Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. Richard Holmes
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a young woman eloping with her lover from a moated Dutch castle, under the disapproving gaze of the ancestral portraits. In fact the ancestral portraits are literally stamped under foot, when they are thrown down to form a kind of pontoon bridge over the moat, across which the young woman dashes to freedom one summer night. This work set tongues wagging in Utrecht.
Soon, more daring, she wrote and circulated among her friends her own deliberately provocative self-portrait. It was now that, perhaps inspired by Voltaire, Isabelle de Tuyll invented her own literary pen-name: the sinuous, satirical, and distinctly sexy ‘Zélide’. (Like Voltaire’s adaptation of his family name Arouet, ‘Zélide’ seems to have been based on a sort of loose anagram of her nickname, ‘Bel-de-Z’.)
She described Zélide as follows:
You ask me perhaps is Zélide beautiful?…pretty?…or just passablê I do not really know; it all depends on whether you love her, or whether she wants to make herself lovable to you. She has a beautiful bosom: she knows it, and makes rather too much of it, at the expense of modesty. But her hands are not a delicate white: she knows that too, and makes a joke of it…
Zélide is too sensitive to be happy, she has almost given up on happiness…Knowing the vanity of plans and the uncertainty of the future, she would above all make the passing moment happy…Do you not perceive the truth? Zélide is somewhat sensual. She can be happy in imagination, even when her heart is afflicted…With a less susceptible body, Zélide would have the soul of a great man; with a less susceptible mind, with less acute powers of reason, she would be nothing but the weakest of women.
This delightful tangle of self-contradictions, these ‘feverish hopes and melancholy dreams’, these struggles with role and gender, form the heart of Zélide’s early correspondence with the Chevalier d’Hermenches. They are not exactly love letters. But they are highly personal, intense, and sometimes astonishingly confessional. They also leave room for a great deal of lively discussion of local Utrecht gossip, scandal, marriage schemes, reading, and what Zélide called her ‘metaphysics’. Above all, they discuss the future. What is to become of Zélidê
3
In her remarkable summer letter of July 1764, Zélide set out two possible and radically different directions for her life. What she is most concerned about – this young woman of the European Enlightenment – is sexual happiness and intellectual fulfillment. The two do not necessarily coincide. She puts two alternatives before the Chevalier d’Hermenches.
First, she could be an independent woman. She could model herself on the celebrated Parisian wit and beauty Ninon de Lenclos, live a self-sufficient life in a city (Amsterdam, Geneva, London or Paris are all considered), take lovers as it pleased her, write books, keep a literary salon, and develop a circle of trusted and intimate friends. Or second, she could be a married woman. In this role, not at all to be despised, she could fulfil the wishes of her parents, make a good aristocratic marriage to ‘a man of character’, find emotional security in her family, have children, and look after a large country estate in Holland. This too could be immensely fulfilling, provided only that she found a truly loving and intelligent husband, who ‘valued her affections’, who ‘concerned himself with pleasing her’, and above all, who did not bore her.
‘You may judge of my desires and distastes,’ she wrote to the Chevalier d’Hermenches. ‘If I had neither a father nor a mother I would be a Ninon, perhaps – but being more fastidious and more faithful than she, I would not have quite so manylovers. Indeed if the first one was truly lovable, I think I might not change at all…’
This possibility sounds like Zélide setting her cap at the Chevalier, a thing that she would often contrive. But perhaps she was not entirely serious? She continued: ‘But I have a father and mother: I do not want to cause their deaths or poison their lives. So I will not be a Ninon; I would like to be the wife of a man of character – a faithful and virtuous wife – but for that, I must love and be loved.’
But then, was Zélide entirely serious about marriage either? ‘When I ask myself whether – supposing I didn’t much love my husband – whether I would love no other man; whether the idea of duty, of marriage vows, would hold up against passion, opportunity, a hot summer night…I blush at my response!’ Here was the premonition of the choice that has faced so many modern women since: career or marriage, freedom or faithfulness.
The extraordinary fascination of Zélide’s life story lies in how this choice worked out in practice, over the next forty years. It was not, of course, by any means as she had planned it. She did marry and settle on a country estate, but she never had children and she was desperately lonely for much of her life. Equally she did write books, notably the exquisitely observed social comedy Mistress Henley (1784), the influential and tragic love story Caliste (1788) and the proto-feminist novel Three Women (1795). And she did have her hot summer nights. But she was intellectually isolated, and ended by pouring much of her emotional life into letter-writing. The great social changes of the French Revolution came too late to save her. After her death in 1805, at the age of sixty-five, her books and her story were soon apparently forgotten.
4
Despite all her determination to direct her own life, Zélide’s destiny was shaped and influenced by four very different men. The first was her older and clandestine correspondent the Chevalier d’Hermenches, a close friend of Voltaire’s, the sophisticated familiar of the Swiss and Paris salons, whose powerful influence – both emotional and literary – lasted until Zélide was over thirty. He was a clever man who understood her very well, but he was also an ambiguous friend, who like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was perhaps ultimately planning to set her up as his mistress. Zélide may have colluded in this, enjoying what she called ‘the salt’ and flattering attention of his witty letters, flirting with him, and co-operating with his mad matrimonial schemes (which seemed perilously like propositions of menage-à-trois). He may eventually have ruined her chances of making a happy and truly fulfilling marriage.
The second figure is one of many, often rather preposterous suitors who fluttered over horizon at Castle Zuylen This was none other than the young Scottish law student, traveller on the Grand Tour, and would-be seducer, James Boswell Esquire. Boswell came to Utrecht in 1763 at the age of twenty-five, shortly after he had first met Dr Johnson in London. He was satisfactorily deep in his own emotional crisis, struggling with manicdepressive episodes, the mania involving sexual adventures and the depression involving drink.
But he was also just discovering his true metier as biographer and autobiographer, and keeping his first secret Journals. Thus the encounter with Zélide struck literary sparks, and ignited one of her best and most outrageous correspondences, with Boswell in the unlikely and ludicrous role of moral tutor. He undoubtedly brought a great deal of fun, charm and frivolity into her life. He eventually proposed marriage to Zélide (by letter) in 1768. She turned him down by return of post: rather exquisitely on strictly literary grounds, since they disagreed on the way to translate a paragraph of his bestselling book about Corsica.
The third was the man she actually married in 1771: to everyone’s surprise and against everyone’s advice, and to the Chevalier’s acute irritation. Zélide had reached the critical age of thirty-one. Her suitor was her younger brother’s tutor, the retiring, stammering, genial, thoughtful, but largely silent and unexpressive Charles de Charrière. He took Zélide away to live on his small country estate of le Pontet, at Colombier on the Swiss border, surrounded by a walled garden, placid vineyards and with a very distant view of the lake of Geneva.
Here the youthful figure of Zélide largely disappears from view. Her childless marriage was accounted, perhaps wrongly, as a disaster. But the person who re-emerges some ten years later, is Zélide transformed into the formidable if disillusioned Madame Isabelle de Charrière, author, moralist and (still) unquenchable letter writer.
Then the fourth, most unexpected and most unaccountable of all the men in her life, appears on the horizon. He was the young, volatile, red-haired French intellectual, Benjamin Constant. Madame de