CHAPTER XL Every kind of love and every kind of imagination, in the individual, takes its colour from one of these six temperaments:— - The sanguine, or French,—M. de Francueil (Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay);
- The choleric, or Spanish,—Lauzun (the Peguilhen of Saint-Simon's Memoirs);
- The melancholy, or German,—Schiller's Don Carlos;
- The phlegmatic, or Dutch;
- The nervous—Voltaire;
- The athletic—Milo of Croton.[1]
If the influence of temperament makes itself felt in ambition, avarice, friendship, etc. etc., what must it be in the case of love, in which the physical also is perforce an ingredient? Let us suppose that all kinds of love can be referred to the four varieties, which we have noted:— - Passion-love—Julie d'Étanges;(23)
- Gallant-love or gallantry;
- Physical love;
- Vanity-love—"a duchess is never more than thirty for a bourgeois."
We must submit these four kinds of love to the six different characters, with which habits, dependent upon the six kinds of temperament, stamp the imagination. Tiberius did not have the wild imagination of Henry VIII.Then let us submit all these combinations, thus obtained, to the differences of habit which depend upon government or national character:— - Asiatic despotism, such as may be seen at Constantinople;
- Absolute monarchy À la Louis XIV;
- Aristocracy masked by a charter, or government of a nation for the profit of the rich, as in England—all according to the rules of a self-styled biblical morality;
- A federal republic, or government for the profit of all, as in the United States of America;
- Constitutional monarchy, or—
- A State in revolution, as Spain, Portugal, France(24). This state of things in a country gives lively passions to everyone, makes manners more natural, destroys puerilities, the conventional virtues and senseless proprieties[2]—gives seriousness to youth and causes it to despise vanity-love and neglect gallantry.
This state can last a long time and form the habits of a generation. In France it began in 1788, was interrupted in 1802, and began again in 1818—to end God knows when! After all these general ways of considering love, we have the differences of age, and come finally to individual peculiarities. For example, we might say:— I found at Dresden, in Count Woltstein, vanity-love, a melancholy temperament, monarchical habits, thirty years, and ... his individual peculiarities. For anyone who is to form a judgment on love, this way of viewing things is conveniently short and cooling to the head—an essential, but difficult operation. Now, as in physiology man has learnt scarcely anything about himself, except by means of comparative anatomy, so in the case of passions, through vanity and many other causes of illusion, we can only get enlightenment on what goes on in ourselves from the foibles we have observed in others. If by chance this essay has any useful effect, it will be by bringing the mind to make comparisons of this sort. To lead the way, I am going to attempt a sketch of some general traits in the character of love in different nations. I beg for pardon if I often come back to Italy; in the present state of manners in Europe, it is the only country where the plant, which I describe, grows in all freedom. In France, vanity; in Germany, a pretentious and highly comical philosophy; in England, pride, timid, painful and rancorous, torture and stifle it, or force it into a crooked channel.[3]
CHAPTER XLI
OF NATIONS WITH REGARD TO LOVE.
FRANCE I mean to put aside my natural affections and be only a cold philosopher. French women, fashioned by their amiable men, themselves creatures only of vanity and physical desires, are less active, less energetic, less feared, and, what's more, less loved and less powerful, than Spanish and Italian women. A woman is powerful only according to the degree of unhappiness, which she can inflict as punishment on her lover. Where men have nothing but vanity, every woman is useful, but none is indispensable. It is success in winning a woman's love, not in keeping it, which flatters a man. When men have only physical desires, they go to prostitutes, and that is why the prostitutes of France are charming and those of Spain the very reverse. In France, to a great many men prostitutes can give as much happiness as virtuous women—happiness, that is to say, without love. There is always one thing for which a Frenchman has much more respect than for his mistress—his vanity. In Paris a young man sees in his mistress a kind of slave, whose destiny it is, before everything, to please his vanity. If she resist the orders of this dominating passion, he leaves her—and is only the better pleased with himself, when he can tell his friends in what a piquant way, with how smart a gesture, he waved her off. A Frenchman, who knew his own country well (Meilhan), said: "In France, great passions are as rare as great men."No language has words to express how impossible it is for a Frenchman to play the role of a deserted and desperate lover, in full view of a whole town—yet no sight is commoner at Venice or Bologna. To find love at Paris, we must descend to those classes, in which the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle against real want, have left more energy. To let oneself be seen with a great and unsatisfied desire, is to let oneself be seen in a position of inferiority—and that is impossible in France, except for people of no position at all. It means exposing oneself to all kinds of sneers—hence come the exaggerated praises bestowed on prostitutes by young men who mistrust their own hearts. A vulgar susceptibility and dread of appearing in a position of inferiority forms the principle of conversation among provincial people. Think of the man who only lately, when told of the assassination of H. R. H. the Duke of Berri(25), answered: "I knew it."[1] In the Middle Ages hearts were tempered by the presence of danger, and therein, unless I am mistaken, lies another cause of the astonishing superiority of the men of the sixteenth century. Originality, which among us is rare, comical, dangerous and often affected, was then of everyday and unadorned. Countries where even to-day danger often shows its iron hand, such as Corsica,[2] Spain or Italy, can still produce great men. In those climates, where men's gall cooks for three months under the burning heat, it is activity's direction that is to seek; at Paris, I fear, it is activity itself.[3] Many young men, fine enough to be sure at Montmirail or the Bois de Boulogne, are afraid of love; and when you see them, at the age of twenty, fly the sight of a young girl who has struck them as pretty, you may know that cowardice is the real cause. When they remember what they have read in novels is expected of a lover, their blood runs cold. These chilly spirits cannot conceive how the storm of passion, which lashes the sea to waves, also fills the sails of the ship and gives her the power of riding over them. Love is a delicious flower, but one must have the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a frightful precipice. Besides ridicule, love has always staring it in the face the desperate plight of being deserted by the loved one, and in her place only a dead blank for all the rest of one's life. Civilisation would be perfect, if it could continue the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with a more frequent presence of danger.[4]It ought to be possible to augment a thousandfold the pleasures of private life by exposing it frequently to danger. I do not speak only of military danger. I would have this danger present at every instant, in every shape, and threatening all the interests of existence, such as formed the essence of life in the Middle Ages. Such danger as our civilisation has trained and refined, goes hand in hand quite naturally with the most insipid feebleness of character. I hear the words of a great man in A Voice from St Helena by Mr. O'Meara:— Order Murat to attack and destroy four or five thousand men in such a direction, it was done in a moment; but leave him to himself, he was an imbecile without judgment. I cannot conceive how so brave a man could be so "lÂche." He was nowhere brave unless before the enemy. There he was probably the bravest man in the world.... He was a paladin, in fact a Don Quixote in the field; but take him into the Cabinet, he was a poltroon without judgment or decision. Murat and Ney were the bravest men I ever witnessed. (O'Meara, Vol. II, p. 95.)
CHAPTER XLII
FRANCE (continued) I beg leave to speak ill of France a little longer. The reader need have no fear of seeing my satire remain unpunished; if this essay finds readers, I shall pay for my insults with interest. Our national honour is wide awake. France fills an important place in the plan of this book, because Paris, thanks to the superiority of its conversation and its literature, is, and will always be, the salon of Europe. Three-quarters of the billets in Vienna, as in London, are written in French or are full of French allusions and quotations—Lord knows what French![1] As regards great passions, France, in my opinion, is void of originality from two causes:— 1. True honour—the desire to resemble Bayard(26)—in order to be honoured in the world and there, every day, to see your vanity satisfied. 2. The fool's honour, or the desire to resemble the upper classes, the fashionable world of Paris. The art of entering a drawing-room, of showing aversion to a rival, of breaking with your mistress, etc. The fool's honour is much more useful than true honour in ministering to the pleasures of our vanity, both in itself, as being intelligible to fools, and also as being applicable to the actions of every day and every hour. We see people, with only this fool's honour and without true honour, very well received in society; but the contrary is impossible. This is the way of the fashionable world:— 1. To treat all great interests ironically. 'Tis natural enough. Formerly people, really in society, could not be profoundly affected by anything; they hadn't the time. Residence in the country has altered all this. Besides, it is contrary to a Frenchman's nature to let himself be seen in a posture of admiration,[2] that is to say, in a position of inferiority, not only in relation to the object of his admiration—that goes without saying—but also in relation to his neighbour, if his neighbour choose to mock at what he admires. In Germany, Italy and Spain, on the contrary, admiration is genuine and happy; there the admirer is proud of his transports and pities the man who turns up his nose. I don't say the mocker, for that's an impossible rÔle in countries, where it is not in failing in the imitation of a particular line of conduct, but in failing to strike the road to happiness, that the only ridicule exists. In the South, mistrust and horror at being troubled in the midst of pleasures vividly felt, plants in men an inborn admiration of luxury and pomp. See the Courts of Madrid and Naples; see a funzione at Cadiz—things are carried to a point of delirium.[3] 2. A Frenchman thinks himself the most miserable of men, and almost the most ridiculous, if he is obliged to spend his time alone. But what is love without solitude? 3. A passionate man thinks only of himself; a man who wants consideration thinks only of others. Nay more: before 1789, individual security was only found in France by becoming one of a body, the Robe, for example,[4] and by being protected by the members of that body. The thoughts of your neighbour were then an integral and necessary part of your happiness. This was still truer at the Court than in Paris. It is easy to see how far such manners, which, to say the truth, are every day losing their force, but which Frenchmen will retain for another century, are favourable to great passions. Try to imagine a man throwing himself from a window, and at the same time trying to reach the pavement in a graceful position. In France, the passionate man, merely as such, and in no other light, is the object of general ridicule. Altogether, he offends his fellow-men, and that gives wings to ridicule.
