The Princesse De Cleves Read online

  ‘Why should it be,’ she exclaimed, ‘that I must accuse you of M. de Clèves’s death? Why did I not start to know you since the time when I became free, or why not before I was engaged to another? Why has fate put such an insurmountable barrier between us?’

  ‘There is no barrier, madame,’ M. de Nemours replied. ‘You alone stand in the way of my happiness; you alone are subjecting yourself to a law, to which neither morality nor reason can subject you.’

  ‘It is true,’ she responded, ‘that I am sacrificing much to an idea of duty that exists only in my mind. Wait and see what time may do. M. de Clèves has only recently expired, and this figure of mortality is too close for me to have any clear view of the matter. Nonetheless, be contented with having gained the love of a woman who would never have loved anything, had she not seen you; believe that my feelings for you are everlasting and will endure regardless of what I may do. Adieu,’ she said. ‘This conversation shames me: I permit you, and even beg you, to report it to M. le Vidame.’

  With these words, she left the room, and M. de Nemours could not hold her. She found the Vidame in the nearest chamber. She seemed so distressed that he dared not speak to her and handed her into her carriage without a word. He returned to find M. de Nemours, who was so full of joy, sorrow, amazement and admiration – in short, of all the feelings that derive from passionate love when it is full of hope and fear – that he no longer had the use of his senses. It was a long time before the Vidame could persuade him to recount what had passed between them. He did so at last; and M. de Chartres, though not himself in love, wondered no less than M. de Nemours at the virtue, spirit and worthiness of Mme de Clèves. They considered what outcome the prince might expect; and, despite the misgivings that his love inspired, he agreed with the Vidame that Mme de Clèves could not possibly abide by her present resolve. Yet they accepted that they must follow her orders lest, should people learn of his feelings towards her, she might make some statement or undertake some public commitment that she would afterwards adhere to, fearing others might believe she had loved him while her husband was still alive.

  M. de Nemours decided to follow the King. The journey was one he could not easily refuse and he determined to leave without even attempting to see Mme de Clèves again from the place where he had sometimes seen her. He begged the Vidame to speak to her. How much he told him to tell her! What an infinite succession of arguments to persuade her to vanquish her scruples! In short, part of the night had already passed before M. de Nemours thought to leave him in peace.

  That was something Mme de Clèves was in no state to enjoy. It was so unprecedented a thing for her to have abandoned the constraints she had imposed on herself, to have, for the first time in her life, permitted a man to tell her he loved her and to have said that she loved him, that she could no longer recognize herself. She was amazed at what she had done; she regretted; she was overjoyed: her whole heart was filled with turmoil and passion. Once more, she examined the arguments of duty that stood in the way of her happiness; she was distressed to find them so powerful and regretted having so persuasively shown them to M. de Nemours. Though the idea of marrying him had come to her mind the moment she saw him again in the garden, it had not impressed her with the same force as the conversation they had just had; and there were moments when she was hard put to understand how she could be miserable if they were to marry. She would greatly have wished to tell herself she was unfounded both in her scruples about the past and her misgivings for the future. Yet, at other moments, reason and duty demonstrated entirely the opposite and quickly drove her to resolve that she would never remarry and never see M. de Nemours. But this was a most painful decision to fix in a heart so deeply smitten as hers and so recently abandoned to the charms of love. At length, to find some repose, she thought that it was not yet essential to suffer the agony of taking any decision; propriety gave her a considerable space of time to make up her mind; but she did resolve to hold fast and to have no communication with M. de Nemours.

  The Vidame came to see her and served the prince, arguing his cause with all possible intelligence and devotion; but he could not change her mind as to her conduct, or that which she had imposed on M. de Nemours. She told him that her plan was to remain in her present state; that she knew this was difficult to carry out; but that she hoped to have the strength to do it. She so persuaded him of her attachment to the idea that M. de Nemours had been the cause of her husband’s death, and how strongly she believed that marrying him would be contrary to her duty, that the Vidame feared it might be unwise to remove this idea. He did not tell the prince what he thought but, in his account of the conversation, left him with all the hope that a man who is loved must reasonably feel.

