March 7th, 2009

Je ne vous ai pas rendu heureux, et je vous laisse malheureux, et moi je meurs; cependant je ne puis me résoudre à souhaiter de ne vous avoir pas connu.

Isabelle de Charrière, Caliste ou suite des lettres écrites de Lausanne (1786)

From Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse to Malraux’s Conquérants, French letters since the eighteenth century are strongly coloured by death and, more particularly, by death wishes. In the last couple of weeks, I have been looking with considerable interest at this subject that most will regard as unnecessarily stern in an age where happiness has been erected into a moral imperative.

What such people overlook, of course, is that happiness is sometimes impossible to achieve. Neither Rousseau, nor Goethe, nor Balzac, nor Wilde, nor Malraux can provide their heroes with the truly disinterested death that, in certain circumstances, can be the only palliative to their suffering.

Isabelle de Charrière’s sensibilité sevrée, to me, when applied by her to her heroine’s death wish, provides a more honest, more modest yet ultimately more modern approach than that of her more famous disciple. She cuts out the pathos and does not pretend to drape an artificial meaning over a gesture dictated by nothing more than reality.