CHAPTER XLIII
ITALY(27) Italy's good fortune is that it has been left to the inspiration of the moment, a good fortune which it shares, up to a certain point, with Germany and England. Furthermore, Italy is a country where Utility, which was the guiding principle of the mediÆval republic,[1] has not been dethroned by Honour or Virtue, disposed to the advantages of monarchy.[2] True honour leads the way to the fool's honour. It accustoms men to ask themselves: What will my neighbour think of my happiness? But how can happiness of the heart be an object of vanity, since no one can see it.?[3] In proof of all this, France is the country, where there are fewer marriages from inclination than anywhere else in the world.[4] And Italy has other advantages. The Italian has undisturbed leisure and an admirable climate, which makes men sensible to beauty under every form. He is extremely, yet reasonably, mistrustful, which increases the aloofness of intimate love and doubles its charms. He reads no novels, indeed hardly any books, and this leaves still more to the inspiration of the moment. He has a passion for music, which excites in the soul a movement very similar to that of love. In France, towards 1770, there was no mistrust.; on the contrary, it was good form to live and die before the public. As the Duchess of Luxemburg was intimate with a hundred friends, there was no intimacy and no friendship, properly so-called. In Italy, passion, since it is not a very rare distinction, is not a subject of ridicule,[5] and you may hear people in the salons openly quoting general maxims of love. The public knows the symptoms and periods of this illness, and is very much concerned with it. They say to a man who has been deserted: "You'll be in despair for six months, but you'll get over it in the end, like So-and-so, etc." In Italy, public opinion is the very humble attendant on passion. Real pleasure there exercises the power, which elsewhere is in the hands of society. 'Tis quite simple—for society can give scarcely any pleasure to a people, who has no time to be vain, and can have but little authority over those, who are only trying to escape the notice of their "pacha"(29). The blasÉs censure the passionate—but who cares for them? South of the Alps, society is a despot without a prison. As in Paris honour challenges, sword in hand, or, if possible, bon mot in the mouth, every approach to every recognised great interest, it is much more convenient to take refuge in irony. Many young men have taken up a different attitude, and become disciples of J. J. Rousseau and Madame de StaËl. As irony had become vulgar, one had to fall back on feelings. A. de Pezai in our days writes like M. Darlincourt. Besides, since 1789, everything tends to favour utility or individual sensibility, as opposed to honour or the empire of opinion. The sight of the two Chambers teaches people to discuss everything, even mere nonsense. The nation is becoming serious, and gallantry is losing ground. As a Frenchman, I ought to say that it is not a small number of colossal fortunes, but the multiplicity of middling ones, that makes up the riches of a country. In every country passion is rare, and gallantry is more graceful and refined: in France, as a consequence, it has better fortune. This great nation, the first in the world,[6] has the same kind of aptitude for love as for intellectual achievements. In 1822 we have, to be sure, no Moore, no Walter Scott, no Crabbe, no Byron, no Monti, no Pellico; but we have among us more men of intellect, clear-sighted, agreeable and up to the level of the lights of this century, than England has, or Italy. It is for this reason that the debates in our Chamber of Deputies in 1822, are so superior to those in the English Parliament, and that when a Liberal from England comes to France, we are quite surprised to find in him several opinions which are distinctly feudal.A Roman artist wrote from Paris:— I am exceedingly uncomfortable here; I suppose it's because I have no leisure for falling in love at my ease. Here, sensibility is spent drop by drop, just as it forms, in such a way, at least so I find it, as to be a drain on the source. At Rome, owing to the little interest created by the events of every day and the somnolence of the outside world, sensibility accumulates to the profit of passion.
CHAPTER XLIV
ROME Only at Rome[1] can a respectable woman, seated in her carriage, say effusively to another woman, a mere acquaintance, what I heard this morning: "Ah, my dear, beware of love with Fabio Vitteleschi; better for you to fall in love with a highwayman! For all his soft and measured air, he is capable of stabbing you to the heart with a knife, and of saying with the sweetest smile, while he plunged the knife into your breast: 'Poor child, does it hurt?'" And this conversation took place in the presence of a pretty young lady of fifteen, daughter of the woman who received the advice, and a very wide-awake young lady. If a man from the North has the misfortune not to be shocked at first by the candour of this southern capacity for love, which is nothing but the simple product of a magnificent nature, favoured by the twofold absence of good form and of all interesting novelty, after a stay of one year the women of all other countries will become intolerable to him. He will find Frenchwomen, perfectly charming, with their little graces,[2] seductive for the first three days, but boring the fourth—fatal day, when one discovers that all these graces, studied beforehand, and learned by rote, are eternally the same, every day and for every lover. He will see German women, on the contrary, so very natural, and giving themselves up with so much ardour to their imagination, but often with nothing to show in the end, for all their naturalness, but barrenness, insipidity, and blue-stocking tenderness. The phrase of Count Almaviva(30) seems made for Germany: "And one is quite astonished, one fine evening, to find satiety, where one went to look for happiness." At Rome, the foreigner must not forget that, if nothing is tedious in countries where everything is natural, the bad is there still more bad than elsewhere. To speak only of the men,[3] we can see appearing here in society a kind of monster, who elsewhere lies low—a man passionate, clear-sighted and base, all in an equal degree. Suppose evil chance has set him near a woman in some capacity or other: madly in love with her, suppose, he will drink to the very dregs the misery of seeing her prefer a rival. There he is to oppose her happier lover. Nothing escapes him, and everyone sees that nothing escapes him; but he continues none the less, in despite of every honourable sentiment, to trouble the woman, her lover and himself. No one blames him—"That's his way of getting pleasure."—"He is doing what gives him pleasure." One evening, the lover, at the end of his patience, gives him a kick. The next day the wretch is full of excuses, and begins again to torment, constantly and imperturbably, the woman, the lover and himself. One shudders, when one thinks of the amount of unhappiness that these base spirits have every day to swallow—and doubtless there is but one grain less of cowardice between them and a poisoner. It is also only in Italy that you can see young and elegant millionaires entertaining with magnificence, in full view of a whole town, ballet girls from a big theatre, at a cost of thirty halfpence a day.[4] Two brothers X——, fine young fellows, always hunting and on horseback, are jealous of a foreigner. Instead of going and laying their complaint before him, they are sullen, and spread abroad unfavourable reports of this poor foreigner. In France, public opinion would force such men to prove their words or give satisfaction to the foreigner. Here public opinion and contempt mean nothing. Riches are always certain of being well received everywhere. A millionaire, dishonoured and excluded from every house in Paris, can go quite securely to Rome; there he will be estimated just according to the value of his dollars.
