“When still very young
I marvelled at the ruins of Christendom, gave them my heart,
turned my back on all I could expect, and made of that past full of blessings my Future…”.
Talleyrand’s phrase, according to which those who had not lived prior to 1789 had not experienced the sweetness of living, can be applied, with a certain analogy to the Belle Époque, the period that preceded the First World War1.
This famous phrase is difficult for twentieth-century man to understand, both in its meaning and its importance. In fact our century has gone by under the sign of the “bitterness of living” whose most obvious expressions today are to be found in the new social illness of “depression” and in the terrible spread of suicides, even among the very young. For modern man, immersed in hedonism and incapable of feeling authentic spiritual joys, the expression “sweetness of living” has a purely material significance and cannot but be reduced to the bitter satisfaction that is born from consumerism and the enjoyment of purely sensual goods.
“Sweetness of living”, in Talleyrand’s meaning, has a deeper and more spiritual significance. It can be interpreted as an atmosphere that hovered throughout society, since the remote times of the Middle Ages. The origins of this sweetness of living date back to Medieval Christian civilization and they are connected with the Christian conception of existence, that inseparably links the happiness of man to the glory of God.
Catholic doctrine and everyday experience teach us how dramatic human life is. And yet effort, suffering, sacrifice, struggle can give us an interior joy that manages to fill with sweetness the vale of tears that is our existence. Outside the Cross no real happiness or sweetness is possible, only the search for blind pleasure exists, which, because it is disordered, necessarily leads to bitterness and despair.
“One can say the same thing about joy what St. Bernard said of glory, that it is like a shadow: if we run after it, it flees from us; if we flee from it, it runs after us. There is no true joy but in Our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, in the shadow of the Cross. The more a man is mortified, the happier he is. The more he seeks after pleasures, the sadder he is.
“This is why, in the centuries during which Christian civilization reached its apex, man was happy: one only need recall the Middle Ages. And as man becomes less and less Catholic, the sadder he becomes.
“This change has become increasingly accentuated from generation to generation. The man of the nineteenth century, for example, no longer enjoyed the delightful ‘douceur de vivre’ as did the man of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, how much more peace and interior well-being did he have than man today!”2
“Sweetness of living” was not an unrestrained enjoyment or modern “easiness”, but a reflection of Divine Love in modern society, a ray of divine light that illuminated and filled with spiritual joy a society that was still devoted to God, at least in its exterior structure. This “sweetness of living”, that Talleyrand considered had already faded away with the French Revolution, continued to hover over Europe up to the eve of the First World War.
The Belle Epoque meant optimism and euphoric confidence in the myths of Reason and Progress, symbolized by the choreography of the Excelsior Ballet.3 But the Belle Époque was also the aristocratic and orderly style of life, that even at the dawn of the twentieth century reflected the way of living of the Ancien Régime.
The Belle Epoque was the dream of the “construction” of modern civilization that began the century; but it also was that lingering patriarchal society whose last rays were to be found in the Austro-Hungarian monarch, heir to the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire. At the dawn of the century, Positivistic Europe lived along side a Catholic and Monarchical one, in a continent that still had four empires and fifteen great monarchies.4
The luminous intensity of the Impressionists’ paintings and the psychological novels of Paul Bourget reflected the atmosphere of those years. The principal tool of this cosmopolitan society was conversation, an art that required grace, amiability, diplomacy and in which “authentic savoir- vivre” was identified.5
Paris, the Ville-Lumière, is the symbol of this era, the acknowledged capital of an ideal world that extends its frontiers well beyond France and even Europe. Wherever the influence of European civilization reaches, it is to France that recognition is given for the primacy of its language, its culture and its fashion.
Among the “French islands” in the world, one, at the beginning of the century, shone more brightly than the others: São Paulo, Brazil, one of the cities that best knew how to integrate the values of its traditions with those of French culture. The best that was produced by the Belle Époque, the good taste, the refined manners, the elegance that had nothing in common with dandyism, flourished then, under the tropics, in the other hemisphere. Against a backdrop of horizons illuminated by the Southern Cross, the last sparks of the Ancien Régime shone in hearts that preserved with simplicity, the mother of all the other virtues, a loyalty full of saudade (nostalgia) towards that Christian civilization that had enlightened their country and the world.
The word saudade expresses something more than “nostalgia”. It is at once the memory and the desire of an absent good. It is a sentiment that is incommunicable and veiled with the typical melancholy of the contemplative and intuitive soul of the Portuguese and Brazilian people.6 The Paulista (inhabitant of the State of São Paulo) had saudade of a Christian and European Brazil, just at the time when the United States began to exercise the enticing call of “modernity”. Saudade of old ways, loyalty to distant principles, of which Europe seemed to offer a last, faded reflection.