  The next day, they left and joined the King. The Vidame wrote to Mme de Clèves, at M. de Nemours’s request, about the prince; and in a second letter closely following the first, M. de Nemours added a few lines in his own hand. But Mme de Clèves, not wishing to infringe upon the rules she had set for herself and fearing the accidents that can happen with letters, instructed the Vidame that she would not accept any from him, if he continued to mention M. de Nemours; and her request was so emphatic that the prince himself begged him not to mention his name again.

  The court accompanied the Queen of Spain as far as Poitou. While they were away, Mme de Clèves kept to herself and, the further she was removed from M. de Nemours and everything that might call him to mind, the more she thought of M. de Clèves, whose memory she made it a point of honour to preserve. Her reasons for not marrying M. de Nemours seemed strong as far as duty was concerned and insurmountable for her peace of mind. The end of the prince’s love and the evils of jealousy, which she felt were inseparable from marriage, pointed to the certain misery towards which she was heading; but she saw too that she was undertaking an impossible task in trying to resist in the presence of the most delightful man in the world, whom she loved and who loved her, and to resist him on grounds that were contrary neither to morality nor to propriety. She considered that absence alone and distance could give her some strength; she thought that she needed them both to maintain her resolve not to enter an engagement, and even to prevent her from seeing M. de Nemours; and she decided to take a fairly long journey, to pass all the time that convention dictated she should live in seclusion. Some estates she owned in the Pyrenees seemed the most appropriate place to choose. She left a few days before the return of the court; and, before leaving, wrote to the Vidame to beg him not to think of seeking news of her, or writing to her.

  M. de Nemours suffered as much from this journey as another might at his mistress’s death. He felt real pain at the thought of not seeing Mme de Clèves for so long and this, above all, at a time when he had experienced the pleasure of seeing her and seeing her moved by his love. Yet he could do nothing except bewail his fate, much though his suffering was increased. Mme de Clèves, whose mind had endured such turmoil, became desperately ill as soon as she arrived at her estates, and news of this reached the court. M. de Nemours was inconsolable: in his anguish, he gave way to despair and folly. The Vidame was hard put to prevent him from exhibiting his feelings in public, and also to contain him and dissuade him from going in person to discover how she was. M. le Vidame’s relationship with the princess and his friendship provided an excuse for sending many couriers. At length, they were told she was out of immediate danger; but she still languished in a wasting sickness that left little hope for her life.

  So long and so near a contemplation of death showed Mme de Clèves the things of this life in a much different light from the one in which we see them in health. The inevitability of dying, which she felt to approach, accustomed her to become detached from everything, and the length of her illness made this a habit. However, when she recovered from this condition, she found that M. de Nemours was not effaced from her heart; but she summoned to her help, in protecting herself against him, all the arguments she could find for never marrying him. A considerable confli
ct took place in her. Finally, she overcame the remains of her passion, already weakened from the feelings inspired by her illness. The idea of death had returned her to thinking of M. de Clèves, and his memory, which was in harmony with her duty, became deeply impressed on her heart. The passions and relationships of this world appeared to her as they do to those who can take a broader and more distant view of them. Her health was much weakened and this helped her to preserve these feelings; but, knowing what circumstances can do to the wisest resolve, she had no wish to risk undermining her own, or to return to the places where the object of her former love resided. She retired, on the pretext of a change of air, to a convent, without declaring any fixed resolve to abandon court life.