CHAPTER XLV
ENGLAND(31) I have lived a good deal of late with the ballet-girls of the Teatro Del Sol, at Valencia. People assure me that many of them are very chaste; the reason being that their profession is too fatiguing. Vigano makes them rehearse his ballet, the Jewess of Toledo, every day, from ten in the morning to four, and from midnight to three in the morning. Besides this, they have to dance every evening in both ballets. This reminds me that Rousseau prescribes a great deal of walking for Émile. This evening I was strolling at midnight with these little ballet girls out along the seashore, and I was thinking especially how unknown to us, in our sad lands of mist, is this superhuman delight in the freshness of a sea breeze under this Valencian sky, under the eyes of these resplendent stars that seem close above us. This alone repays the journey of four hundred leagues; this it is that banishes thought, for feeling is too strong. I thought that the chastity of my little ballet girls gives the explanation of the course adopted by English pride, in order, little by little, to bring back the morals of the harem into the midst of a civilised nation. One sees how it is that some of these young English girls, otherwise so beautiful and with so touching an expression, leave something to be desired as regards ideas. In spite of liberty, which has only just been banished from their island, and the admirable originality of their national character, they lack interesting ideas and originality. Often there is nothing remarkable in them but the extravagance of their refinements. It's simple enough—in England the modesty of the women is the pride of their husbands. But, however submissive a slave may be, her society becomes sooner or later a burden. Hence, for the men, the necessity of getting drunk solemnly every evening,[1] instead of as in Italy, passing the evening with their mistresses. In England, rich people, bored with their homes and under the pretext of necessary exercise, walk four or five leagues a day, as if man were created and put into the world to trot up and down it. They use up their nervous fluid by means of their legs, not their hearts; after which, they may well talk of female refinement and look down on Spain and Italy. No life, on the other hand, could be less busy than that of young Italians; to them all action is importunate, if it take away their sensibility. From time to time they take a walk of half a league for health's sake, as an unpleasant medicine. As for the women, a Roman woman in a whole year does not walk as far as a young Miss in a week. It seems to me that the pride of an English husband exalts very adroitly the vanity of his wretched wife. He persuades her, first of all, that one must not be vulgar, and the mothers, who are getting their daughters ready to find husbands, are quick enough to seize upon this idea. Hence fashion is far more absurd and despotic in reasonable England than in the midst of light-hearted France: in Bond Street was invented the idea of the "carefully careless." In England fashion is a duty, at Paris it is a pleasure. In London fashion raises a wall of bronze between New Bond Street and Fenchurch Street far different from that between the ChaussÉe d'Antin and the rue Saint-Martin at Paris. Husbands are quite willing to allow their wives this aristocratic nonsense, to make up for the enormous amount of unhappiness, which they impose on them. I recognise a perfect picture of women's society in England, such as the taciturn pride of its men produces, in the once celebrated novels of Miss Burney. Since it is vulgar to ask for a glass of water, when one is thirsty, Miss Burney's heroines do not fail to let themselves die of thirst. While flying from vulgarity, they fall into the most abominable affectation. Compare the prudence of a young Englishman of twenty-two with the profound mistrust of a young Italian of the same age. The Italian must be mistrustful to be safe, but this mistrust he puts aside, or at least forgets, as soon as he becomes intimate, while it is apparently just in his most tender relationships that you see the young Englishman redouble his prudence and aloofness. I once heard this:— "In the last seven months I haven't spoken to her of the trip to Brighton." This was a question of a necessary economy of twenty-four pounds, and a lover of twenty-two years speaking of a mistress, a married woman, whom he adored. In the transports of his passion prudence had not left him: far less had he let himself go enough to say to his mistress: "I shan't go to Brighton, because I should feel the pinch." Note that the fate of Gianone de Pellico, and of a hundred others, forces the Italian to be mistrustful, while the young English beau is only forced to be prudent by the excessive and morbid sensibility of his vanity. A Frenchman, charming enough with his inspirations of the minute, tells everything to her he loves. It is habit. Without it he would lack ease, and he knows that without ease there is no grace. It is with difficulty and with tears in my eyes that I have plucked up courage to write all this; but, since I would not, I'm sure, flatter a king, why should I say of a country anything but what seems to me the truth? Of course it may be all very absurd, for the simple reason that this country gave birth to the most lovable woman that I have known. It would be another form of cringing before a monarch. I will content myself with adding that in the midst of all this variety of manners, among so many Englishwomen, who are the spiritual victims of Englishmen's pride, a perfect form of originality does exist, and that a family, brought up aloof from these distressing restrictions (invented to reproduce the morals of the harem) may be responsible for charming characters. And how insufficient, in spite of its etymology,—and how common—is this word "charming" to render what I would express. The gentle Imogen, the tender Ophelia might find plenty of living models in England; but these models are far from enjoying the high veneration that is unanimously accorded to the true accomplished Englishwoman, whose destiny is to show complete obedience to every convention and to afford a husband full enjoyment of the most morbid aristocratic pride and a happiness that makes him die of boredom.[2] In the great suites of fifteen or twenty rooms, so fresh and so dark, in which Italian women pass their lives softly propped on low divans, they hear people speak of love and of music for six hours in the day. At night, at the theatre, hidden in their boxes for four hours, they hear people speak of music and love. Then, besides the climate, the whole way of living is in Spain or Italy as favourable to music and love, as it is the contrary in England. I neither blame nor approve; I observe. [1] This custom begins to give way a little in very good society, which is becoming French, as everywhere; but I'm speaking of the vast generality.
CHAPTER XLVI
ENGLAND—(continued) I love England too much and I have seen of her too little to be able to speak on the subject. I shall make use of the observations of a friend. In the actual state of Ireland (1822) is realised, for the twentieth time in two centuries,[1] that curious state of society which is so fruitful of courageous resolutions, and so opposed to a monotonous existence, and in which people, who breakfast gaily together, may meet in two hours' time on the field of battle. Nothing makes a more energetic and direct appeal to that disposition of the spirit, which is most favourable to the tender passions—to naturalness. Nothing is further removed from the two great English vices—cant and bashfulness,—moral hypocrisy and haughty, painful timidity. (See the Travels of Mr. Eustace(32) in Italy.) If this traveller gives a poor picture of the country, in return he gives a very exact idea of his own character, and this character, as that of Mr. Beattie(32), the poet (see his Life written by an intimate friend), is unhappily but too common in England. For the priest, honest in spite of his cloth, refer to the letters of the Bishop of Landaff.[2](32). One would have thought Ireland already unfortunate enough, bled as it has been for two centuries by the cowardly and cruel tyranny of England; but now there enters into the moral state of Ireland a terrible personage: the Priest.... For two centuries Ireland has been almost as badly governed as Sicily. A thorough comparison between these two islands, in a volume of five hundred pages, would offend many people and overwhelm many established theories with ridicule. What is evident is that the happiest of these two countries—both of them governed by fools, only for the profit of a minority—is Sicily. Its governors have at least left it its love of pleasure; they would willingly have robbed it of this as of the rest, but, thanks to its climate, Sicily knows little of that moral evil called Law and Government.[3] It is old men and priests who make the laws and have them executed, and this seems quite in keeping with the comic jealousy, with which pleasure is hunted down in the British Isles. The people there might say to its governors as Diogenes said to Alexander: "Be content with your sinecures, but please don't step between me and my daylight."[4] By means of laws, rules, counter-rules and punishments, the Government in Ireland has created the potato, and the population of Ireland exceeds by far that of Sicily. This is to say, they have produced several millions of degenerate and half-witted peasants, broken down by work and misery, dragging out a wretched life of some forty or fifty years among the marshes of old Erin—and, you may be sure, paying their taxes! A real miracle! With the pagan religion these poor wretches would at least have enjoyed some happiness—but not a bit of it, they must adore St. Patrick. Everywhere in Ireland one sees none but peasants more miserable than savages. Only, instead of there being a hundred thousand, as there would be in a state of nature, there are eight millions,[5] who allow five hundred "absentees" to live in prosperity at London or Paris. Society is infinitely more advanced in Scotland,[6] where, in very many respects, government is good (the rarity of crime, the diffusion of reading, the non-existence of bishops, etc.). There the tender passions can develop much more freely, and it is possible to leave these sombre thoughts and approach the humorous. One cannot fail to notice a foundation of melancholy in Scottish women. This melancholy is particularly seductive at dances, where it gives a singular piquancy to the extreme ardour and energy with which they perform their national dances. Edinburgh has another advantage, that of being withdrawn from the vile empire of money. In this, as well as in the singular and savage beauty of its site, this city forms a complete contrast with London. Like Rome, fair Edinburgh seems rather the sojourn of the contemplative life. At London you have the ceaseless whirlwind and restless interests of active life, with all its advantages and inconveniences. Edinburgh seems to me to pay its tribute to the devil by a slight disposition to pedantry. Those days when Mary Stuart lived at old Holyrood, and Riccio was assassinated in her arms, were worth more to Love (and here all women will agree with me) than to-day, when one discusses at such length, and even in their presence, the preference to be accorded to the neptunian system over the vulcanian system of ... I prefer a discussion on the new uniform given by the king to the Guards, or on the peerage which Sir B. Bloomfield(35) failed to get—the topic of London in my day—to a learned discussion as to who has best explored the nature of rocks, de Werner or de.... I say nothing about the terrible Scottish Sunday, after which a Sunday in London looks like a beanfeast. That day, set aside for the honour of Heaven, is the best image of Hell that I have ever seen on earth. "Don't let's walk so fast," said a Scotchman returning from church to a Frenchman, his friend; "people might think we were going for a walk."[7] Of the three countries, Ireland is the one in which there is the least hypocrisy. See the New Monthly Magazine thundering against Mozart and the Nozze di Figaro.[8] In every country it is the aristocrats, who try to judge a literary magazine and literature; and for the last four years in England these have been hand in glove with the bishops. As I say, that of the three countries where, it seems to me, there is the least hypocrisy, is Ireland: on the contrary, you find there a reckless, a most fascinating vivacity. In Scotland there is the strict observance of Sunday, but on Monday they dance with a joy and an abandon unknown to London. There is plenty of love among the peasant class in Scotland. The omnipotence of imagination gallicised the country in the sixteenth century. The terrible fault of English society, that which in a single day creates a greater amount of sadness than the national debt and its consequences, and even than the war to the death waged by the rich against the poor, is this sentence which I heard last autumn at Croydon, before the beautiful statue of the bishop: "In society no one wants to put himself forward, for fear of being deceived in his expectations." Judge what laws, under the name of modesty, such men must impose on their wives and mistresses.
