portrait by Amaury Duval. It was executed in 1839
when she was twenty-eight years old, and has had the
strange fate of always pleasing her family and never
her friends. Gautier, in his half Bohemian way, used
to say of it and of the artist: "Is it necessary for him
to be maladroit? There are three hours every day
during which she is less ugly than that. He should have
chosen them."
The portrait, despite its deadness of color and a
certain artificiality in handling, is on the whole very
satisfactory. It is life size. Madame Mennessier here
appears in a black, decolletee robe with short sleeves.
Her jet black hair comes compactly down over her
temples. The nose has an accent of broadness, and
the face is squarish, and is overspread as if with the
subdued radiance of a youthful motherhood. Her left
arm hangs gracefully forward over an arm of the
Daughter of the French Romantics 65
fauteuil. Her right hand gently supports her chin and
cheek. The whole attitude indicates the ready con-
versationalist. This effect Is heightened wonderfully
by the expression of the eyes which, to her family, seem
perfectly reproduced. The skill of the painter was here
at its best. We love to regard her two grayish-green
eyes that bead. In this canvas, with twinkling life, and
look straight at us with a frank amiability, telling us
that their owner was quick to share a sportive hour, or
a serious, comfort-needing mood. They speak of an
indescribable mixture of gayety, affection, discretion,
and we forget that they are only In a pictur::. One
realizes that there exhales from this canvas a woman's
lovely dignity and a genial vivacity — the two prevail-
ing perfumes in the sachet of her personality.
She had a bright tongue, yet her full-beating heart
was heard in still distlncter messages. She spread about
her the charm of a cheerful sympathy, a warm com-
radeship. And as the background for all this, there
was her domesticity. What gifts and culture she was
graced of were mellowed by her tender, homelike na-
ture. We do not doubt it was rather for her than
ev^en for Nodier himself that those younger Romantics
kept coming to the Arsenal. In her they found a sweet,
fair-eyed friend, who was enthusiastic for them and
proud of them, and to whom It was a genuine pleasure
to offer their verses and designs. With her they could
talk and sing and dance. They could have at the Ar-
senal something of a free Intercourse with a maiden
who was exemplifying before their very eyes that
womanly purity, emotivity and fireside happiness which
66 French Essays and Profiles
many of them, leading Bohemian careers adrift in un-
domestic Paris, could otherwise dream of only in
rimes and colors and contours.
This atmosphere inspired them with confidence and
self-respect, with the crowning promises of utmost ef-
fort and of temperate, moral living — all those virtues
for which the role of the Nodier salon is to be re-
marked, and to which the daughter of the house con-
tributed her full and essential part. Surely no other
young woman of that epoch diffused among the youth-
ful companions and followers of Victor Hugo such an
Influence as hers, either in quality or degree. For we
cannot think. In this connection, of Madame Recamier
nor George Sand.
The favorite flower of Madame Mennessier was
the honeysuckle; and those familiar with the lives of
the French Romantics are not surprised that she dis-
liked having flowers about her in the house. She could
not bear to see them wither and die, and therefore
rarely plucked a rose or grouped a bouquet. It Is in-
teresting, too, to learn that during her last years she
always sat by a window which faced the little stony
main street of her village. Instead of by one of the win-
dows which looked out over a pretty garden and across
the picturesque v^alley of the Blevre. The homely street
and Its humble life were company for one who had been
surrounded for years by so many brilliant friends. The
landscape was too lonely and pensive for her.
She read much, and the poets of her heart were La-
martine and Musset. Among novelists, she preferred
Dumas and Octave Feuillet. The novels of George
Daughter of the French Romantics 67
Sand she did not care for and scarcely had ever fingered
through one of them.
It is natural to conclude that her gift of making her-
self universally loved, of effacing herself before her
companions, accounts for her failure to contribute any-
thing notable to art or literature. She was endowed
with talents, but she cultivated them modestly and only
for her friends and household. She seemed to have
no dreams of ambition save for those about -her. Her
joyous neglect of self doubtless often impressed her
friends with the thought of what she might have done,
had she not been content to remain simply a delightful
inspiration to others; for, as it is, extravagant are the
laudations that have come down to us of her music,
her verse and her esprit. Everlasting is the praise;
ephemeral was its theme.