  When M. de Nemours first heard of it, he realized the significance of this retreat and how great it was. At that moment, he felt he had no further hope; but the loss of his hopes did not prevent him from employing every means to bring Mme de Clèves back. He got the Queen to write, he got the Vidame to write, he got him to go; but all was in vain. The Vidame saw her: she did not tell him that she had taken any decision. Yet he believed that she would never return. Finally, M. de Nemours went in person, on the pretext of taking the waters. She was extremely surprised and upset to learn of his arrival. She sent word to him, through a person of worth who was dear to her and whom she had with her at that time, that she begged him not to find it untoward if she did not expose herself to the danger of seeing him and so destroy, by his presence, feelings which she ought to preserve; that she would like him to know that, having found her duty and peace of mind in conflict with the inclination she had felt to belong to him, the other things of this world must appear so indifferent to her that she renounced them for all time; that she no longer thought of anything except the other life, and that she had no further desire except to see him in the same frame of mind as herself.

  M. de Nemours thought he would die of sorrow in the presence of the woman who brought him this message. He begged her twenty times to go back to Mme de Clèves and contrive for him to see her; but the woman told him that Mme de Clèves had not only forbidden her to bring any message from him, but even to report their conversation. So, at last, the prince had to depart, as overwhelmed with grief as any man can be when he has lost all hope of seeing again a person whom he loves with the strongest, most natural and most legitimate passion that has ever been. Yet he was still not finally discouraged, and did all that might persuade her to alter her mind. At length, when many years had passed, time and absence assuaged his pain and extinguished his feelings. Mme de Clèves lived in a manner suggesting that she would never relent. For a part of the year she stayed in the convent, and the remainder at home; but in seclusion and in holier occupations than those of the strictest religious order; and her life, which was somewhat brief, left inimitable examples of virtuous conduct.

  Notes

  BOOK ONE

  1 … the last years of the reign of Henri II… Diane de Poitiers, Duchesse de Valentinois (p. 23): Mme de Lafayette situates the events of the novel towards the end of the Valois dynasty, which started in 1328 with the accession of Philippe VI. Henri II, son of François I (1494–1547), born in 1519, succeeded his father in 1547 and reigned until his death in 1559. While still Duc d’Orléans, he fell in love with Diane de Poitiers (1499–15 66), the wife of Louis de Brézé: though the future King was barely in his teens and she was twenty years his senior, she remained his mistress for the rest of his life. The King’s elder brother, François de Valois, died at Tournon, aged nineteen, in 1536. Three years before that, Henri had married Catherine de Médicis (1519–89), daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose three sons were to become the last Valois Kings, as François II (reigned 1559–60), Charles IX (reigned 1560–74) and Henri III (reigned 1574–89), the dynasty being succeeded by that of the Bourbons, which survived until the abolition of the monarchy in 1792.

  Mme de Lafayette’s main sources for the history of the period were: François de Mézeray’s Abrégé de l’histoire de France, published in 1643–51; Pierre de Brantôme’s anecdotal memoirs, Recueil d’aucuns discours, written in the second half of the sixteenth century (though not published until a few years before La Princesse de Clèves); Michel de Castelnau’s Mémoires, also written in the late sixteenth century and published with additions by Jean Le Laboureur in 1659 under the title Additions aux Mémoires de Castelnau; Pierre Matthieu’s Histoire de France (1631); and various works, including André du Chesne’s Histoire d’ Angleterre (1614), the translations of Francis Godwin’s Annals (1647) and Nicholas Sanders’ account of the English Reformation, De Origine ac Progressu Schimatis Anglicani, for the stories of Mary Stuart and Anne Boleyn. She follows these sources very closely for descriptions of events and characters.

  2 Mme Elisabeth de France… Mary Stuart… Madame (p. 24): Elisabeth, Henri II’s daughter, married Philip II of Spain in June 1559, at the age of fourteen, and died in 1568. It was believed in France that Don Carlos, Philip’s son, had fallen in love with her and that the Spanish King had her poisoned (which explains the remark about her beauty proving fatal). Mary Stuart (1542–87), later Queen of Scots, was the daughter of James V of Scotland and Marie de Guise. In 1558, the year when the novel begins, she married François II, heir to the throne, or Dauphin, and as the Dauphine, or Reine Dauphine, she plays a leading role in the story. ‘Madame’, the King’s sister, is Marguerite de France (1525–74) who, after her marriage to the Duc de Savoie in July 1559, became Marguerite de Savoie. She was a poet and patronized other writers, including the poet Ronsard.