CHAPTER XLVII
SPAIN(36) Andalusia is one of the most charming sojourns that Pleasure has chosen for itself on earth. I had three or four anecdotes to show how my ideas about the three or four different acts of madness, which together constitute Love, hold good for Spain: I have been advised to sacrifice them to French refinement. In vain I protested that I wrote in French, but emphatically not French literature. God preserve me from having anything in common with the French writers esteemed to-day! The Moors, when they abandoned Andalusia, left it their architecture and much of their manners. Since it is impossible for me to speak of the latter in the language of Madame de SÉvignÉ, I'll at least say this of Moorish architecture:—its principal trait consists in providing every house with a little garden surrounded by an elegant and graceful portico. There, during the unbearable heat of summer, when for whole weeks together the RÉaumur thermometer never falls below a constant level of thirty degrees, a delicious obscurity pervades these porticoes. In the middle of the little garden there is always a fountain, monotonous and voluptuous, whose sound is all that stirs this charming retreat. The marble basin is surrounded by a dozen orange-trees and laurels. A thick canvas, like a tent, covers in the whole of the little garden, and, while it protects it from the rays of the sun and from the light, lets in the gentle breezes which, at midday, come down from the mountains. There live and receive their guests the fair ladies of Andalusia: a simple black silk robe, ornamented with fringes of the same colour, and giving glimpses of a charming ankle; a pale complexion and eyes that mirror all the most fugitive shades of the most tender and ardent passion—such are the celestial beings, whom I am forbidden to bring upon the scene. I look upon the Spanish people as the living representatives of the Middle Age. It is ignorant of a mass of little truths (the puerile vanity of its neighbours); but it has a profound knowledge of great truths and enough character and wit to follow their consequences down to their most remote effects. The Spanish character offers a fine contrast to French intellect—hard, brusque, inelegant, full of savage pride, and unconcerned with others. It is just the contrast of the fifteenth with the eighteenth century. Spain provides me with a good contrast; the only people, that was able to withstand Napoleon, seems to me to be absolutely lacking in the fool's honour and in all that is foolish in honour. Instead of making fine military ordinances, of changing uniforms every six months and of wearing large spurs, Spain has general No importa.[1]
CHAPTER XLVIII
GERMAN LOVE(37) If the Italian, always agitated between love and hate, is a creature of passion, and the Frenchman of vanity, the good and simple descendants of the ancient Germans are assuredly creatures of imagination. Scarcely raised above social interests, the most directly necessary to their subsistence, one is amazed to see them soar into what they call their philosophy, which is a sort of gentle, lovable, quite harmless folly. I am going to cite, not altogether from memory, but from hurriedly taken notes, a work whose author, though writing in a tone of opposition, illustrates clearly, even in his admirations, the military spirit in all its excesses—I speak of the Travels in Austria of M. Cadet-Gassicourt, in 1809. What would the noble and generous Desaix have said, if he had seen the pure heroism of '95 lead on to this execrable egoism? Two friends find themselves side by side with a battery at the battle of Talavera, one as Captain in command, the other as lieutenant. A passing bullet lays the Captain low. "Good," says the lieutenant, quite beside himself with joy, "that's done for Francis—now I shall be Captain." "Not so quick," cries Francis, as he gets up. He had only been stunned by the bullet. The lieutenant, as well as the Captain, were the best fellows in the world, not a bit ill-natured, and only a little stupid; the excitement of the chase and the furious egoism which the Emperor had succeeded in awakening, by decorating it with the name of glory, made these enthusiastic worshippers of him forget their humanity. After the harsh spectacle offered by men like this, who dispute on parade at Schoenbrunn for a look from their master and a barony—see how the Emperor's apothecary describes German love, page 188: "Nothing can be more sweet, more gentle, than an Austrian woman. With her, love is a cult, and when she is attached to a Frenchman, she adores him—in the full force of the word. "There are light, capricious women everywhere, but in general the Viennese are faithful and in no way coquettes; when I say that they are faithful, I mean to the lover of their own choice, for husbands are the same at Vienna as everywhere else" (June 7, 1809). The most beautiful woman of Vienna accepts the homage of one of my friends, M. M——, a captain attached to the Emperor's headquarters. He's a young man, gentle and witty, but certainly neither his figure nor face are in any way remarkable. For some days past his young mistress has made a very great sensation among our brilliant staff officers, who pass their life ferreting about in every corner of Vienna. It has become a contest of daring. Every possible manoeuvre has been employed. The fair one's house has been put in a state of siege by all the best-looking and richest. Pages, brilliant colonels, generals of the guard, even princes, have gone to waste their time under her windows, and their money on the fair lady's servants. All have been turned away. These princes were little accustomed to find a deaf ear at Paris or Milan. When I laughed at their discomfiture before this charming creature: "But good Heavens," she said, "don't they know that I'm in love with M. M....?" A singular remark and certainly a most improper one! Page 290: "While we were at Schoenbrunn I noticed that two young men, who were attached to the Emperor, never received anyone in their lodgings at Vienna. We used to chaff them a lot on their discretion. One of them said to me one day: 'I'll keep no secrets from you: a young woman of the place has given herself to me, on condition that she need never leave my apartment, and that I never receive anyone at all without her leave.' I was curious," says the traveller, "to know this voluntary recluse, and my position as doctor giving me, as in the East, an honourable pretext, I accepted a breakfast offered me by my friend. The woman I found was very much in love, took the greatest care of the household, never wanted to go out, though it was just a pleasant time of the year for walking—and for the rest, was quite certain that her lover would take her back with him to France. "The other young man, who was also never to be found in his rooms, soon after made me a similar confession. I also saw his mistress. Like the first, she was fair, very pretty, and an excellent figure. "The one, eighteen years of age, was the daughter of a well-to-do upholsterer; the other, who was about twenty-four, was the wife of an Austrian officer, on service with the army of the Archduke John. This latter pushed her love to the verge of what we, in our land of vanity, would call heroism. Not only was her lover faithless to her, he also found himself under the necessity of making a confession of a most unpleasant nature. She nursed him with complete devotion; the seriousness of his illness attached her to her lover; and perhaps she only cherished him the more for it, when soon after his life was in danger. "It will be understood that I, a stranger and a conqueror, have had no chance of observing love in the highest circles, seeing that the whole of the aristocracy of Vienna had retired at our approach to their estates in Hungary. But I have seen enough of it to be convinced that it is not the same love as at Paris. "The feeling of love is considered by the Germans as a virtue, as an emanation of the Divinity, as something mystical. It is riot quick, impetuous, jealous, tyrannical, as it is in the heart of an Italian woman: it is profound and something like illuminism; in this Germany is a thousand miles away from England. "Some years ago a Leipsic tailor, in a fit of jealousy, waited for his rival in the public garden and stabbed him. He was condemned to lose his head. The moralists of the town, faithful to the German traditions of kindness and unhampered emotion (which makes for feebleness of character) discussed the sentence, decided that it was severe and, making a comparison between the tailor and Orosmanes, were moved to pity for his fate. Nevertheless they were unable to have his sentence mitigated. But the day of the execution, all the young girls of Leipsic, dressed in white, met together and accompanied the tailor to the scaffold, throwing flowers in his path. "No one thought this ceremony odd; yet, in a country which considers itself logical, it might be said that it was honouring a species of murder. But it was a ceremony—and everything which is a ceremony, is always safe from ridicule in Germany. See the ceremonies at the Courts of the small princes, which would make us Frenchmen die with laughter, but appear quite imposing at Meiningen or Koethen. In the six gamekeepers who file past their little prince, adorned with his star, they see the soldiers of Arminius marching out to meet the legions of Varus. "A point of difference between the Germans and all other peoples: they are exalted, instead of calming themselves, by meditation. A second subtle point: they are all eaten up with the desire to have character. "Life at Court, ordinarily so favourable to love, in Germany deadens it. You have no idea of the mass of incomprehensible minutiÆ and the pettinesses that constitute what is called a German Court,[1]—even the Court of the best princes. (Munich, 1820)."When we used to arrive with the staff in a German town, at the end of the first fortnight the ladies of the district had made their choice. But that choice was constant; and I have heard it said that the French were a shoal, on which foundered many a virtue till then irreproachable."
The young Germans whom I have met at Gottingen, Dresden, Koenigsberg, etc., are brought up among pseudo-systems of philosophy, which are merely obscure and badly written poetry, but, as regards their ethics, of the highest and holiest sublimity. They seem to me to have inherited from their Middle Age, not like the Italians, republicanism, mistrust and the dagger, but a strong disposition to enthusiasm and good faith. Thus it is that every ten years they have a new great man who's going to efface all the others. (Kant, Steding, Fichte, etc. etc.[2]) Formerly Luther made a powerful appeal to the moral sense, and the Germans fought thirty years on end, in order to obey their conscience. It's a fine word and one quite worthy of respect, however absurd the belief; I say worthy of respect even from an artist. See the struggle in the soul of S—— between the third [sixth] commandment of God—"Thou shalt not kill"—and what he believed to be the interest of his country. Already in Tacitus we find a mystical enthusiasm for women and love, at least if that writer was not merely aiming his satire at Rome.[3] One has not been five hundred miles in Germany, before one can distinguish in this people, disunited and scattered, a foundation of enthusiasm, soft and tender, rather than ardent and impetuous. If this disposition were not so apparent, it would be enough to reread three or four of the novels of Auguste La Fontaine, whom the pretty Louise, Queen of Prussia, made Canon of Magdeburg, as a reward for having so well painted the Peaceful Life.[4] I see a new proof of this disposition, which is common to all the Germans, in the Austrian code, which demands the confession of the guilty for the punishment of almost all crimes. This code is calculated to fit a people, among whom crime is a rare phenomenon, and sooner an excess of madness in a feeble being than the effect of interests, daring, reasoned and for ever in conflict with society. It is precisely the contrary of what is wanted in Italy, where they are trying to introduce it—a mistake of well-meaning people. I have seen German judges in Italy in despair over sentences of death or, what's the equivalent, the irons, if they were obliged to pronounce it without the confession of the guilty.
