Do the French Write the Best Love Letters?

Here are three examples of love letters written by three of France's greatest literary figures - Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The French have a reputation as great lovers. Do these letters confirm that view or refute it, in your opinion?

From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive. One of them is reproduced below. Flaubert never married and according to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romance. Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art. Does he find 'le mot juste' in this letter dated 1846?

“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge yu [sic] with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports… When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”

Louise had an interesting love life too. In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris. When the couple arrived in Paris, Colet began to submit her work for approval and publication and soon won a two-thousand-franc prize from the Académie française, the first of four prizes won from the Académie. Like many women of note she ran a salon that was frequented by many of the city's litrary crowd including Victor Hugo. In 1840 she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity of the child. Later she became the paramour of Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, and Abel Villemain. After her husband died, she supported herself and her daughter with her writing.


Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) had torrid love life. He fell in love with a woman called Mme. Berny, she was 46 and he was 23. He called her “la Dilecta,” and her creative and intellectual influence on Balzac was profound. When the two split up in 1832, he entered a troubled relationship with the Marquise de Castries on the rebound. The letter below was written to Countess Ewelina Haska, a married Polish noblewoman to whom he came to refer to as “The Foreigner.” They embarked upon an intense correspondence, which quickly escalated into a passionate bond, which lasted seventeen years. The two vowed to marry once Ewelina’s husband died. Though the Count passed away in 1842, Balzac’s poor finances prevented the couple from marrying. In March of 1850, when he was already fatally ill, the two finally married. That was just five months before he died.

"MY BELOVED ANGEL,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be — very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, ‘Come, I am going there!’ Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself ‘She is mine!’ Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!"

This missive from the 24 year old Jean-Paul Sartre to a 21 year old Simone de Beauvoir dates to the spring of 1929, and can be found in Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone De Beauvoir, 1926-1939  at the dawn of their romance, shortly before he proposed marriage, which Simone turned down; instead, the two embarked on their famous lifelong open relationship.

My dear little girl
For a long time I’ve been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love......

I love you with all my heart and soul.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics. Her most famous work, The Second Sex remains to this day one of the foundational texts in philosophy, feminism, and women's studies.The main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman has been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man through her relegation to being man's "Other." In agreement with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as a self. It seems that Jean-Paul remained her 'other' for the rest of her life.