Renée and Louis de l’Estorade

Renée and Louis de l’Estorade’s marriage in Balzac’s Letters of Two Brides is a marriage of reason rather than romantic attachment, and its apparent stability comes at the cost of Renée’s feelings. In Simone de Beauvoir’s reading, Renée finds much of her compensation in motherhood, but the marriage’s celebrated passage from duty to tenderness is undercut by her later sense of having lost her independent standing.

Marriage and the Choice of Reason

Renée sacrifices her feelings to reason, in contrast to Louise de Chaulieu, who believes marriage should rest on love. The contrast gives Renée a stable happiness: the joys of motherhood largely compensate her for the feelings she has set aside. Yet this stability does not establish that a marriage without love is emotionally neutral or freely chosen. Beauvoir questions the novel’s implicit account of Renée’s willing acceptance of her husband’s embraces, observing that this apparent ease requires the kind of accommodation Stendhal criticized in “honest women.”

The Wedding Night and Its Aftermath

Renée’s letter describes a sudden transformation in her perception of Louis on their wedding night: the husband she had regarded as an animal gives way, in her account, to a lover. The passage presents the encounter as a surprising passage from reluctance to satisfaction, and as an imagined ideal becoming real. Its epistolary form makes Renée’s own report the evidence for this exceptional change; it does not, by itself, explain what made the change possible or establish that it lasted.

Several letters later, Renée is in tears and describes herself as having changed from a person into a chattel. She seeks consolation after nights of conjugal love by reading Bonald. The sharp reversal between the wedding-night account and this later self-description unsettles the earlier image of an enduring marital enchantment: the relationship may contain moments Renée recounts as pleasurable, but those moments do not erase her sense of subordination.

Beauvoir’s Critique of Balzac’s Explanation

Beauvoir questions how Louis could have acquired the skill that supposedly reconciles a wife to marriage, especially when Renée does not love him and the novel’s depiction of Louis offers no clear explanation for such expertise. She points to Balzac’s prescriptions in The Physiology of Marriage, which range from the succinct warning “Never begin marriage by rape” to a more general appeal to a husband’s genius for handling and developing pleasure. Balzac also acknowledges that such ingenuity is wanton between people who do not love one another—a qualification that makes its supposed success in Renée and Louis’s marriage harder to account for.

For Beauvoir, Balzac skirts the central difficulty: there are no neutral feelings, and constraint combined with boredom is more likely to produce resentment, impatience, and hostility than tender friendship. Renée’s account therefore does not settle the conflict between marriage and love. Her maternal happiness and the novel’s wedding-night ideal stand beside her later sense of being reduced to property, leaving the marriage’s promised reconciliation visibly unstable.