CHAPTER XLIX
A DAY IN FLORENCE Florence, February 12, 1819. This evening, in a box at the theatre, I met a man who had some favour to ask of a magistrate, aged fifty. His first question was: "Who is his mistress? Chi avvicina adesso?" Here everyone's affairs are absolutely public; they have their own laws; there is an approved manner of acting, which is based on justice without any conventionality—if you act otherwise, you are a porco. "What's the news?" one of my friends asked yesterday, on his arrival from Volterra. After a word of vehement lamentation about Napoleon and the English, someone adds, in a tone of the liveliest interest: "La Vitteleschi has changed her lover: poor Gherardesca is in despair."—"Whom has she taken?"—"Montegalli, the good-looking officer with a moustache, who had Princess Colonna; there he is down in the stalls, nailed to her box; he's there the whole evening, because her husband won't have him in the house, and there near the door you can see poor Gherardesca, walking about so sadly and counting afar the glances, which his faithless mistress throws his successor. He's very changed and in the depths of despair; it's quite useless for his friends to try to send him to Paris or London. He is ready to die, he says, at the very idea of leaving Florence." Every year there are twenty such cases of despair in high circles; some of them I have seen last three or four years. These poor devils are without any shame and take the whole world into their confidence. For the rest, there's little society here, and besides, when one's in love, one hardly mixes with it. It must not be thought that great passions and great hearts are at all common, even in Italy; only, in Italy, hearts which are more inflamed and less stunted by the thousand little cares of our vanity, find delicious pleasures even in the subaltern species of love. In Italy I have seen love from caprice, for example, cause transports and moments of madness, such as the most violent passion has never brought with it under the meridian of Paris.[1] I noticed this evening that there are proper names in Italian for a million particular circumstances in love, which, in French, would need endless paraphrases; for example, the action of turning sharply away, when from the floor of the house you are quizzing a woman you are in love with, and the husband or a servant come towards the front of her box. The following are the principal traits in the character of this people:— 1. The attention, habitually at the service of deep passions, cannot move rapidly. This is the most marked difference between a Frenchman and an Italian. You have only to see an Italian get into a diligence or make a payment, to understand "la furia francese." It's for this reason that the most vulgar Frenchman, provided that he is not a witty fool, like DÉmasure, always seems a superior being to an Italian woman. (The lover of Princess D—— at Rome.) 2. Everyone is in love, and not under cover, as in France; the husband is the best friend of the lover. 3. No one reads. 4. There is no society. A man does not reckon, in order to fill up and occupy his life, on the happiness which he derives from two hours' conversation and the play of vanity in this or that house. The word causerie cannot be translated into Italian. People speak when they have something to say, to forward a passion, but they rarely talk just in order to talk on any given subject. 5. Ridicule does not exist in Italy. In France, both of us are trying to imitate the same model, and I am a competent judge of the way in which you copy it.[2] In Italy I cannot say whether the peculiar action, which I see this man perform, does not give pleasure to the performer and might not, perhaps, give pleasure to me. What is affectation of language or manner at Rome, is good form or unintelligible at Florence, which is only fifty leagues away. The same French is spoken at Lyons as at Nantes. Venetian, Neapolitan Genoese, Piedmontese are almost entirely different languages, and only spoken by people who are agreed never to print except in a common language, namely that spoken at Rome. Nothing is so absurd as a comedy, with the scene laid at Milan and the characters speaking Roman. It is only by music that the Italian language, which is far more fit to be sung than spoken, will hold its own against the clearness of French, which threatens it. In Italy, fear of the "pacha"(29) and his spies causes the useful to be held in esteem; the fool's honour simply doesn't exist.[3] Its place is taken by a kind of petty hatred of society, called "petegolismo." Finally, to make fun of a person is to make a mortal enemy, a very dangerous thing in a country where the power and activity of governments is limited to exacting taxes and punishing everything above the common level.6. The patriotism of the antechamber. That pride which leads a man to seek the esteem of his fellow-citizens and to make himself one of them, but which in Italy was cut off, about the year 1550, from any noble enterprise by the jealous despotism of the small Italian princes, has given birth to a barbarous product, to a sort of Caliban, to a monster full of fury and sottishness, the patriotism of the antechamber, as M. Turgot called it, À propos of the siege of Calais (the Soldat laboureur(40) of those times.) I have seen this monster blunt the sharpest spirits. For example, a stranger will make himself unpopular, even with pretty women, if he thinks fit to find anything wrong with the painter or poet of the town; he will be soon told, and that very seriously, that he ought not to come among people to laugh at them, and they will quote to him on this topic a saying of Lewis XIV about Versailles. At Florence people say: "our Benvenuti," as at Brescia—"our Arrici": they put on the word "our" a certain emphasis, restrained yet very comical, not unlike the Miroir talking with unction about national music and of M. Monsigny, the musician of Europe. In order not to laugh in the face of these fine patriots one must remember that, owing to the dissensions of the Middle Age, envenomed by the vile policy of the Popes,[4] each city has a mortal hatred for its neighbour, and the name of the inhabitants in the one always stands in the other as a synonym for some gross fault. The Popes have succeeded in making this beautiful land into the kingdom of hate. This patriotism of the antechamber is the greatest moral sore in Italy, a corrupting germ that will still show its disastrous effects long after Italy has thrown off the yoke of its ridiculous little priests.[5] The form of this patriotism is an inexorable hatred for everything foreign. Thus they look on the Germans as fools, and get angry when someone says: "What has Italy in the eighteenth century produced the equal of Catherine II or Frederick the Great? Where have you an English garden comparable to the smallest German garden, you who, with your climate, have a real need of shade?" 7. Unlike the English or French, the Italians have no political prejudices; they all know by heart the line of La Fontaine:— Notre ennemi c'est notre M.[6]
Aristocracy, supported by the priest and a biblical state of society, is a worn-out illusion which only makes them smile. In return, an Italian needs a stay of three months in France to realise that a draper may be a conservative. 8. As a last trait of character I would mention intolerance in discussion, and anger as soon as they do not find an argument ready to hand, to throw out against that of their adversary. At that point they visibly turn pale. It is one form of their extreme sensibility, but it is not one of its most amiable forms: consequently it is one of those that I am most willing to admit as proof of the existence of sensibility. I wanted to see love without end, and, after considerable difficulty, I succeeded in being introduced this evening to Chevalier C—— and his mistress, with whom he has lived for fifty-four years. I left the box of these charming old people, my heart melted; there I saw the art of being happy, an art ignored by so many young people. Two months ago I saw Monsignor R——, by whom I was well received, because I brought him some copies of the Minerve. He was at his country house with Madame D——, whom he is still pleased, after thirty-four years, "avvicinare," as they say. She is still beautiful, but there is a touch of melancholy in this household. People attribute it to the loss of a son, who was poisoned long ago by her husband. Here, to be in love does not mean, as at Paris, to see one's mistress for a quarter of an hour every week, and for the rest of the time to obtain a look or a shake of the hand: the lover, the happy lover, passes four or five hours every day with the woman he loves. He talks to her about his actions at law, his English garden, his hunting parties, his prospects, etc. There is the completest, the most tender intimacy. He speaks to her with the familiar "tu," even in the presence of her husband and everywhere. A young man of this country, one very ambitious as he believed, was called to a high position at Vienna (nothing less than ambassador). But he could not get used to his stay abroad. At the end of six months he said good-bye to his job, and returned to be happy in his mistress's box at the opera. Such continual intercourse would be inconvenient in France, where one must display a certain degree of affectation, and where your mistress can quite well say to you: "Monsieur So-and-so, you're glum this evening; you don't say a word." In Italy it is only a matter of telling the woman you love everything that passes through your head—you must actually think aloud. There is a certain nervous state which results from intimacy; freedom provokes freedom, and is only to be got in this way. But there is one great inconvenience; you find that love in this way paralyses all your tastes and renders all the other occupations of your life insipid. Such love is the best substitute for passion. Our friends at Paris, who are still at the stage of trying to conceive that it's possible to be a Persian(71), not knowing what to say, will cry out that such manners are indecent. To begin with, I am only an historian; and secondly, I reserve to myself the right to show one day, by dint of solid reasoning, that as regards manners and fundamentally, Paris is not superior to Bologna. Quite unconsciously these poor people are still repeating their twopence-halfpenny catechism. 12 July, 1821. There is nothing odious in the society of Bologna. At Paris the role of a deceived husband is execrable; here (at Bologna) it is nothing—there are no deceived husbands. Manners are the same, it is only hate that is missing; the recognised lover is always the husband's friend, and this friendship, which has been cemented by reciprocal services, quite often survives other interests. Most love-affairs last five or six years, many for ever. People part at last, when they no longer find it sweet to tell each other everything, and when the first month of the rupture is over, there is no bitterness. January, 1822. The ancient mode of the cavaliere servente, imported into Italy by Philip II, along with Spanish pride and manners, has entirely fallen into disuse in the large towns. I know of only one exception, and that's Calabria, where the eldest brother always takes orders, marries his younger brother, sets up in the service of his sister-in-law and becomes at the same time her lover. Napoleon banished libertinism from upper Italy, and even from here (Naples). The morals of the present generation of pretty women shame their mothers; they are more favourable to passion-love, but physical love has lost a great deal.[7]
CHAPTER L
LOVE IN THE UNITED STATES(41) A free government is a government which does no harm to its citizens, but which, on the contrary, gives them security and tranquillity. But 'tis a long cry from this to happiness. That a man must find for himself; for he must be a gross creature who thinks himself perfectly happy, because he enjoys security and tranquillity. We mix these things up in Europe, especially in Italy. Accustomed as we are to governments, which do us harm, it seems to us that to be delivered from them would be supreme happiness; in this we are like invalids, worn out with the pain of our sufferings. The example of America shows us just the contrary. There government discharges its office quite well, and does harm to no one. But we have been far removed, for very many centuries, thanks to the unhappy state of Europe, from any actual experience of the kind, and now destiny, as if to disconcert and give the lie to all our philosophy, or rather to accuse it of not knowing all the elements of human nature, shows us, that just when the unhappiness of bad government is wanting to America, the Americans are wanting to themselves. One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, but they are essentially not happy. Is the Bible, that is to say, the ridiculous consequences and rules of conduct which certain fantastic wits deduce from that collection of poems and songs, sufficient to cause all this unhappiness? To me it seems a very considerable effect for such a cause.M. de Volney related that, being at table in the country at the house of an honest American, a man in easy circumstances, and surrounded by children already grown up, there entered into the dining-room a young man. "Good day, William," said the father of the family; "sit down." The traveller enquired who this young man was. "He's my second son." "Where does he come from?"—"From Canton." The arrival of one of his sons from the end of the world caused no more sensation than that. All their attention seems employed on finding a reasonable arrangement of life, and on avoiding all inconveniences. When finally they arrive at the moment of reaping the fruit of so much care and of the spirit of order so long maintained, there is no life left for enjoyment. One might say that the descendants of Penn never read that line, which looks like their history:— Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
The young people of both sexes, when winter comes, which in this country, as in Russia, is the gay season, go sleighing together day and night over the snow, often going quite gaily distances of fifteen or twenty miles, and without anyone to look after them. No inconvenience ever results from it. They have the physical gaiety of youth, which soon passes away with the warmth of their blood, and is over at twenty-five. But I find no passions which give pleasure. In America there is such a reasonable habit of mind that crystallisation has been rendered impossible. I admire such happiness, but I do not envy it; it is like the happiness of human beings of a different and lower species. I augur much better things from Florida and Southern America.[1]What strengthens my conjecture about the North is the absolute lack of artists and writers. The United States have not yet(42) sent us over one scene of a tragedy, one picture, or one life of Washington. [1] See the manners of the Azores: there, love of God and the other sort of love occupy every moment. The Christian religion, as interpreted by the Jesuits, is much less of an enemy to man, in this sense, than English protestantism; it permits him at least to dance on Sunday; and one day of pleasure in the seven is a great thing for the agricultural labourer, who works hard for the other six.
