Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after having given themselves to each other, may in a single instant have created a family, perhaps a nation. In man, love is fecundation as well, but is, above all, the interweaving of two existences, a combination of new relations, a deep modification of the manner of existence for a man and a woman.

Even in the lowest races, even where morality is only interest defended by strength and sacrifice is a folly, where phantoms of religious sentiment scarcely exist, where they bury the old mother alive, or celebrate victories and vintage with a sea of blood; even there love is bound by a compact, silent or sworn. Prostitution also is a compact that may last an hour or a minute, but is always a compact. In any case, the sale and purchase of voluptuousness cannot found a family, a tribe, a people; and even the loosest libertine and the wildest savage feel other needs than that of fecundating a female: they feel the necessity of loving a woman. And to love does not mean to unite the members of two bodies in a single knot, but to possess each other a long time, and to desire, to defend, to protect each other; it means to hold oneself responsible to nature for the weakness of one creature and the violence of another, for the future of the being whom we have procreated together and brought into the world.

Woman, when fecundated, is for nine months weaker and more vulnerable; the woman who is in travail is a wounded creature; the woman who nurses can neither flee nor defend herself, and the man-child is for a long time defenseless and very weak. The man, then, who has loved a companion even for one day becomes for a long time her friend and protector without ceasing to be her lover. This is the simplest form of the nuptial compact, which is found in many of the lower nations. While the savage female leans affectionately and confidingly on the male who has made her fruitful, he often finds himself to be a man when his companion cannot be a woman, and he then fecundates other females, who are added to his possessions and whom he protects with the same devotion and affection with which he protects and defends the first woman who was his. The very weak man can have but one female, or he must often do without her, because the strong men have more than one and the very strong have many, who often dwell merrily under one roof without being in the least jealous of one another. A polygamy limited to a few females is the most common form of human society in the lower races, and our organism is so imbued with this custom that even in the highest forms of civilization, where morality and religion do not lend their valid support, monogamy slips and falls, to give place to a polygamy more or less acknowledged or concealed.

We, however, must occupy ourselves only with our own society, where the compact of love has but one moral form: matrimony; while it has various forms that belong to the world of pathology, namely, prostitution, rape, concubinage.

We have already studied prostitution. It is the sale of voluptuousness, the possession of bodies without love, the swindling and deceiving of nature; and if nature, only too often cruel, causes a new creature to be generated through a purchased embrace, that creature will enter the world with the mark of infamy on its brow, and, anonymous child of vice, will be cast by society into the most obscure corner of the social vaults, where the things lie which we wish to efface, forget and allow to die. Prostitution is a safety-valve only too necessary in our immoral and hypocritical society, wretchedly constituted, and it exists to prove with most cruel eloquence that many men cannot love, that very many men should not love.

We have also dealt with rape in the house of others. Even this greatest of the crimes of love we have been compelled to discuss: secret agreement of two traitors who, in the shadow of a social and holy compact, violate the faith of the family and bastardize the world; vile contract of the thief with the procurer, who assassinate in the dark and conceal the victim in the wide folds or the deep fissures of our written codes.

Concubinage in many imperfect societies, and even among us, is a form of matrimony which lacks only religious and civil consecration. It is more despicable for its origin than for the nature of the compact that binds it, because if it lasted eternally, supported only by the word of honor of two creatures who love each other, it would be a true and proper marriage, sealed by the faith of two lovers. Only too often, however, concubinage has an obscure and even shameful origin: it is domestic lechery which has become a habit; it is a vulgar custom that has a periodical type: mustiness of the kitchen or stench of the hospital. Born between the Turkish babooshes and the nightcaps, between the after-dinner yawns and the advices of the hygienist, it has a tinge of prostitution and rape, but knows neither the inebriation of the one nor the pungent remorse of the other. It is a vulgar pickpocket, who begs pardon of the public and is ashamed of himself and weeps when caught in the act; it is something low, plebeian and shameful, that does not admit of public confession, and hides like a wound in the leg or a false tooth; it debases love to pygmy proportions, lowers the level of the spouse and elevates that of the chambermaid. It is an upstart who can dress well, but smells of the stable; a despicable, often even ridiculous creature, who is merely tolerated.