At conversing she must have been remarkably adept
in the sense of being irresistibly gay and entertaining.
We saw how her portraits speak the conversationalist.
Those who knew her in her prime say that one can
scarcely form an idea of her entrain when she found
some one who was good at repartee and could give quick
and salient replies. That such friends and acquaint-
ances were in no respect lacking we are offered abun-
dant proof, for the bourgeois circle at the Arsenal was
surely as successful a company of famous conversers
and story-tellers as ever came habitually together even
in France. Did not the July Monarchy prove that the
gift of esprit was not confined, among the French, to
the aristocracy and the populace? Loui'S Philippe, the
only bourgeois ruler the greater France has had, ap-
68 French Essays and Profiles
pears to have been precisely its wittiest monarch.
Madame Mennessier was very musical and music-
loving. At the piano she was contented with accom-
paniments and the little contredanses and waltzes that
punctuated and modulated the dancing at the soirees.
A friend of hers tells us that Marie Nodier sang three
decades before Gounod that which this master has since
sung. There is a significant undertone of truth in the
above; for the noteworthy, if not notable, trait in
Madame Mennessier was her heartfelt color of senti-
ment; and it is this that Gounod has woven into music
in a more eminent degree than any French composer.
She wrote countless songs. She wedded to melody
much of Musset's verse and some of Sainte-Beuve and
of Victor Hugo. Here in the silence of her parlor we
could rove through a pile of her scores. They are
neatly penned; the paper is yellow with age and finger-
soiled. The melodies are very modest and are chap-
eroned by the plainest of correct accompaniments, for
she knew nothing of modern harmony. Her songs are
completely forgotten, yet for years they were not with-
out a certain fame throughout all Paris.
Her writings consist of a few contes, of "Lettres
d'une hirondelle," of her book "Charles Nodier," and
of verses. Her unpretending poetic talent may be
found at its best by far in the two sonnets which she
addressed to Musset under the circumstances revealed
by a friend. He recounts:
"One day in the spring of 1843, I brought some
verse to Nodier and among it there was a sonnet to
Musset. 'Leave this one with me,' he said, 'it may
Daughter of the French Romantics 69
render us real service. For sometime past Musset has
neglected us and appears to forget us. Your sonnet
may bring him back to us. My daughter will send it to
him, and the ungrateful fellow must come down here
and tell us why he is in the sulks.' Madame Mennes-
sier at once sent the sonnet to Musset with a letter of
the kind she knew how to write, and the next day I re-
ceived a note from him thanking me for my poetry and
excusing himself from answering in verse — that lan-
guage, he delicately added, which I understood so well
how to use. Of what does glory consist? If he had
addressed me in rime, I should have been celebrated.
In any event my sonnet had awakened him. He
hastened to the Arsenal, saw his two friends, and, the
following day, thanked Madame Mennessier in a son-
net for her amiable appeal. She responded in the same
form. Musset replied in verse the same day. In short,
during three days there was a rapid exchange of rime
between the two poets who had been friends from
childhood."
Musset himself paid these sonnets of hers a frank
compliment in writing his brother at the time: "I have
also done several sonnets for Madame Mennessier,
who sent me in response two v^ery pretty ones."
No, and nevertheless, Madame Mennessier is
scarcely for an instant to be remembered for what she
created, though she will be immortal for what she in-
spired. It would be idle for one to attempt to enumer-
ate the canvases and the musical scores that lauded her
charms, and the countless minor or casual tributes that
were paid her in rime. We are curious to learn, though.
70 French Essays and Profiles
that she had two albums — one as a girl, the other as
a young married woman. The latter, containing the
Arvers sonnet, I never saw for it was en province. But
in the former the present writer found that the opening
tribute, dated Nov. i6, 1824, was by Lamartine. It
consists of six lines written in a small, neat, but yet not
very legible style, in the upper right hand corner of the
first page.
In this album, too, were stanzas by the elder Dumas,
Vigny and Victor Hugo. The Dumas verses are penned
with the greatest of care in a minute yet clear hand.
They are impeccably aligned, showing that he wrote
them along the edge of a sheet of paper or a ruler.
He was then twenty-one.
Madame Mennessier unquestionably inspired more
of imperishable verse than any other French woman.