CHAPTER LI
LOVE IN PROVENCE UP TO THE CONQUEST OF TOULOUSE, IN 1328, BY THE BARBARIANS FROM THE NORTH Love took a singular form in Provence, from the year 1100 up to 1328. It had an established legislation for the relations of the two sexes in love, as severe and as exactly followed as the laws of Honour could be to-day. The laws of Love began by putting completely aside the sacred rights of husbands. They presuppose no hypocrisy. These laws, taking human nature such as it is, were of the kind to produce a great deal of happiness. There was an official manner of declaring oneself a woman's lover, and another of being accepted by her as lover. After so many months of making one's court in a certain fashion, one obtained her leave to kiss her hand. Society, still young, took pleasure in formalities and ceremonies, which were then a sign of civilisation, but which to-day would bore us to death. The same trait is to be found in the language of Provence, in the difficulty and interlacing of its rhymes, in its masculine and feminine words to express the same object, and indeed in the infinite number of its poets. Everything formal in society, which is so insipid to-day, then had all the freshness and savour of novelty. After having kissed a woman's hand, one was promoted from grade to grade by force of merit, and without extraordinary promotion. It should be remarked, however, that if the husbands were always left out of the question, on the other hand the official promotion of the lover stopped at what we should call the sweetness of a most tender friendship between persons of a different sex.[1] But after several months or several years of probation, in which a woman might become perfectly sure of the character and discretion of a man, and he enjoy at her hand all the prerogatives and outward signs which the tenderest friendship can give, her virtue must surely have had to thank his friendship for many a violent alarm. I have spoken of extraordinary promotion, because a woman could have more than one lover, but one only in the higher grades. It seems that the rest could not be promoted much beyond that degree of friendship which consisted in kissing her hand and seeing her every day. All that is left to us of this singular civilisation is in verse, and in a verse that is rhymed in a very fantastic and difficult way; and it need not surprise us if the notions, which we draw from the ballads of the troubadours, are vague and not at all precise. Even a marriage contract in verse has been found. After the conquest in 1328, as a result of its heresy, the Pope, on several occasions, ordered everything written in the vulgar tongue to be burnt. Italian cunning proclaimed Latin the only language worthy of such clever people. 'Twere a most advantageous measure could we renew it in 1822. Such publicity and such official ordering of love seem at first sight to ill-accord with real passion. But if a lady said to her lover: "Go for your love of me and visit the tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ at Jerusalem; there you will pass three years and then return"—the lover was gone immediately: to hesitate a moment would have covered him with the same ignominy as would nowadays a sign of wavering on a point of honour. The language of this people has an extreme fineness in expressing the most fugitive shades of feeling. Another sign that their manners were well advanced on the road of real civilisation is that, scarcely out of the horrors of the Middle Ages and of Feudalism, when force was everything, we see the feebler sex less tyrannised over than it is to-day with the approval of the law; we see the poor and feeble creatures, who have the most to lose in love and whose charms disappear the quickest, mistresses over the destiny of the men who approach them. An exile of three years in Palestine, the passage from a civilisation full of gaiety to the fanaticism and boredom of the Crusaders' camp, must have been a painful duty for any other than an inspired Christian. What can a woman do to her lover who has basely deserted her at Paris? I can only see one answer to be made here: at Paris no self-respecting woman has a lover. Certainly prudence has much more right to counsel the woman of to-day not to abandon herself to passion-love. But does not another prudence, which, of course, I am far from approving, counsel her to make up for it with physical love? Our hypocrisy and asceticism[2] imply no homage to virtue; for you can never oppose nature with impunity: there is only less happiness on earth and infinitely less generous inspiration. A lover who, after ten years of intimate intercourse, deserted his poor mistress, because he began to notice her two-and-thirty years, was lost to honour in this lovable Provence; he had no resource left but to bury himself in the solitude of a cloister. In those days it was to the interest of a man, not only of generosity but even of prudence, to make display of no more passion than he really had. We conjecture all this; for very few remains are left to give us any exact notions.... We must judge manners as a whole, by certain particular facts. You know the anecdote of the poet who had offended his lady: after two years of despair she deigned at last to answer his many messages and let him know that if he had one of his nails torn off and had this nail presented to her by fifty loving and faithful knights, she might perhaps pardon him. The poet made all haste to submit to the painful operation. Fifty knights, who stood in their ladies' good graces, went to present this nail with all imaginable pomp to the offended beauty. It was as imposing a ceremony as the entry of a prince of the blood into one of the royal towns. The lover, dressed in the garb of a penitent, followed his nail from afar. The lady, after having watched the ceremony, which was of great length, right through, deigned to pardon him; he was restored to all the sweets of his former happiness. History tells that they spent long and happy years together. Sure it is that two such years of unhappiness prove a real passion and would have given birth to it, had it not existed before in that high degree. I could cite twenty anecdotes which show us everywhere gallantry, pleasing, polished and conducted between the two sexes on principles of justice. I say gallantry, because in all ages passion-love is an exception, rather curious than frequent, a something we cannot reduce to rules. In Provence every calculation, everything within the domain of reason, was founded on justice and the equality of rights between the two sexes; and I admire it for this reason especially, that it eliminates unhappiness as far as possible. The absolute monarchy under Lewis XV, on the contrary, had come to make baseness and perfidy the fashion in these relations.[3] Although this charming Provencal language, so full of delicacy and so laboured in its rhymes,[4] was probably not the language of the people, the manners of the upper classes had permeated the lower classes, which in Provence were at that time far from coarse, for they enjoyed a great deal of comfort. They were in the first enjoyment of a very prosperous and very valuable trade. The inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean had just realised (in the ninth century) that to engage in commerce, by risking a few ships on this sea, was less troublesome and almost as amusing as following some little feudal lord and robbing the passers-by on the neighbouring high-road. Soon after, the Provencals of the tenth century learnt from the Arabs that there are sweeter pleasures than pillage, violence and war. One must think of the Mediterranean as the home of European civilisation. The happy shores of this lovely sea, so favoured in its climate, were still more favoured in the prosperous state of their inhabitants and in the absence of all religion or miserable legislation. The eminently gay genius of the Provencals had by then passed through the Christian religion, without being altered by it. We see a lively image of a like effect from a like cause in the cities of Italy, whose history has come down to us more distinctly and which have had the good fortune besides of bequeathing to us Dante, Petrarch and the art of painting. The Provencals have not left us a great poem like the Divine Comedy, in which are reflected all the peculiarities of the manners of the time. They had, it seems to me, less passion and much more gaiety than the Italians. They learnt this pleasant way of taking life from their neighbours, the Moors of Spain. Love reigned with joy, festivity and pleasure in the castles of happy Provence. Have you seen at the opera the finale of one of Rossini's beautiful operettas? On the stage all is gaiety, beauty, ideal magnificence. We are miles away from all the mean side of human nature. The opera is over, the curtain falls, the spectators go out, the great chandelier is drawn up, the lights are extinguished. The house is filled with the smell of lamps hastily put out; the curtain is pulled up half-way, and you see dirty, ill-dressed roughs tumble on to the stage; they bustle about it in a hideous way, occupying the place of the young women who filled it with their graces only a moment ago. Such for the kingdom of Provence was the effect of the conquest of Toulouse by the army of Crusaders. Instead of love, of grace, of gaiety, we have the Barbarians from the North and Saint Dominic. I shall not darken these pages with a blood-curdling account of the horrors of the Inquisition in all the zeal of its early days. As for the Barbarians, they were our fathers; they killed and plundered everywhere; they destroyed, for the pleasure of destroying, whatever they could not carry off; a savage madness animated them against everything that showed the least trace of civilisation; above all, they understood not a word of that beautiful southern language; and that redoubled their fury. Highly superstitious and guided by the terrible S. Dominic, they thought to gain Heaven by killing the Provencals. For the latter all was over; no more love, no more gaiety, no more poetry. Less than twenty years after the conquest (1335), they were almost as barbarous and as coarse as the French, as our fathers.[5] Whence had lighted on this corner of the world that charming form of civilisation, which for two centuries was the happiness of the upper classes of society? Apparently from the Moors of Spain.
