Scott on Zélide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott

Isabelle de Tuyll was also unusually well-educated. Her liberal-minded father, recognizing the exceptional talents of his eldest daughter, had spared no expense. As a girl she was given a clever young governess from Paris, Mlle Prevost, and she was soon studying French, Latin, Greek, mathematics, music, algebra, and astronomy. Later she was tutored by a mathematics professor from Utrecht university. She took a particular delight in reading Voltaire and calculating conic sections. She once remarked nonchalantly: ‘I find an hour or two of mathematics freshens my mind and lightens my heart.’

By the time she was twenty in 1760, Isabelle de Tuyll was being besieged by suitors, proving particularly attractive to rich Dutch merchant bankers and penniless Germain princelings. But now she was too quick and clever for most of them. They bored or irritated her. The first time she ever saw the Chevalier d’Hermenches, at the Duke of Brunswick ball in the Hague, typically she broke all the rules of etiquette by going straight up to him and asking ‘Sir, why aren’t you dancing?’ At first he was deeply offended, then quickly charmed. ‘At our first word, we quarreled,’ he said later, ‘at our second, we became friends for life.’ It was soon after that their clandestine correspondence began.

Though admired by her younger siblings (and adored by her brother Ditie), her parents now thought of Isabelle with increasing anxiety. In the salons of Utrecht and the Hague, she was getting the reputation of a belle esprit, an unconventional free spirit, a rationalist, a religious sceptic: in short, a young person of ‘ungoverned vivacity’. This was all very well for a man, but perilous for a young woman. She might never marry and settle down. Her name ‘Belle de Zuylen’ was now spoken with a certain frisson.

To confirm these worries, Isabelle soon began to write poems, stories and essays. In 1762 she published her first and distinctly rebellious short story, ‘Le Noble’, in the Le Journal Etranger. It described 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

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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.

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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 Charrière met him on a rare visit to Paris in 1787. Now the positions were almost exactly reversed from the Zuylen days with the Chevalier d’Hermenches. Benjamin Constant 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, discovered that autumn of 1919 on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Scott had taken Lady Sybil on a rest cure. Iris Origo later wrote in her memoirs: ‘Thus by a curious irony, a woman [Zélide] whose own emotional life had been singularly unhappy, brought for a few months, harmony to another woman’s marriage. In the absorption of bringing Zélide and Boswell, d’Hermenches and Constant, to life again, Geoffrey and his wife suspended the relentless analysis of their own feelings; they laughed and worked together. Perhaps, too, there was in all this a certain process of self-identification’ (Images and Shadows)

After the initial excitement of discovery, Scott’s work on the biography which he had intended to finish in a year, slowed down. Like Philippe Godet, he underwent the classic ‘transfer experience’ of the modern biographer, starting as the detached scholar but gradually being drawn hypnotically into all the domestic details and dramas of Zélide’s world. The historical story becoming more and more a weird reflection of his own life, and emotional entanglements.

In 1922 Geoffrey Scott wrote to Nicky Mariano: ‘The thing that makes me stick in the mud with that book, is that [Zélide’s] relations with Benjamin Constant, after his marriage, have an uncanny likeness to Mary [Berenson’s] feelings and actions four years ago. I understand it almost too well to write about it in the detached and light manner which the tone of the book requires…The idea of Mary’s reading the manuscript and drawing the inevitable parallels at each point embarrasses me a good deal in writing it.’

When not working on Zélide, Scott drifted away from Lady Sybil and his marriage. He spent the summer of 1923in England and embarked on a refreshing new affair, this time with Harold Nicolson’s wife, the aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West. Vita was another powerful literary woman with a country estate, the beautiful manor house of Long Barn in Kent (near her ancestral home of Knole). As an established writer she too encouraged Scott with his work on Zélide. He could confide in her without ceremony, and revealed his increasingly intense involvement with Zélide’s story.

‘I’m going to busy myself this week with Madame de Charrière,’ he wrote to Vita in October 1923. ‘I’ve dragged her by the scruff of the neck round two or three difficult corners. I’ve done the meeting with Benjamin and the first fantastic part of their friendship: it’s good that part, I hope, and goes with a swing. I give it mostly through Monsieur de Charrière’s eyes, bewildered and misunderstanding, watching rather breathlessly the spectacle of Zélide coming back to life. I’ve got Mme de Staël in the wings just ready to pop in…with her private theatricals, negroid beauty, her tramping insensibility and impeccable bad taste.’

He emphasized the daring speed he had set himself in the narrative. ‘I’ve struck a very quick tempo, and can’t afford now to slow it: the book will be quite shockingly short.’ But above all Scott stressed his own personal excitement with the work, and the way he was now inspired by Vita. ‘It’s fun, though, doing it. I do it for you.’

So the tangled web of Geoffrey Scott’s relationships (not in fact unduly tangled by the standards of post-War Bloomsbury), each generated an extensive correspondence about the biography, and curiously mimicked different aspects of Zélide’s own story. Indeed Mary Berenson, Edith Wharton, Lady Sybil, and Vita Sackville-West were each separately told by Scott that Zélide’s biography was secretly and lovingly dedicated to them alone, and contained their disguised portraits as Zélide.

Similarly, it was to be understood that Scott himself was sometimes the mercurial Constant, sometimes the worldly Chevalier d’Hermenches, and sometimes (though rarely) the long-suffering and inadequate M. de Charrière. On the other hand, he was never James Boswell. Mostly he identified with Benjamin Constant, writing to Mary Berenson that drawing Constant’s portrait gave him the most trouble: ‘he is so many sided, so inexhaustible, it is difficult to bring him out fully within the compass of my small scale.’

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Far from softening or sentimentalizing the texture of the biography, this secret shimmer of subjectivity gives it an almost unnatural sharpness and stylistic brightness. From the opening Scott makes brilliant metaphoric use of the pastel portrait of Zélide by George de la Tour, and the contrasting monotonies of Dutch landscape (and society) stretching behind her. The whole book has a strong visual sense, and Scott continually presents Zélide’s moods in terms of beautifully conjured landscapes or interiors, a series of Dutch still-lives.

Yet just as he planned, he moves the narrative forward at a dazzling pace, compressing and summarizing the story, foreshortening perspective, and playing off the immobility of Zélide’s life at Zuylen and Colombier against the frantic gyrations of Boswell or Constant. The arrival and departure of carriages forms a choric motif, reaching its apotheosis in the fatal carriage of Madame de Staël. Scott is so enraptured by Constant’s peripatetic adventures in England (chapter 7), and later in Germany (chapter 9), that they almost threaten to leave Zélide entirely behind.

He wonderfully catches minor characters, by impish anecdote and ironic aside. His handling of the inquisitive Pastor Chaillet with his miniscule handwriting, and the well-meaning and foolish Madame Huber at Le Pontet, are masterly. While Constant’s animal-obsessed German princess, Wilhelmina, is immortalized in a single footnote.