Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. Richard Holmes
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was aged twenty, while Zélide was married, worldly wise and aged forty-seven. Zélide’s influence over her protégé was to last for almost a decade, and produce the last remarkable correspondence of her life. When she was finally supplanted in Benjamin Constant’s affections, it was by the turbulent and Romantic figure of Madame de Staël, and in many ways it killed Zélide.
Yet even after her death, her influence continued to work powerfully on both of them, helping to shape both Benjamin Constant’s autobiographical masterpiece Adolphe (1805), and Madame de Staël’s famous novel of passionate awakenings, Corinne (1807). It was difficult to say whether Zélide (or Madame de Charrière), had in the end failed or succeeded in her life’s plan. Or perhaps it was simply too soon to draw a conclusion.
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That question, like Zélide herself, was largely forgotten for more than a hundred years. Almost everything except her love story Caliste fell out of fashion and out of print. Despite the presence of both James Boswell and Benjamin Constant in her story, neither French nor English biographers of the nineteenth-century were much interested by lives of women of this period, unless they were saints or strumpets, or somebody’s sister, or Joan of Arc or Queen Victoria. Sainte-Beuve alone considered her worthy of a short essay, commending Zélide for writing fine, aristocratic French prose ‘in the manner of Versailles’, but mocking her infatuation with Constant.
But in 1919 Zélide found an unlikely champion. A young English architectural historian, Geoffrey Scott, was visiting Ouchy on Lake Geneva, and one rainy autumn afternoon he discovered copies of Zélide’s books in the Lausanne University Library. He was so struck by the paradoxes of Zélide’s story, and certain resonances it had with his own complicated emotional life, that he began an intensive period of research, reading all her novels, visiting Zélide’s estate at nearby Colombier, and digging out her unpublished letters. Scott later wrote: ‘Today a sentimental journey to her home at Le Colombier, which thrilled me. There is a little secret staircase concealed in cupboards connecting her room with the one Benjamin used to have, which would be amusing…[Madame de Staël’s] Coppet I loved. Altogether I’ve fallen under the charm of these shores.’
Early in his research, Scott unearthed a rare two-volume study of her work, Madame de Charrière et Ses Amis, published in a limited edition in Geneva in 1906. This remarkable book was a labour of love, which had been minutely compiled over a lifetime by a local Swiss historian of Neufchâtel, Philippe Godet. Godet might be described as the last of Zélide’s protégés. He wrote tenderly in his preface: ‘Twenty years ago I fell in love with Madame de Charrière and her work…for twenty years writing her biography has been my ruling passion…and for those twenty years I have been gently mocked by my friends for the childish minuteness and unbelievable slowness of my researches.’
These two vast, shapeless, erudite, pedantic and loving tomes, proved an added incitement to Scott’s natural – and indeed rather dandyish – sense of aesthetic form. He immediately set out to write exactly the opposite kind of biographical study of Zélide: a brief, elegant, highly stylized and distinctly sardonic ‘portrait’, partly inspired by the recent success of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians(1918), which had risked one controversial account of a woman – that of Florence Nightingale. ‘Perfect as workmanship,’ enthused Scott, ‘a book in ten thousand’.
Geoffrey Scott was greatly intrigued by Zélide’s intense and unusual relationships, first with the Chevalier d’Hermenches and then with Benjamin Constant. It turned out that they were uncle and nephew, and they offer to the biographer a tempting – though fictional – symmetry to Zélide’s life, providing portraits to be ‘hung on either side’ of hers. In fact Scott (following Sainte-Beuve) deliberately gave most weight to the affair with Constant, so that the period of eight years when it flourished (1787–1794) actually occupies over half of his book. Yet this produces a psychological drama of such interest, told with such an a engaging mixture of tenderness and malice, that the reader is barely aware of the skillful foreshortening involved. Scott explores the emotional significance of the age gap, the curious sexual currents behind their voluminous literary correspondance, the obsession with ‘frankness and sincerity’, and the profound intellectual impact of each upon the other.
He has a shrewd and witty awareness, so essential to the biographer, of the haunting difference between the written document and the life. ‘It may confidently be asserted that the habit of letter-writing has estranged far more lovers than it has united…To dip the quill in ink is a magical gesture: it sets free in each of us a new and sometimes a forbidding sprite, the epistolary self. The personality disengaged by the pen is something apart and often ironically diverse from that other personality of act and speech. Thus in the correspondence of lovers there will be four elements at play – four egoisms to be placated instead of two. And by this grim mathematical law the permutations of possible offence will be calculably multiplied.’ (Chapter 11)
Yet the biography never becomes laboured or abstract. Scott always envisaged Zélide’s life in sharp, architectural outline, and executed this with wonderful graphic effects. But he also viewed it skeptically. He presented the brief interlude with Boswell as high comedy, and the long marriage with Charles de Charrière as a relentless, matrimonial satire. While the final irruption of Germaine de Staël in her daemonic coach on the road to Lausanne, at the opening of Chapter 13, is described with something approaching gothic melodrama.
Above all Scott saw Zélide’s determination to choose her own life, her own destiny, in the face of eighteenth-century social conventions, as both the crux of the biography and the source of its ‘unadmitted but evident tragedy’. For Scott this was a terrible if heroic error, so that Zélide ‘failed, immensely and poignantly’ in her search for happiness.
This, at any rate, is the challenging note on which the biography opens. It is a proposition taken from Benjamin Constant, the young intellectual enchanter, and the male figure in the story with whom Scott most closely identified. Constant later wrote of Zélide in Adolphe: ‘Like so many others this woman had begun her career by sailing forth to conquer society, rejoicing in the possession of moral toughness and a powerful mind. But she did not understand the ways of the world and, again like so many others, through failing to adapt herself to an artificial but necessary code of behaviour, she had lived to see her progress disappointed and her youth pass joylessly away until, finally, old age overtook her without subduing her.’ (Adolphe, Chapter 1) This was exactly what Scott, as Zélide’s first modern English biographer and champion, apparently concluded of his heroine too.
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But did hê Geoffrey Scott’s personal identification with his material was far greater than at first appears. It is partly this that makes the biography so subtly engaging and self-contradictory. Far from producing a coolly objective study of Zélide, the deliberately polished ‘studio portrait’ that he claimed, Scott was writing something perilously close to autobiography. This too makes the biography peculiarly modern in its shifting layers of symbolism and self-reflection.
For the previous decade (and through most of the First World War) Scott had been working as the personal assistant of the celebrated art historian Bernard Berenson, comfortably housed in his vast Florentine Villa, ‘I Tati’. Here Scott cultivated an intense platonic relationship with Berenson’s wife Mary, twenty years his senior, and upon whom he had become emotionally dependent.
Scott – handsome, clever and dilettantish (he had won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford) could be devastatingly charming. But he was also disorganized, spoilt, selfish and decidedly rakish. In an effort to break away from Mary, he embarked on a number of other affairs, both platonic and otherwise: one with Berenson’s young assistant Nicky Mariano, another with the elderly Edith Wharton in Paris. Then suddenly and unexpectedly in 1918 he married Mary Berenson’s great friend, the aristocratic and neurasthenic Lady Sybil Cutting, who also had a grand house in Florence, the Villa Medici.
The marriage almost immediately ran into difficulties. Ironically, it was only held together (according to Lady Sybil’s daughter, Iris Origo) by their mutual interest in Zélide,