CHAPTER LII(39)
PROVENCE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY I am going to translate an anecdote from the ProvenÇal manuscripts. The facts, of which you are going to read, happened about the year 1180 and the history was written about 1250.[1] The anecdote, to be sure, is very well known: the style especially gives the colour of the society which produced it. I beg that I be allowed to translate it word for word, and without seeking in any way after the elegance of the language of to-day. "My Lord Raymond of Roussillon was a valiant baron, as you know, and he took to wife my Lady Marguerite, the most beautiful woman of all her time and one of the most endowed with all good qualities, with all worth and with all courtesy. Now it happened that William of Cabstaing came to the Court of my Lord Raymond of Roussillon, presented himself to him and begged, if it so pleased him, that he might be a page in his Court. My Lord Raymond, who saw that he was fair and of good grace, told him that he was welcome and that he might dwell at his Court. Thus William dwelt with him, and succeeded in bearing himself so gently that great and small loved him; and he succeeded in placing himself in so good a light that my Lord Raymond wished him to be page to my Lady Marguerite, his wife; and so it was. Then William set himself to merit yet more both in word and deed. But now, as is wont to happen in love, it happened that Love wished to take hold of my Lady Marguerite and to inflame her thoughts. So much did the person of William please her, both his word and his air, that one day she could not restrain herself from saying to him: 'Now listen, William, if a woman showed you likelihood of love, tell me would you dare love her well?' 'Yes, that I would, madam, provided only that the likelihood were the truth.'—'By S. John,' said the lady, 'you have answered well, like a man of valour; but at present I wish to try you, whether you can understand and distinguish in matter of likelihood the difference between what is true and what is not.' "When William heard these words he answered: 'My lady, it is as it shall please you.' "He began to be pensive, and at once Love sought war with him; and the thoughts that love mingled with his entered into the depth of his heart, and straightway he was of the servants of Love and began to 'find'[2] little couplets, gracious and gay, and tunes for the dance and tunes with sweet words,[3] by which he was well received, and the more so by reason of her for whom he sang. Now Love, that grants to his servants their reward, when he pleases, wished to grant William the price of his; and behold, he began to take hold of the lady with such keen thoughts and meditations on love that neither night nor day could she rest, thinking of the valour and prowess that had been so beautifully disposed and set in William. "One day it happened that the lady took William and said to him: 'William, come now, tell me, have you up to this hour taken note of our likelihood, whether it truly is or lies?' William answered: 'My lady, so help me God, from that moment onward that I have been your servant, no thought has been able to enter my heart but that you were the best woman that was ever born, and the truest in the world and the most likely. So I think, and shall think, all my life.' And the lady answered: 'William, I tell you that, if God help me, you shall never be deceived by me, and that what you think shall not prove vain or nothing.' And she opened her arms and kissed him softly in the room where they two sat together, and they began their "druerie";[4] and straightway there wanted not those, whom God holds in wrath, who set themselves to talk and gossip of their love, by reason of the songs that William made, saying that he had set his love on my Lady Marguerite, and so indiscriminately did they talk that the matter came to the ears of my Lord Raymond. Then he was sorely pained and grievously sad, first that he must lose his familiar squire, whom he loved so well, and more still for his wife's shame. "One day it happened that William went out to hunt with his hawks and a single squire; and my Lord Raymond made enquiry where he was; and a groom answered him that he had gone out to hawk, and one who knew added that it was in such-and-such a spot. Immediately Raymond took arms, which he hid, and had his horse brought to him, and all alone took his way towards the spot whither William had gone: by dint of hard riding he found him. When William saw him approach he was greatly astonished, and at once evil thoughts came to him, and he advanced to meet him and said: 'My lord, welcome. Why are you thus alone?' My Lord Raymond answered: 'William, because I have come to find you to enjoy myself with you. Have you caught anything?'—'I have caught nothing, my lord, because I have found nothing; and he who finds little will not catch much, as the saying goes.'—'Enough of this talk,' said my Lord Raymond, 'and by the faith you owe me, tell me the truth on all the questions that I may wish to ask.'—'By God, my lord,' said William, 'if there is ought to say, certainly to you shall I say it.' Then said my Lord Raymond: 'I wish for no subtleties here, but you must answer me in all fullness on everything that I shall ask you.'—'My lord, as it shall please you to ask,' said William, 'so shall I tell you the truth.' And my Lord Raymond asked: 'William, as you value God and the holy faith, have you a mistress for whom you sing and for whom Love constrains you?' William answered: 'My lord, and how else should I be singing, if Love did not urge me on? Know the truth, my lord, that Love has me wholly in his power.' Raymond answered: 'I can well believe it, for otherwise you could not sing so well; but I wish to know, if you please, who is your lady.'—'Ah, my lord, in God's name,' said William, 'see what you ask me. You know too well that a man must not name his lady, and that Bernard of Ventadour says:— "'In one thing my reason serves me,[5]
That never man has asked me of my joy,
But I have lied to him thereof willingly.
For this does not seem to me good doctrine,
But rather folly or a child's act,
That whoever is well treated in love
Should wish to open his heart thereon to another man,
Unless he can serve him or help him.'
"My Lord Raymond answered: 'And I give you my word that I will serve you according to my power.' So said Raymond, and William answered him: 'My lord, you must know that I love the sister of my Lady Marguerite, your wife, and that I believe I have exchange with her of love. Now that you know it, I beg you to come to my aid and at least not to prejudice me.'—'Take my word,' said Raymond, 'for I swear to you and engage myself to you that I will use all my power for you.' And then he gave his word, and when he had given it to him Raymond said to him: 'I wish us to go to her castle, for it is near by.'—'And I beg we may do so, in God's name,' said William. And so they took their road towards the castle of Liet. And when they came to the castle they were well received by En[6] Robert of Tarascon, who was the husband of my Lady Agnes, the sister of my Lady Marguerite, and by my Lady Agnes herself. And my Lord Raymond took my Lady Agnes by the hand and led her into her chamber, and they sat down on the bed. And my Lord Raymond said: 'Now tell me, my sister-in-law, by the faith that you owe me, are you in love with Love?' And she said: 'Yes, my lord.'—'And whose?' said he. 'Oh, that I do not tell you,' answered she; 'what means this parleying?' "In the end, so insistently did he demand that she said that she loved William of Cabstaing; this she said because she saw William sad and pensive and she knew well that he loved her sister; and so she feared that Raymond might have had evil thoughts of William. Such a reply gave great joy to Raymond. Agnes related it all to her husband, and her husband answered her that she had done well and gave her his word that she was at liberty to do and say anything that could save William. Agnes was not wanting to him. She called William all alone into her chamber, and remained so long with him that Raymond thought he must have had the pleasures of love with her; and all this pleased him, and he began to think that what he had been told of William was untrue and random talk. Agnes and William came out of her chamber, supper was prepared and they supped with great gaiety. And after supper Agnes had the bed of her two neighbours prepared by the door of her chamber, and so well did the Lady and William act their parts that Raymond believed he was with her. "And the next day they dined in the castle with great joy, and after dinner they set out with all the honours of a noble leave-taking, and came to Roussillon. And as soon as Raymond could, he separated from William and went away to his wife, and related to her all that he had seen of William and her sister, for which his wife was sorely grieved all night. And the next day she had William summoned to her and received him ill, and called him false friend and traitor. And William cried to her for pity, as a man who had done nought of that with which she charged him, and related to her all that had passed, word for word. And the lady sent for her sister and from her she learnt that William had done no wrong. And therefore she called him and bade him make a song by which he should show that he loved no woman but her, and then he made the song which says:— "The sweet thoughts
That Love often gives me.
"And when Raymond of Roussillon heard the song that William had made for his wife, he made him come to speak with him some way from the castle, and cut off his head, which he put in a bag; he drew out the heart from the body and put it with the head. He went back to the castle; he had the heart roasted and brought to his wife at table and made her eat it without her knowing. When she had eaten it, Raymond rose up and told his wife that what she had just eaten was the heart of Lord William of Cabstaing, and showed her his head and asked her if the heart had been good to eat. And she heard what he said, and saw and recognised the head of Lord William. She answered him and said that the heart had been so good and savoury, that never other meat or other drink could take away from her mouth the taste that the heart of Lord William had left there. And Raymond ran at her with a sword. She took to flight, threw herself down from a balcony and broke her head. "This became known through all Catalonia and through all the lands of the King of Aragon. King Alphonse and all the barons of these countries had great grief and sorrow for the death of Lord William and of the woman whom Raymond had so basely done to death. They made war on him with fire and sword. King Alphonse of Aragon having taken Raymond's castle, had William and his lady laid in a monument before the door of a church in a borough named Perpignac. All perfect lovers of either sex prayed God for their souls. The King of Aragon took Raymond and let him die in prison, and gave all his goods to the relatives of William and to the relatives of the woman who died for him."
