THE LETTERS OF MARCELINE VALMORE
“Prends garde a moi,
ma fille, et couvre moi bien!”
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, writing from France
to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and
chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous,
journeying fancy as was expressed by two other women,
both also Frenchwomen, and both articulate in tenderness.
Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, had preceded
her with her own complaint, “I have a pain in
my brother’s side”; and in another age
Mme. de Sevigne had suffered, in the course of
long posts and through infrequent letters — a
protraction of conjectured pain — within
the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased
her plight in much the same words, confessing the
uncancelled union with her child that had effaced
for her the boundaries of her personal life.
Is not what we call a life — the
personal life — a separation from the universal
life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound?
For these women, such a severance was in part healed,
made whole, closed up, and cured. Life was restored
between two at a time of human-kind. Did these
three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy
with their children were indeed the signs of a new
and universal health — the prophecy of human
unity?
The sign might have been a more manifest
and a happier prophecy had this union of tenderness
taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Except
at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sevigne,
all three — far more sensitive than the rest
of the world — were yet not sensitive enough
to feel equally the less sharp communication of joy.
They claimed, owned, and felt sensibly the pangs
and not the pleasures of the absent. Or if not
only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly
in that sense which human anxiety and foreboding have
lent to the word; they were apprehensive of what they
feared. “Are you warm?” writes Marceline
Valmore to her child. “You have so little
to wear — are you really warm? Oh, take
care of me — cover me well.” Elsewhere
she says, “You are an insolent child to think
of work. Nurse your health, and mine. Let
us live like fools”; whereby she meant that
she should work with her own fervent brain for both,
and take the while her rest in Ondine. If
this living and unshortened love was sad, it must
be owned that so, too, was the story. Eugenie
and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and Marceline
was to lose this daughter and another.
But set free from the condition and
occasion of pain and sorrow, this life without boundaries
which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and
to portend what the progressive charity of generations
may be — and is, in fact, though the continuity
does not always appear — in the course of
the world. If a love and life without boundaries
go down from a mother into her child, and from that
child into her children again, then incalculable,
intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that
seem — and only seem — so to transcend
the usual experience. The love of such a mother
passes unchanged out of her own sight. It drops
down ages, but why should it alter? What in
her daughter should she make so much her own as that
daughter’s love for her daughter in turn?
There are no lapses.
Marceline Valmore, married to an actor
who seems to have “created the classic genre”
in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women
in want. Some of her rich friends, she avers,
seem to think that the sadness of her poems is a habit — a
matter of metre and rhyme, or, at most, that it is
“temperament.” But others take up
the cause of those whose woes, as she says, turned
her long hair white too soon. Sainte-Beuve gave
her his time and influence, succoured twenty political
offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to
her poor. “He never has any socks,”
said his mother; “he gives them all away, like
Beranger.” “He gives them with a
different accent,” added the literary Marceline.
Even when the stroller’s life
took her to towns she did not hate, but loved — her
own Douai, where the names of the streets made her
heart leap, and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux,
which was, in her eyes, “rosy with the reflected
colour of its animating wine” — she
was taken away from the country of her verse.
The field and the village had been dear to her, and
her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing,
when they come among winds, birds, bells, and waves.
They fly with the whole volley of a summer morning.
She loved the sun and her liberty, and the liberty
of others. It was apparently a horror of prisons
that chiefly inspired her public efforts after certain
riots at Lyons had been reduced to peace. The
dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote,
and petitioned. She looked at the sentinels at
the gates of the Lyons gaols with such eyes as might
have provoked a shot, she thinks.
During her lifetime she very modestly
took correction from her contemporaries, for her study
had hardly been enough for the whole art of French
verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine
have praised her as one of the poets of France.
The later critics — from Verlaine onwards — will
hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight irregularities
in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for
upon this liberty they themselves have largely improved.
The old rules in their completeness seemed too much
like a prison to her. She was set about with
importunate conditions — a caesura, a rhyme,
narrow lodgings in strange towns, bankruptcies, salaries
astray — and she took only a little gentle
liberty.