On the surface, salons might seem nothing more than parties attended by bored, frivolous socialites whose daily lives were governed by their toilettes—aristocratic women changed their clothes several times a day, often while receiving favoured visitors—but the details of these lives in fact reveal the social developments of the times. In an age of rigorous formality, for example, in which behaviour itself seemed bound up in whalebone stays, the ritual of the toilette provided a release, allowing people to see each other in relaxed circumstances. In an age that had almost institutionalized extramarital affairs, it also gave women the chance to display themselves to current or potential lovers beyond the citadel of their petticoats, hoops and corsets: in 1790 it was fashionable to receive friends from the luxury of one's milk-bath.
Although she was famously badly dressed, Germaine never lost the ancien régime custom of receiving visitors during her toilette, all through her life carrying on metaphysical conversations with a horde of people while one maid dressed her hair and another did her nails. Her doctor in England in 1792 was surprised to be greeted by Germaine in her bedroom wearing ‘a short petticoat and a thin shirt’, and astonished by her energy. She talked and wrote all day long, he reported, her green leather portable writing-desk permanently open on her knees, whether she was in bed or at dinner. Even when she gave birth there were fifteen people in her bedroom and within three days she was talking as much as ever.
Before the revolution, every different outfit served a different purpose, and each one minutely indicated the wearer's status. Wearing unsuitable clothes was an implicit rejection of the hierarchy that controlled society. Inelegant Germaine, who always showed too much flesh—even her travelling dresses had plunging necklines—was by these criteria deeply suspect. Riding-habits were worn to ride or drive in the Bois de Boulogne or go out hunting with the court; day dresses were worn to receive guests at home, to go shopping in the Palais Royal or to attend lectures in the thrilling new sciences of electricity and botany; in the evening, to attend the theatre or a court ball, three-inch heels, heavy makeup and elaborate, pomaded headdresses, snowy-white with powder and sprinkled with jewels, flowers and feathers were de rigueur. Their hair arrangements were often so tall that women had to travel crouching on the floor of their carriages.
Fluttering a fan in a certain way or placing a patch near the eye as opposed to on the cheek revealed a person's character without them having to speak. The sociologist Richard Sennett observes of this period that it is hard to imagine how people so governed by ‘impersonal and abstract convention [can] be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves…their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive’. Contemporaries were fully aware of this dichotomy between word and action. ‘A man who placed his hand on the arm of a chair occupied by a lady would have been considered extremely rude,’ wrote the comtesse de Boigne, looking back on the pre-revolutionary period of her youth, and yet language ‘was free to the point of licentiousness’.
But by the mid-1780s contemporary medical and philosophical views were transforming women's fashions and habits. In 1772 one doctor described corsets as barbarous, impeding women's breathing and deforming their chests, and especially dangerous during pregnancy; he was also concerned about the moral effects they produced by displaying the bosom so prominently. His advice was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prophet of naturalness and sensibility in Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, who recommended that children wear loose clothes that would not constrict their growing bodies.
For the first time, women's clothes allowed them to breathe and eat freely: the new fashions quite literally liberated their bodies from an armour of stays, panniers and hoops at the same time as the ideological implications of the change in fashion began to liberate their behaviour. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft declared that stiff, uncomfortable clothes, like the ‘fiction’ of beauty itself, were a means by which society kept women submissive and dependent. Shedding these restrictions would empower them. By this definition Germaine, who rose above her plainness (Gouverneur Morris thought she looked like a chambermaid) and paid scant attention to her dress, was already halfway to emancipation.
Perhaps the most celebrated proponent of these progressive ideas was the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who was painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783 in a simple white chemise dress tied at the waist with a satin sash. This seemingly innocent act raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. Chemises were muslin shifts, previously worn only in the intimacy of a toilette (or by prostitutes), so to eighteenth-century eyes Vigée-Lebrun had painted the queen in a shocking state of undress. Furthermore, for the queen herself to reject the formality of court custom—she was traditionally portrayed in carapace-like court dress—carried seditious undertones of disrespect to the traditions she represented. Finally, the chemise de la reine (as it came to be called) was a style anyone could afford. As Mary Robinson, the courtesan who popularized the chemise de la reine in England, commented, ‘the duchess, and her femme de chambre, are dressed exactly alike’. Dress, which had once distinguished between people, was becoming dangerously democratic.
Manners, too, were changing. As with clothing, the fashion for informality initially came from the top down: in the artificial world of the salon, being able to give the impression of naturalness and ease had long been considered the highest of the social arts. ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor?’ asked the philosopher Denis Diderot. Just as the cut flowers in her headdress were kept fresh with tiny glass vases hidden in her hair, the salonnière achieved the sparkling effect of spontaneity in conversation through study and discipline. Every day, Mme Geoffrin, celebrated pre-revolutionary hostess to the great Enlightenment philosophers, wrote two letters (in those days an art form) to keep her brain sharp.
Germaine de Staël's favourite game was called the Boat, in which everyone present was asked who they would save from a sinking ship. She asked her first lover, Talleyrand, who he would rescue, her or his other mistress Adèle de Flauhaut. He replied that she was so talented she could extricate herself from any predicament; gentility would oblige him to save the resourceless Adèle. Another version of this story has Germaine and Talleyrand actually in a boat, talking about devotion and courage. To her question as to what he would do if she fell in, he reportedly replied, ‘Ah, Madame, you must be such a good swimmer.’
Word games, jokes, debates, making up poems and proverbs and amateur theatricals were salon pastimes designed to stimulate and heighten conversation, which Germaine described as an instrument the French above all other nations liked to play, producing a sublime ‘intellectual melody’. Conversation, she said, was
a certain way in which people act upon one another, a quick give-and-take of pleasure, a way of speaking as soon as one thinks, of rejoicing in oneself in the immediate present, of being applauded without making an effort, of displaying one's intelligence by every nuance of intonation, gesture and look—in short, the ability to produce at will a kind of electricity.
Naturally, Germaine herself excelled at this art: ‘If I was queen,’ said a friend, ‘I should order Mme de Staël to talk to me always.’ When she spoke, constantly fiddling with a small twig or twist of paper which the unkind said was a way of drawing attention to her fine hands, her captivated listeners forgot her scruffy clothes, red face and large frame, noticing only the beautiful expression in her eyes.
These showers of sparks, as Staël defined the words and ideas that brought a salon to life, showed the importance to French society of writers and philosophers. Salonnières acted as confidantes, editors, muses and patrons to their talented guests, corresponding with them, intriguing to have them elected to the Academy or appointed to political office and erecting statues in their honour. Women were, according to a 1788 pamphlet entitled Advice to the Ladies, ‘the arbiters of all things…Business, honours, everything is in your hands.’ These roles set a dangerous precedent by giving women powerful identities outside marriage and motherhood.
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