good :

" For depravity and impure language, whether spoken or written, they substituted the refinement of virtue and the delicacy of good taste. To them we owe it that the French literature of the age can, with few ex- ceptions, be read without shame in ours ; that, whilst poetry and prose were almost equally profligate in Erigland, they were comparatively pure in France."

The ladies of whom Miss Kavanagh has given separate biographies are ten in number, and are all novelists ; the reason which is assigned for this restriction being that novels are the most influential form of modern literature. She introduces into her list no later name than that of Madame De Genlis, who died in 1830, and her plan is to give first the life, and then an analysis and critique of the works of each writer. Miss Kavanagh bad, of course, a right to confine her- self to novelists if she chose ; but we think it would have been better not to style the book French Women of letters, for such a title is clearly incorrect, whatever the reasons which are given for it, and excites the suspicion that it was rather the difficulty of finding a better one than the propriety of the one chosen which led to its adoption. The first of the series is Mademoiselle De Gournay (1565 —1645), the adopted daughter of Montaigne. This lady wrote iarge/y upon a variety of subjects; and seems to have published only one novel, which is called " Alinda," "chiefly valuable to us as being the first genuine modern novel written in French by a woman." It is a most tragic story, of which the scene is laid in Parthia, consistent with the practice pursued by this lady's successors of founding their novels upon classical or antique incidents. Mademoiselle De Gour- nay was a frequenter of the Hotel de Rambouillet, one of les pre- cieuses, and took a prominent part in company with the embryo "Academy" in fixing the canon of the French language. The second lady on the list is Mademoiselle De Seudery (1607-1701), who wrote altogether fifty volumes, averaging about a thousand pages each. Of these, three are romances which were eagerly devoured in their day by the French public. They are entitled • Ibrahim," "The Great Cyrus," and "Clelia." The most popular of these and the longest was "The Great Cyrus," which our readers may remember was in course of perusal by Edith Bellenden in "Old Mortality." Its chief charm in the eyes of French readers would render it unbearable at the present day-. " The historical characters, places, and events, are made to fit the men and women, the localities, the incidents, and the feelings of Louis XIV'S court, reign, and kingdom." Thus, Cyrus himself was the great Conde, and madame, the heroine was Madame de Longueville.

To Madame de la Fayette (1633-1693) we owe the first novel of what we may call the modern school : that is a novel in which no use is made of historical characters and events, and monstrous or heroic exploits. It is a love story, and the whole interest turns upon the trials of the two lovers. This is "The Princess de Cleves." But she also wrote another novel of the old-fashioned school, called " Zayde," which was equally popular in its day. Madame de Tencin (1683-1749), sister of the infamous Abbe de Tencin, the friend of the Regent Orleans and John Law, first, according to our authoress introduced "the eloquence of passion" into French novels, meaning by that phrase the tone of the " Nouvelle Heloise." Madame was a woman of fiery passions herself. Divesting herself of the conven- tual fetters which had been imposed upon her at fifteen years of age, she came to her brother at Paris, consorted with a variety of lovers, and had at least one illegitimate child, whom she left upon a door-step, and who grew up to be the famous D'Alembert. She mixed eagerly in all the intrigues and profligacy of that awful time. She was intimate with Lord Bolingbroke, was for a time mistress to the Regent, and afterwards to Cardinal Dubois, and she seems only to have taken to literature when her beauty and her lovers deserted her. Madame Riccoboni (1714-1798) is next upon our list. Her maiden name was Mesieres. When about twenty years of age, she was seduced by an English nobleman, and on being deserted by him, adopted the stage as a profession. She married an actor named Riccoboni, and continued for many years in the position of a pains- taking and meritorious, but not very brilliant actress. As a novelist, we are told that her chief excellence consists in the cleverness of her stories, an art which she had probably picked up upon the stage, and

'that she was one of the first to make use of suicide in fiction. After 'Madame Riccoboni come Madame de Geniis, Madame de Charriere, Madame de Kriidener, Madame Cotton, and Madame de Steel. These !ladies are all discussed in the same way. First we have their lives, and then an epitome of their writings. But as the chief incidents iu their lives, as well as the character of their works, are probably well known to our readers, we shall not reproduce Miss Kavanagh's ac- count of them. That the power of women in France survived the old society in which it had originally been formed, is clear from Napoleon's conduct to both Madame de Geniis and Madame de Stael. The first he admired, made a regular correspondent of, and pensioned handsomely. The second he both feared and hated, and went so far as to say that if she bad exerted in his favour all the influence which she put forth against him, his fate might have been different. This same feminine dominion lasted through the reigns of Charles X. and Louis Philippe, and has at length expired, according to M. de Tocque- vile, under the weight of the second Empire. With the execution of this work we have only one fault to find: the extracts given from the various works mentioned, are far to long. They might be shortened by at least one-half without impair- ing their effect, and in that case the whole work might be completed in one good-sized volume, which is always preferahle to two, if nothing is sacrificed to attain it.