  3 The King of Navarre… the Duc de Guise… the Cardinal de Lorraine… the Chevalier de Guise… the Prince de Condé (pp. 24–5): The King of Navarre (1518–62), is Antoine de Bourbon, whose son became the first King of the Bourbon dynasty as Henri IV in 1559. The Guise brothers – Francois I (1519–63), Duc de Guise, Charles (1524–74), Cardinal de Lorraine, and François (1534–63), Chevalier de Guise and Grand Prieur – whose influence and ambition are emphasized throughout the novel, were the three sons of Claude, Duc de Lorraine, created Duc de Guise in 15 27. When Henri II was succeeded in 1559 by the fifteen-year-old François II, then in 1560 by the nine-year-old Charles IX, the Guise family became the most powerful in France. François I, the eldest brother, had distinguished himself particularly by recapturing Calais from the English, and his son Henri (1550–88) took part in the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in 1572. The Prince de Condé, Louis de Bourbon (1530–69), a leader of the Protestant faction in the Religious Wars, was assassinated after being taken prisoner at the Battle of Jarnac, in 1569.

  Mme de Lafayette’s description of the brilliance of Henri II’s court in its last two years – the period of the novel – and of the still friendly rivalry between these nobles implies an awareness that this was founded on a fragile balance, and that it was soon to give way to bitter sectarian conflicts: in this way, the historical and political background to the story harmonizes with its sense of the need for order in human relationships and of the impermanence of human happiness.

  4 The Duc de Nevers… the Prince de Clèves… the Vidame de Chartres… the Duc de Nemours (p. 25): With the last three, Mme de Lafayette comes to the central male characters in the novel. Francois de Clèves (1516–62), Duc de Nevers, had three sons, the second, Jacques, being the Prince de Clèves in question. For the purposes of the story, the author tampers with the historical record: in reality, Jacques married Diane de la Marck and died at the age of twenty, in 1564, after a life of ill-health. His early death and his obscurity make him a plausible figure to lend his name to the hero of the novel. ‘Vidame’ was a feudal title, originally applied to the person who acted on behalf of a bishop in certain secular matters. The Vidame de Chartres was François de Vendôme, Prince de Chabanois (1524–62), the uncle of the fictitious heroine (Mlle de Chartres, then Mme de Clèves), and the main confidant of the hero, the Duc de Nemours. Jacques de Savoie, Duc de Nemours, is also a historical figure: born in 15
31, he married the Duc de Guise’s widow, Anne d’Este, in 1566. Mme de Lafayette takes much of her description of him from Brantôme (see Note 1), together with the details of the interest shown in him, as a possible consort, by Queen Elizabeth I (though she brings the negotiations forward by a year or two).

  5 The Connétable de Montmorency… the Maréchal de Saint-André (p. 26): The Connétable was supreme commander of the army. In the text of the novel, I have left this title in French, instead of finding an English equivalent (‘constable’ does not quite convey the dignity of the office). Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1492–1567), fell out of favour under François I after being suspected of treason. As mentioned in the next paragraph, his son François married an illegitimate daughter of Henri II. Jacques d’Albon, Maréchal de Saint-André, was to die in battle in 1562. He appears here as a leading figure in the court who was not attached to any faction, while the competition between the Connétable and the Guise family suggests its underlying instability.

  6 … a succession of victories (p. 27): The struggle between France and the Holy Roman Empire, under Charles V, continued into Henri II’s reign. The Battle of Saint-Quentin, in 1557, was a disaster for the French army under Montmorency, who had defeated the forces of the Empire at Renti three years earlier. The Duc de Guise successfully defended Metz in 1552 and won Calais in 1558. Peace negotiations were opened at Cercamp in October 1558.

  7 The Queen of Navarre (p. 34): Jeanne d’Albret (1528–72), daughter of Henri, King of Navarre, married Antoine de Bourbon in 1548, and he succeeded to the title (see Note 3).