Renée de l’Estorade

Renée de l’Estorade is one of the two contrasting married women in Balzac’s epistolary novel Letters of Two Brides. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, Renée sets aside her feelings in favor of reason; motherhood largely compensates her, and she builds a stable happiness. Yet her experience also unsettles the novel’s account of marriage: the apparent promise of conjugal love gives way to a sense of lost personhood.

Marriage and the Contrast with Louise

The novel places Renée beside Louise de Chaulieu, who believes marriage should rest on love. Louise’s intense passion brings about the death of her first husband, and jealous fixation over her second husband leads to her own death. Renée follows the opposite course, sacrificing feeling to reason and finding consolation in motherhood. Beauvoir treats the contrast as revealing, while questioning the unexplained deprivation of the motherhood Louise desires: love itself, she observes, does not prevent conception.

The Wedding Night and Its Aftermath

Renée’s account of her wedding night presents a striking transformation in her husband. She describes the husband as giving way to a lover, and recalls being moved by his words and pleased to lean on his arm. The experience, as she relates it, combines satisfaction with the unexpected and with a passage from imagination and reluctance toward reality. Beauvoir notes, however, that this apparent conjugal miracle does not last. Several letters later, Renée weeps that she was once a person and is now a chattel; after nights of conjugal love, she consoles herself by reading Bonald.

Beauvoir’s Critique of the Marriage Ideal

Renée’s changing account exposes the distance between a successful wedding night and the continuing conditions of married life. Balzac’s The Physiology of Marriage offers brief or vague advice about a husband’s conduct, including the injunction never to begin marriage by rape and the idea that a husband should develop and vary his wife’s pleasure. But Beauvoir points out that Balzac also acknowledges that such skill is wanton when two people do not love each other. Renée does not love Louis, and the account provides no convincing explanation for how he could possess the supposed genius that would make their intimacy pleasurable.

For Beauvoir, Balzac skirts the central difficulty: feelings are not neutral, and in the absence of love, constraint and boredom are more likely to produce resentment, impatience, and hostility than tender friendship. Renée’s early pleasure and later sense of being reduced to property therefore do not resolve the conflict between marriage and love. Her stable happiness, sustained largely by motherhood, sits alongside an account of marriage in which she feels that she has ceased to be a person.