Besides the three sonnets of Musset to which we have
referred, he dedicated to her some well-known lines as
a tribute to her for having interpreted in music some
of his rimes. Victor Hugo composed as many stanzas
in her honor as Musset.
But the most memorable of the verse which Madame
Mennessier called forth was the sonnet of Arvers —
everything considered, the most celebrated French son-
net of the nineteenth century. Felix Arvers, one of the
many minor frequenters of the Arsenal, was a kind
of Musset in miniature. All else from his pen proved
ephemeral. Nodier, charmed with the sonnet, was al-
ways having Arvers recite it at the soirees. The lines
were originally written in the second album of Madame
Mennessier. They are as follows, with their imperfect
Daughter of the French Romantics 71
punctuation, In the first edition (1833) of the poet's
*'Mes Heures Perdues," the words "Sonnet imite de
I'ltalien" not appearing in the album.
"Sonnet imite de I'ltalien."
Mon ame a son secret, ma vie a son mystere;
Un amour eternel en un moment congu :
Le mal est sans espoir, aussi j'ai du le taire,
Et celle qui I'a fait n'en a jamais rien su.
Helas! j'aurai passe pres d'elle inapergu,
Toujours a ses cotes, et pourtant solitaire,
Et j'aurai jusqu'au bout fait mon temps sur la terre,
N'osant rien demander et n'ayant rien regu.
Pour elle, quoique Dieu I'ait faite douce et tendre,
Elle ira son chemin, distraite, et sans entendre
Ce murmure d'amour eleve sur ses pas;
A I'austere devoir, pieusement fidele,
Elle dira, lisant ces vers tout remplis d'elle:
"Quelle est done cette femme?" et ne comprendra pas.
(My heart has its secret, my life, its mystery; an eternal
love in a moment conceived. The ill is without hope
and so have I concealed it. And she who has caused it
has never aught guessed.
Alas, I have passed near her form unperceived, ever by
her side and yet ever alone. I shall have finished my
term upon earth, year by year, asking of her nothing
and nothing received.
72 French Essays and Profiles
And she, though God made her gentle and tender, will
go her way freely and unaware, without hearing this
murmur of love at her feet.
Correctly faithful to duty will always she ask, on read-
ing this verse so filled with her soul, "Who is really this
woman?" and never will know.)
This poem breathes the fragrant, tender loveliness
of Madame Mennessier. It was because Arvers con-
fined a perfect souvenir of her aroma in this little casket
of a sonnet that he was saved to fame, and that some-
thing of the incense of her modest glory, which seemed
to be daily dissipating in her self-disinterestedness, was
preserved in a precious reliquary of rime. What con-
firms our feeling that Arvers diffused her charm in
rhythm more felicitously than any of his great rivals is
an instant's comparison of his sonnet with the two
sonnets she sent Musset. We are conscious at once that
her verse has more of the strain and quality of his than
of Musset's or Hugo's. The same Arverian, low-
voiced gentleness, the same warm love-note, are here.
The verse of Arvers makes us think only of her — it is
thoroughly impregnated with her fragrance. The
poems of Hugo and Musset, on the contrary, are
mainly filled with the thoughts of themselves.
We might now attempt to outline more fully the
nature of the Nodier salon and its influence. We have
Daughter of the French Romantics 73
seen how Madame Mennessier, in whom the fire-
side life and the salon life appeared to intermingle in an
inimitable manner, accentuated there a distinguish-
ing emotionalism, domesticity and youth. By no means
was there absent the background of books, art and cul-
ture, yet the artistic and the belletristic were somehow
effaced by the presence of those individualistic, blood-
throbbing people who laughed and wept, and were
vigorously active and human in the flesh. At Nodier's
Arsenal, men doted on fantastic imageries, and played
in haunted domains of freaks and oddities in a way that
seemed half childlike. There, women of copious and
facile emotions were quick to sympathize and shed
tears. There Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Musset
found a plain humanity to work upon with all its senti-
mentality as well as naturalness; and, at will, they
aroused it into triumphant enthusiasm or melted it into
lachrymose weakness.
