Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott. Richard Holmes
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La Tour has painted Madame de Charrière: a face too florid for beauty, a portrait of wit and wilfulness where the mind and senses are disconcertingly alert; a temperament impulsive, vital, alarming; an arrowy spirit, quick, amusing, amused.
Houdon has left of her a bust in his fine manner: a distinguished head, a little sceptical and aloof.
Both portraits are convincing; both were applauded as faithful likenesses by this lady and her admirers.
The interest to us of her life, its unadmitted but evident tragedy to her, is there in these two interpretations, both real, of a character so avid of living, so sceptical of life, which could find no harmony within itself nor acquiesce in the discord.
Madame de Charrière was not of marble, emphatically, nor even of the hardness of Houdon’s clay. But the coldness of Houdon’s bust – its touch of aloofness – corresponds to an intellectual ideal, more masculine than feminine, which she set before herself. It embodies a certain harsh clear cult of the reason which at every crisis falsified her life. She was not more reasonable, in the last resort, than the rest of humanity. She paid in full and stoically, the penalty of supposing herself to be so.
La Tour was nearer the truth: the painted shadow is less conventional than the carven image, and colour, with its changing lights, a little nearer to the stuff of which we are made.
But even in La Tour’s portrait, which misses her scepticism, it is not easy to see how the subject of it could well achieve happiness, or make others happy. Madame de Charrière, who entered on life with so confident a will to these two human ends, knew as she lay dying in that desolate Swiss manor, her chosen exile, that she had failed, immensely and poignantly, of both.
Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll – to give Madame de Charrière her Dutch name – was born at the château of Zuylen in 1740 of one of the oldest families in Holland. To give her a Dutch name: that was the first freak of malice which Providence played on this surprising woman. Every physical and moral law, she used to say, must have been suspended in the circumstances of so paradoxical a nativity. A Dutch woman and a Tuyll – she felt herself in every fibre of mind and nature a stranger to that phlegmatic world. The van Tuylls were famous even among the old-fashioned nobility of Holland for a stolid virtue, a conventional probity, a profound pride of birth. By what trick of heredity had ‘Belle de Zuylen’ sprung from that grave, imposing stock – she, with her mocking spirit, so eager, so unquiet?
The background of her life was the great moated house at Zuylen, from whose walls innumerable van Tuylls looked down in stiff disapproval of their too lively descendant; where mynvrouw sat upright at her needlework and mynheer with placid rectitude sat thinking about the dykes. Outside, a Cuyp landscape with eternal cattle motionlessly browsing – were they too thinking of the public good? – and somewhere a solitary horseman slowly, slowly ambling – perhaps a Tuyll, mindful of his ‘droit de chasse.’ Truly a land where it was always afternoon, nay Sunday afternoon: a land where nothing ever happened – where nothing ever ought to happen – to ruffle the dead surface of that Tuyll serenity, born of many quarterings and an unblemished life. The Romans of the great days of Rome were not more virtuous, she said. But those great days of Rome were not very gay either, and Zuylen was more provincial than the Seven Hills.
In winter the scene changed to Utrecht, to that other grave house, damp and gentlemanly and bordered by the still canal. On one side the empty street, on the other the severe garden; a place of austere dignity, sombre in winter and silent. But sometimes, within, candles lit up the quiet stateliness of the shadowy rooms, and faultless dowagers would assemble for polite and disapproving talk. Andante was signed upon their conversation: no wide ideas, no quick emotion ever jarred that scrupulous society. Across this decent picture of still-life Belle de Zuylen moved, a single unquenched flame of lonely animation, ‘Ici l’on est vif tout seul.’
The van Tuylls were sincere folk; it was one of their almost too numerous virtues. In Belle this traditional sincerity took the form of a disconcerting frankness. Impatient of restraint, conscious in herself of a fundamental goodwill, she placed no bridle on her feverish spirit, her Voltairean wit, her subversive criticism of accepted values. She wished to be ‘a citizen of the country of all the world’—a natural ideal to one whose sympathy and curiosity were, from the first, amazingly wide. She brought a French quickness, an English sans-gêne, and (on her own confession) some ardent touches of the South, into a slow and solemn and passionless Dutch world. It was as though a firework were to go off – to keep going off – at a nice, orderly funeral.
Very orderly; very sedate and genteel. Nevertheless in Belle’s parents – and she was the first to admit it – there was nothing unduly puritanical or harsh. ‘My father,’ she wrote, ‘is a man accustomed to the paintings of a smiling landscape: he averts his eyes from the horrors of a tempest or St Laurence’s gridiron or the Last Judgment. The family dictionary is modelled on his thought. No exclamations, no lively expressions, nothing shocking.’ A good man, courteous and unaffected; a governor of the Province, conscientiously discharging his duty, and happy in works of building or administration, Monsieur de Tuyll’s only fault was to set a standard of virtue so high that one felt, in his presence, at a kind of moral disadvantage. ‘I never feel satisfied with myself in regard to him,’ is Belle’s reflection; for it was characteristic of her that she wanted the prize for goodness as well as the forbidden fruit. For the rest, he hated to interfere, and preferred not to notice whatever he might have to disapprove. He opposed a fin de non recevoir to her ‘lively expressions,’ and could he have seen into the very unconventional process of his daughter’s heart, or caught a glimpse of certain pages of her correspondence, no doubt he would have averted his eyes as from the gridiron of Saint Laurence.
The mother, thanks to her less noble origin, was more amenable. She had caught the Tuyll note: lively expressions had long since ceased to cross her kindly lips; but she was ‘known to joke’ and capitulated readily enough to an attack upon her sense of humour. And when disaster came, and those illicit letters did fall into her possession, she got over it. Belle was at pains to persuade her that, with it all, she was as good, nay better than another. ‘Et je voulais faire avouer à ma mère que telle que j’étais je valais encore mieux qu’une autre.’ The prize for goodness once more.
Tuyll to the bone, on the contrary, was the younger daughter, Jeanne-Marie. She figures but seldom in her sister’s letters; we discern her, clearly enough, tight, prim, conventional: a good girl, and likely to remain so. Plainly a prude, and favoured with a prettiness which failed to please, Jeanne distilled an atmosphere of disapproval not untainted with jealousy. She was, Belle frankly states, the kind of sister one would love better were she in America: in home life she showed a sulky temper and a taste for scenes of sentimental reconciliation conducted with unbearable solemnity. She married in due course a serious Dutchman who nevertheless consented to become the intermediary of that clandestine correspondence with Constant d’Hermenches in which Belle revealed herself so winningly – free, kindly, gay, spontaneous, Jeanne’s opposite at every point.
There were four brothers; the eldest was drowned while bathing, at eighteen; of the second she writes, ‘William is always out hunting, or else ill from having hunted too much: his temper is uncertain, his manner often hard and uncivil.’ She reads Plutarch with Vincent: ‘I try to separate in his mind the conceptions of book and pain.’ (‘Why is it,’ she once asked, ‘that the young should only know two categories of books – those they are forced to read, and those they read in secret?’) Vincent is slow, prudent, and systematic: in short, very Tuyll. He becomes a soldier, and Belle proposes to console herself for his loss by learning to play upon the lute. But Dietrich, three years older than Vincent, is her favourite. A simple-minded sailor, he returns from his long voyages and cannot leave his sister’s side; he sits on her bed at all hours listening to conversations ‘unlike anything in the world’ and confiding his naïve love affairs. Later on, it is to Dietrich that some of her most charming letters are addressed. He died, to her great sorrow, of consumption, in 1773.
If the problem of life had to be settled once for all on a fixed pattern, if no ideas should be revised and few be suffered to exist, this life