In Éric Rohmer’s 1987 film, 4 Aventures á Rienette et Mirabelle, essentially a compilation of four stores relating the quotidian moral quandaries of two friends in 1980s Paris, one of the pair, Rienette, asks Mirabelle to divulge the facts of her love life or private life. Thereto Mirabelle had maintained a resolute silence on this subject, extending even to her closest friend and flatmate, all to Rienette’s consternation if not bemusement. Mirabelle is unphased with conveying to Rienette all the mundane facts and occasions that embroil her daily life, as would any friend, but where she opts to draw the line would seem, to Rienette, to contravene the desired form of true friendship she wishes to realise with Mirabelle. In this form of friendship, as against the acquaintances and occasional or formal friendships we require in life but do not treasure to the same degree, Michel de Montaigne writes in his essay ‘De l’amitié’, the two parties ‘mix and work themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined’. Whereas all relationships founded on amorous love, as their great anatomist, Marcel Proust, would suggest, contain within themselves the latent root of their own destruction in bringing two individuals together in a fever of transient paroxysms that affect only part of us, the attainment of proper friendship, for Montaigne, marks the successful incubation of a ‘general and universal fire’ that, unlike amorous love, ‘is temperate and equal, [emitting] a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness.’ Were we required to articulate the inner emotional resonance of true friendship, the inimitable feelings of contentment and security that it occasions, Montaigne thinks we could do no better than by responding: ‘because it was he, because it was I’.
It was Mirabelle’s impermeability, her obstinate refusal to open herself to Rienette and fill the void separating them, preventing Rienette from ever truly knowing her friend in all her complexity, from ever feeling securely at one with her in the way that true friends should, in a state of lucid reciprocity, that set their relationship as it stood on delicate foundations. Mirabelle’s position was such that were she to introduce a third party into her private life, regardless of who this third party was – even her best friend – their very presence, regardless of whether they were intrusive, prurient, or indifferent to such things and concerned only with keeping a watchful over Mirabelle’s proceedings, would desecrate a sphere that by its very nature ought to remain sacred. ‘Were I to tell you about my private life it would stop being private’, she remarks to Rienette on her repeated and gradually more frustrated enquiries. One’s private life was one’s private reserve into which, on Mirabelle’s maximalist reading, no external party could warrant admittance unless they were the object of one’s amorous affections.
Mirabelle’s decision seems like a radical one; but should one’s preference not to divulge the history and character of one’s private life in an attempt to preserve and strengthen the inter-personal and exclusivist character of romantic love, on the one hand, and a preference not to participate in the dense nexus of conventionally prurient and naturally judgmental discourses concerning love, on the other, really be construed as radical? It would seem so, for the same reason that retreating from social media today would be construed as a tacitly radical course to take given how it contravenes currently established forms of individualistic social presentation and modes of inter-personal association – at least for someone of my age and cultural background, as will likely be the case for most people reading this essay.