For it was the heart that reigned at the Nodiers', and
the various moods it was doubtless wont to indulge in
there may be seen reflected in the literary pages of
those days. At times it was too soft and mushy, too
tearfully and feebly good, like the verse of Madame
Desbordes-Valmore with its "moonlights and weeping
willows." At times it showed that mature sensibility,
tolerance and maternal tenderness which were being de-
veloped in the volumes of George Sand. Again it dis-
played in some hours the kind of emotivity, cor-
rected by esprit, vivacity and a clear, independent sense
of the ridiculous, which graces the stanzas and para-
graphs of Musset. And it was, of course, the symbol
74 French Essays and Profiles
of the sentiment of the "Interior Hfe" ; for, as has been
pointed out, the life of the inner-self then at length
created, among the writings of French women, a
notable volume in the "Journal" of Eugenie de Guerin.
The Nodier salon, with its influence for morality and
family ties, antedated the bourgeois reign of King
Louis Philippe, and existed almost until the new na-
tional epoch of 1848. One Is thus led to remark how
the Arsenal soirees were distinguished by characteristics
not typically French, but English. Its open, unconven-
tional, family hospitality was much like that of a
country seat In England. It offered the truest and
plainest of welcomes, and a conviviality which, in this
instance, had only a little "sugared water to pass
around." Its virtue lay in simply letting the guests
feel chez sol. Madame Hugo remarks that "at the
Nodlers' every one held his pleasure in his own hands,
and was accountable to no one. Nodier obliterated
himself too much ever to repress or interfere with any
elan. His friends were more in their own house than
in his. Indulgent, gracious and almost feminine, he
offered as it were the hospitality-woman."
This personal, warming-pan comfort, this common,
dally life, unaffected by the presence of friends and
strangers, this freedom of the daughter in her inter-
course with the guests, this predominance of very young
people — all this was English, not French. It was but
another evidence of the Immense Influx of things Anglo-
Saxon into France with the Romantic school, and was
naturally of the epoch when a large proportion of
French poetry cited Engllsii verses for its texts and
Daughter of the French Romantics 75
mottoes. The idea of English family life here tri-
umphed over that of the French chez soi. It was the
home invading the salon. The moment the host and
guests caught the fashion of appearing and doing much
as they pleased in their assemblings, the fate of the his-
toric salon was practically sealed; for, as M. Brunetiere
has well said, "there would be no salons if each of us
brought only our natural selves." Thus the Nodier
soirees exemplified in a significant way a transition from
the salon of France to the home of England, and illus-
trated the eminence of the one and the virtues of the
other.
The traits of the levees at the Arsenal became salient
in our minds when we think of the "Classic" reunions
of that day. The "Classic" salon of the gay and wanton
hermit M. Jouy seems to have been the most inimical
and persistent enemy which the Arsenal was blessed
with. This antagonist seethed with violent rage when-
ever he glanced at any of the soft-eyed lyrics of La-
martine. "Whimperer!" he woi^ld exclaim. "You are
lamenting, are you? You are poitrinaire, are you?
What do you suppose I care? The dying poet! Eh
bien ! then die of your grief, blockhead — you won't be
the first one!" And so we can fancy how M. Jouy
could suddenly forget his gayety and descend into the
bowels of direst wrath whenever a certain small word
was even whispered in his presence. That word was
Hugo.
The characteristics of the Nodier salon and its liter-
ary role are brought into a bolder and broader relief
when we reread what Brunetiere has signaled as the
76 French Essays and Profiles
effect of woman and the salons on French literature
down to the close of the eighteenth century. The In-
fluence for presentable respectability and social seem-
llness In appearance and bearing, which Brunetlere
points out as the first lesson of the earlier salons, finds
Its complement in the Influence at the Arsenal for
morality, or the something that makes for the Ideal of
family. As the precleuses declared against the vulgar,
the offensive, the coarsely wanton in letters, so the
Arsenal stood as a protest against social irregularities
and excesses and against the brutalities of the rights of
passion which characterized so many pages of the turbu-
lent young Romantics, and which Bohemlanism insisted
in attaching as a tail to the kite of the new school.
So while Gautier and his chums were vigorously repre-
senting "liberality" and independence at the evening of
Hernani, Marie Nodler and her companions were there
unconsciously representing the claims and charms of
simple virtue.