When one refrains from assuming all moral responsibility; when, through sluggishness, ignorance or skepticism, or for all these reasons, one abdicates the supreme primacy of husband and father, a right which not even the nude cannibal will relinquish, one becomes in modern society a sort of convict freed on parole, to whom liberty is granted on condition that he will regularly report to the police; a sort of brigand allowed at large, who, for lack of proof, cannot be sentenced to prison. A hundred times better, prostitution with its degradations and vile infirmities! Public opinion, laws, books should scourge and place in the pillory of ridicule and opprobrium this bastard compact of concubinage, denying it all assent, consent and toleration. And women too, who, more than the laws, can be the avengers of these social degradations, should flagellate these amphibia of love, denying them caresses and esteem, and showing to them at every hour, with cruel art, how different are the voluptuous aromas of true love from the daily slop of domestic concubinage.

The man of a high race, who aspires to be called a civilized man, should be monogamous, and cannot consecrate his love with any other compact than matrimony.

Matrimony should be a free, a very free selection, for the woman as much as for the man; it should be the selection of selections, the typical selection.

As long as we deny the young woman a free and wise education so that she may choose well; as long as we deny her the same right of selection as man possesses, we never will be able to elevate matrimony. The common consciousness in two creatures that they have chosen each other freely and that they love each other without any bond of interest, any pressure of authority, of prejudice, of ambition, is the sacred corner-stone on which the most splendid temples of conjugal happiness are erected, and it has sufficient power to preserve that happiness amidst the greatest domestic storms.

Neither do I believe in sudden and irresistible loves, nor in the future happiness of a married couple who, without straw to weave the nest, in the open country, amid the frosts of misery, wish to erect a temple to Love. No; matrimony is love and should be nothing except love. But love is nude and wants to be clothed; love is delicate, and wants to be nourished and protected from the winds and the frosts; love is fruitful, and should have bread and wine to keep alive the little angels that will bloom in its garden. All this should be known by our young girls; our authority should go no further than temporizing; we should never impose anything on lovers except patience; and this in itself is sufficient to cause many transient desires to vanish, while it invigorates true loves. But in any case, and always, selection should be free, and to prepare for it the education of our daughters should be more sincere, more frank, less hypocritical, less false. Teach your child modesty and personal dignity, and you will see that with such sentiments the fortress you wish to guard will very rarely capitulate. Perpetual diffidence rouses many false alarms, stirs up in many frivolous and touchy natures the desire for spite and revenge. Diffidence always in arms gives one a pessimistic idea of the virtues of mothers; perhaps they remember how weakly they resisted temptation and they try by every art to avoid it, instead of strengthening the forces that should defend virtue.

The free selection of woman is much more important in our society, because she is not ignorant of the fact that in marriage she will find an immense liberty; perhaps she also divines that, even though she should not love the official spouse, she can still love and be loved. When a society is entirely saturated with adultery and hypocrisy, even the chaste and ingenuous maiden is dimly prescient of certain things which she dares not acknowledge to herself. Without leaving the domestic nest, she may perhaps know with what infamy a family may become sullied; she has, perhaps, more than once repeated to herself: "I will not sin, but—I, too, could sin with impunity."

Free selection is the best guarantee of faith; it is the only touchstone by which the true natural rights of mutual fidelity are tried. No one has the right to cast the first stone at the adulteress if she, ignorant, was dragged to the altar; no wife can be condemned if she was forced to sign the compact like a victim and a slave instead of as a woman and a lover.

All these reforms which must elevate matrimony will be but slowly secured through the progress of education and customs, through morality strengthened by science and not by fear, through greater respect for the liberty of woman, who must be raised from the low level where modern society has still left her.

THE END