Persian Letters. Montesquieu

he, after having searched in his pocket, ‘it is not worth while waiting for the key. You can jump as well as I, I am sure, and it’s not a gate like that I’m afraid of.’ So saying, he ran at the gate and leapt over it as light as you like. He had noticed our embarrassment on first meeting him—for we were much moved—and so he set to work, out of pure good-nature, to put us at our ease. Little by little his age and his genius disappeared so completely that the conversation became as free and easy as if we had been his equals in every respect. We spoke of the arts and sciences. He questioned us on our travels, and as I had visited the east he addressed himself particularly to me, interesting himself in the smallest details of the lands through which I had traveled. I heard him say more than once that he regretted not having seen these countries. . . After having made the tour of his estate, laid out in the English style, we returned and were received by Madame la Baronne and her daughter. . . . The meal was simple and abundant. After dinner Montesquieu insisted that we should stay, and he kept us for three days, during which his conversation was equally amusing and instructive.” This, though of the gushing order, is evidently a true picture of the man who said, “He who writes well does not write as people write, but as he writes; very often in talking badly such a one writes well.” To himself may be applied what he said of Montaigne: “In most authors I see a writing man; in Montaigne, a thinking man.” He was always saying, “The misfortune of certain books is the killing work one has to do in condensing what the author took so much trouble to expand.”

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      This simplicity was the great charm of the man, as it is that of the writer. He never lectures the reader, he talks with him; “he makes him assist him in his composition.” In Paris he was, as in the country, as in his books, even-tempered, simple, and pleasantly merry. In the very heat of conversation he never lost his equanimity. Simple, profound, sublime, he charmed, instructed, without offence: was even more marvelous in conversation than in his works:¹ “and always that same energy when his hatred of despotism lighted his face.”² Without bitterness, without satire, full of wit and brilliant sallies, no one could tell a better story, promptly, vividly, without premeditation.³ And he was always more willing to listen than to talk; he learnt as much from conversation as from books. The Duchess de Chaulnes said of him, “That man makes his book in society: he remembers everything that is said to him, and only talks with those who have something to tell him worth remembering.: Such a man requires the company of the best brains to bring him out; with commonplace people he will be commonplace: and yet he could find wit in those who were called dull.⁴ It was possible, however, to bore him. On one occasion, when disputing with some portentous councilor who got warm and cried, “M. le Président, if it is not as I say, I will give you my head, “ he replied, coolly, “I accept; little gifts are the cement of friendship.”⁵ A certain young lady, un peu galante, annoyed him with a torrent of questions one evening. His opportunity came when she asked him in what happiness consisted. “Happiness,” he replied, “means for queens, fertility; for maidens, sterility; and for those who are near you, deafness.”⁶ Still he delighted in the company and conversation of women, and in his younger days did not object be in their best graces. He tells that he attached himself to such as he thought loved him, and detached himself as soon as he thought they didn’t:⁷ the manners of the Regency being somewhat different from ours.

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      The eighteenth century was in France the age of the “monstrous regiment of women.” The divine right of kings, as it had done in England half a century before, resolved itself into the divine right of mistresses. One legacy bequeathed by them was the French Revolution; modern conversation was the other. In England conversation remained among men, and produced clubs; in France women invaded it, and the salon was the result: the heyday past, the Regent’s mistress, the minister’s mistress, opened a salon, where Montesquieu and all celebrities might meet to talk. Claudine Guérin de Tencin, saddened by the suicide of a lover and the arrival of her forty-fifth year; Madame Geoffrin, “whimsical and cross-grained,” citizen’s daughter, millionaire’s widow, who had the excellent talent of drawing every one out in his own subject, and called her salon “a shop;” Marie de Vichy, Marquise du Deffand, whom Massillon could not convert, who was interested in nothing, and had neither temperament nor romance; and the Duchess de Chaulnes, the “intimate enemy” of Madame du Deffand, “a typical woman of the eighteenth century,” delighting only in wit, bons-mots, and gallantry, and made piercingly sagacious by her wicked life: these and others like them kept salons, primarily for their own amusement. Earnest talk on momentous matters was the one thing forbidden. Clear analysis of questions of finance, of morality, of legislation, clear mockery of the problems of human destiny, the facile, brilliant, and winged talk, “on everything à propos of nothing,” was the order of the day.

      Madame du Deffand was Montesquieu’s favourite among these. She gathered about her in her own phrase “les trompeurs, le trompés, et les trompettes”—everybody connected with diplomacy, in fact. In her salon the author of “L’Esprit des Lois” learned much. “I like that woman,” he said, “with all my heart; she pleases me, amuses me; it is impossible to weary in her company.” It was in this society that Montesquieu “talked out” his books; and the reader should remember that it was for this society they were written.

      Montesquieu was often glad to retire from the “official centers of conversation” to quieter houses, where he could be more at home, and where he could meet such marvels of the age as the two sisters of Madame de Rochefort, “the Marquise de Boufflers, who was faithful to her lover, and the Duchesse de Mirepoix, who was faithful to her husband.” But of all salons he preferred that the Duchesse d’Aiguillon. There he met the most interesting men of the day of all nationalities, attracted by the impartiality of the duchess, her abundant and original wit, her refined talk, her obligating manners, and her ability to speak four languages. Gustavus III. called her the “living journal of the Academy.” But she had judgment also; and authors consulted her about their works. Montesquieu liked her for herself and also because in her house he could meet Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur, wife of the Intendant of Bordeaux, who was “equally charming as mistress, as wife, and as friend.” It was in the arms of Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur that Montesquieu died on the 10th of February, 1755, in his sixty-sixth year.

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      Of “L’Esprit de Lois,” perhaps the greatest French book of the eighteenth century, “La Grandeur des Romains et leur décadence,” and Montesquieu’s minor works, it is not necessary to speak here. It has been said that Montesquieu only wrote one book, the “Persian Letters” and the “Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans” being studies for “L’Esprit des Lois;” but with a master the sketch is as perfect a work of art as the completed picture. “Timidity”—Montesquieu was a severe judge of himself—“timidity has been the curse of my life,” he said; but his very dread of being weak—which he never was—helped to make his first work a masterpiece.

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      Quesnay, the elder Mirabeau, Raynal, Morelly, Servan, Malesherbes, Voltaire, Beccaria, Filangieri, Blackstone, Ferguson, all descend from Montesquieu; and Gibbon found “the strong ray of philosophic light,” which “broke from Scotland in our times” upon political economy, only a reflection, though with a far steadier and more concentrated force, from the scattered but brilliant sparks kindled by the genius of Montesquieu. Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant imitated him; Talleyrand, the best servant France ever had