As distinguished from "elegance in precision, perfec-
tion in the measure, and, with the greatest writers,
lucidity In profoundness," which were the results of the
role of the traditional salons, there were to be found
at the Nodlers', as we have seen, the two mates whose
marriage had led to Romanticism, namely, emotion
with Its consciousness of weak and suffering mortality,
and, as an alleviation or safety valve therefor, imagi-
nation with Its realms of Faith and of fantastic diver-
sion. Precision of outline here disappeared in the shift-
ing moods and vague reaches of sentiment: the correct
brain yielded to the overflowing heart which Ignores
Daughter of the French Romantics 77
formalities and symmetries. The old-time feminine
impulse for form was succeeded by the new feminine
impulse for "matter," since no estheticism nor preciosity
affected the Arsenal nor ever courted with perfumed
graces any of its characteristic habitues. Corseted
and bepowdered refinement here gave way before
sweet, fresh-faced tenderness and sympathy; and the
cult of caste and station, with its indifference to the
rights or feelings of others, melted somewhat into the
cult of self-sacrifice, or of the claims that come from
without. Thus the old salons emphasized the aristo-
craticalness of French belles-lettres and kept them for
two or three centuries removed from the people. It re-
mained for the Nodier salon to bring French letters
down, so far as a salon could, from the world of the
upper class. The vivified and mortal-like volumes of
the Romantics were not for the nobility of France.
This new literature was, in some phases, for the bour-
geoisie and, in others, for the Bohemians and the
populace. It stirred the hearts, fancies and hopes of
the people (using this word in its broadest sense), and
bequeathed to France a popular literature. Therefore,
while the literary reunions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries exemplified the "artificial and the
superficial," and the aristocratic and solidarity, the
Nodier circle taught naturalness and genuineness,
democracy and individualism. It was the salon-Rous-
seau, in the best sense of the term.
Again, the salons of Brunetiere were, as he says, far
from encouraging any pursuits of the Indefinable or
any excursions into the domains of the Dark and In-
78 French Essays and Profiles
scrutable. There were no Hamlets and Fausts In
classic French literature, and the pages of Racine and
Moliere were untroubled by questions of free will and
destiny. But in the grand ccnaclc of the Nodiers, it
was precisely this love for the Unknowable, and for the
realms of chiaroscuros which were the hovering coun-
terpart and product of the Romantic deification of the
Middle Ages, that gave the medieval Hernani to French
belles-lettres. Imagination never could paint too
strangely, terribly or darkly, nor fantasy limn the bor-
ders or margins of life too fantastically or grotesquely,
to suit the wondering hearers of Hugo and Nodier.
And so, while the old aristocratic salons contributed
to works of fiction — to the novel — and notably to the
theater, the Arsenal associated itself with, and con-
tributed to, the rise and growth of modern French
poetry and of the French Romantic literature and art
in their various phases. It is left for the twentieth
century to determine whether the women of 1830 oc-
casioned a wealth of "Letters" and "Correspondence"
equaling, when measured by every standard, that of any
previous isochronal epoch in France. But if it shall be
found that they have not, it will be for the reason
that they were enriching French literature in other and
superior ways; for they were either poets putting their
communications into the form of verse, or novelists
publishing their confessions and confidences under the
guise of romances, or solitaires writing "Diaries" and
"Journals." As for the art of conversation, wherein
the French have excelled alike in all times, the women
at the Arsenal doubtless displayed less scintillating bril-
Daughter of the French Romantics 79
llance, less glinting mentality and preciosity in their
liveliness of tongue than their fair predecessors; yet
their colloquies must surely have shown more human-
ness and more spontaneous and colorful variety.
One observes then, in a word, with respect to the
comparative characteristics of the Nodier salon, how
the home life there began to "kill" the salon; how an
English type of living succeeded to a French type of
living; how the bourgeois dethroned the aristocrat,
and liberty and liberality unloosened the hold of Court
and tradition in all things; how French belles-lettres
were popularized as well as romanticized; how the
natural took precedence over the artificial, and the
youthful over the old; how the individualistic rose up
out of the social; how the heart and the inner sensibili-
ties, color and the moral, displaced brain, mentality,
form and the decorative, in the quasi triumph of the
human over the artistic; and how Imagination, the pic-
turesque, the bizarre, the cult of the shapeless Unseen
and of the obscure Unknown, were imported into the
typically bright, sane, symmetrical, mundane sphere of
French literary activity.
What a pity that Madame Mennessier-Nodler left
no Journal or Memoirs! Her knowledge of the lettered