CHAPTER LIII
ARABIA 'Tis beneath the dusky tent of the Bedouin Arab that we seek the model and the home of true love. There, as elsewhere, solitude and a fine climate have kindled the noblest passion of the human heart—that passion which must give as much happiness as it feels, in order to be happy itself. In order that love may be seen in all the fullness of its power over the human heart, equality must be established as far as possible between the mistress and her lover. It does not exist, this equality, in our poor West; a woman deserted is unhappy or dishonoured. Under the Arab's tent faith once plighted cannot be broken. Contempt and death immediately follow that crime. Generosity is held so sacred by this people, that you may steal, in order to give. For the rest, every day danger stares them in the face, and life flows on ever, so to speak, in a passionate solitude. Even in company the Arabs speak little. Nothing changes for the inhabitant of the desert; there everything is eternal and motionless. This singular mode of life, of which, owing to my ignorance, I can give but a poor sketch, has probably existed since the time of Homer.[1] It is described for the first time about the year 600 of our era, two centuries before Charlemagne. Clearly it is we who were the barbarians in the eyes of the East, when we went to trouble them with our crusades.[2] Also we owe all that is in our manner to these crusades and to the Moors of Spain. If we compare ourselves with the Arabs, the proud, prosaic man will smile with pity. Our arts are very much superior to theirs, our systems of law to all appearance still more superior. But I doubt if we beat them in the art of domestic happiness—we have always lacked loyalty and simplicity. In family relations the deceiver is the first to suffer. For him the feeling of safety is departed; always unjust, he is always afraid. In the earliest of their oldest historical monuments we can see the Arabs divided from all antiquity into a large number of independent tribes, wandering about the desert. As soon as these tribes were able to supply, with more or less ease, the simplest human wants, their way of life was already more or less refined. Generosity was the same on every side; only according to the tribe's degree of wealth it found expression, now in the quarter of goat's flesh necessary for the support of life, now in the gift of a hundred camels, occasioned by some family connexion or reasons of hospitality. The heroic age of the Arabs, that in which these generous hearts burnt unsullied by any affectation of fine wit or refined sentiment, was that which preceded Mohammed; it corresponds to the fifth century of our era, to the foundations of Venice and to the reign of Clovis. I beg European pride to compare the Arab love-songs, which have come down to us, and the noble system of life revealed in the Thousand and One Nights, with the disgusting horrors that stain every page of Gregory of Tours, the historian of Clovis, and of Eginhard, the historian of Charlemagne. Mohammed was a puritan; he wished to prescribe pleasures which do no one any harm; he has killed love in those countries which have accepted Islamism.[3] It is for this reason that his religion has always been less observed in Arabia, its cradle, than in all the other Mohammedan countries. The French brought away from Egypt four folio volumes, entitled The Book of Songs. These volumes contain:— 1. Biographies of the poets who composed the songs. 2. The songs themselves. In them the poet sings of everything that interests him; when he has spoken of his mistress he praises his swiftcoursers and his bow. These songs were often love-letters from their author, giving the object of his love a faithful picture of all that passed in his heart. Sometimes they tell of cold nights when he has been obliged to burn his bow and arrows. The Arabs are a nation without houses. 3. Biographies of the musicians who have composed the music for these songs. 4. Finally, the notation of the musical setting; for us these settings are hieroglyphics. The music will be for ever unknown, and anyhow, it would not please us. There is another collection entitled The History of those Arabs who have died for Love. In order to feel at home in the midst of remains which owe so much of their interest to their antiquity, and to appreciate the singular beauty of the manners of which they let us catch a glimpse, we must go to history for enlightenment on certain points. From all time, and especially before Mohammed, the Arabs betook themselves to Mecca in order to make the tour of the Caaba or house of Abraham. I have seen at London a very exact model of the Holy City. There are seven or eight hundred houses with terraces on the roofs, set in the midst of a sandy desert devoured by the sun. At one extremity of the city is found an immense building, in form almost a square; this building surrounds the Caaba. It is composed of a long course of colonnades, necessary under an Arabian sun for the performance of the sacred procession, This colonnade is very important in the history of the manners and poetry of the Arabs; it was apparently for centuries the one place where men and women met together. Pell-mell, with slow steps, and reciting in chorus their sacred songs, they walked round the Caaba—it is a walk of three-quarters of an hour. The procession was repeated many times in the same day; this was the sacred rite for which men and women came forth from all parts of the desert. It is under the colonnade of the Caaba that Arab manners became polished. A contest between the father and the lover soon came to be established—in love-lyrics the lover discovered his passion to the girl, jealously guarded by brothers and father, as at her side he walked in the sacred procession. The generous and sentimental habits of this people existed already in the camp; but Arab gallantry seems to me to have been born in the shadow of the Caaba, which is also the home of their literature. At first, passion was expressed with simplicity and vehemence, just as the poet felt it; later the poet, instead of seeking to touch his mistress, aimed at fine writing; then followed that affectation which the Moors introduced into Spain and which still to-day spoils the books of that people.[4] I find a touching proof of the Arab's respect for the weaker sex in his ceremony of divorce. The woman, during the absence of her husband from whom she wished to separate, opened the tent and drew it up, taking care to place the opening on the opposite side to that which she had formerly occupied. This simple ceremony separated husband and wife for ever. FRAGMENTS
Gathered and translated from an Arabic Collection entitled: The Divan of Love(39)
Compiled by Ebn-Abi-Hadglat. (Manuscripts of the King's Library, Nos. 1461 and 1462.) Mohammed, son of Djaafar Elahouazadi, relates that Djamil being sick of the illness of which he died, Elabas, son of Sohail, visited him and found him ready to give up the ghost. "O son of Sohail," said Djamil to him, "what do you think of a man who has never drunk wine, who has never made illicit gain, who has never unrighteously given death to any living creature that God has forbidden us to kill, and who confesses that there is no other God but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet?" "I think," answered Ben Sohail, "that such a man will be saved and will gain Paradise; but who is he, this man of whom you talk?" "'Tis I," answered Djamil. "I did not think that you professed the faith," returned Ben Sohail, "and moreover, for twenty years now you have been making love to Bothaina, and celebrating her in your verses." "Here I am," answered Djamil, "at my first day in the other world and at my last in this, and I pray that the mercy of our Master Mohammed may not be extended to me at the day of judgment, if ever I have laid hands on Bothaina for anything reprehensible." This Djamil and Bothaina, his mistress, both belonged to the Benou-Azra, who are a tribe famous in love among all the tribes of the Arabs. Also their manner of loving has passed into a proverb, and God has made no other creatures as tender in love as they. Sahid, son of Agba, one day asked an Arab: "Of what people are you?" "I am of the people that die when they love," replied the Arab. "Then you are of the tribe of Azra," added Sahid. "Yes, by the Master of the Caaba," replied the Arab. "Whence comes it that you love in this manner?" Sahid asked next. "Our women are beautiful and our young men are chaste," answered the Arab. One day someone asked Aroua-Ben-Hezam:[5] "Is it really true what people tell of you, that you of all mankind have the heart most tender in love?" "Yes, by Allah, it is true," answered Aroua, "and I have known in my tribe thirty young men whom death has carried oil and who had no other sickness but love." An Arab of the Benou-Fazarat said one day to an Arab of the Benou-Azra: "You, Benou-Azra, you think it a sweet and noble death to die of love; but therein is a manifest weakness and stupidity; and those whom you take for men of great heart are only madmen and soft creatures." "You would not talk like that," the Arab of the tribe of Azra answered him, "if you had seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them smile and their teeth gleaming between their brown lips!" Abou-el-Hassan, Ali, son of Abdalla, Elzagouni, relates the following story: A Mussulman loved to distraction the daughter of a Christian. He was obliged to make a journey to a foreign country with a friend, to whom he had confided his love. His business prolonged his stay in this country, and being attacked there by a mortal sickness, he said to his friend: "Behold, my time approaches; no more in the world shall I meet her whom I love, and I fear, if I die a Mussulman, that I shall not meet her again in the other life." He turned Christian and died. His friend betook himself to the young Christian woman, whom he found sick. She said to him: "I shall not see my friend any more in this world, but I want to be with him in the other; therefore I confess that there is no other God but Allah, and that Mohammed is the prophet of God." Thereupon she died, and may God's mercy be upon her.* Eltemimi relates that there was in the tribe of the Arabs of Tagleb a Christian girl of great riches who was in love with a young Mussulman. She offered him her fortune and all her treasures without succeeding in making him love her. When she had lost all hope she gave an artist a hundred dinars, to make her a statue of the young man she loved. The artist made the statue, and when the girl got it, she placed it in a certain spot where she went every day. There she would begin by kissing this statue, and then sat down beside it and spent the rest of the day in weeping. When the evening came she would bow to the statue and retire. This she did for a long time. The young man chanced to die; she desired to see him and to embrace him dead, after which she returned to her statue, bowed to it, kissed it as usual, and lay down beside it. When day came, they found her dead, stretching out her hand towards some lines of writing, which she had written before she died.* Oueddah, of the land of Yamen, was renowned among the Arabs for his beauty. He and Om-el-Bonain, daughter of Abd-el-Aziz, son of Merouan, while still only children, were even then so much in love that they could not bear to be parted from each other for a moment. When Om-el-Bonain became the wife of Oualid-Ben-Abd-el-Malek, Oueddah became mad for grief. After remaining a long time in a state of distraction and suffering, he betook himself to Syria and began every day to prowl around the house of Oualid, son of Malek, without at first finding the means to attain his desire. In the end, he made the acquaintance of a girl, whom he succeeded in attaching to himself by dint of his perseverance and his pains. When he thought he could rely on her, he asked her if she knew Om-el-Bonain. "To be sure I do," answered the girl, "seeing she is my mistress." "Listen," continued Oueddah, "your mistress is my cousin, and if you care to tell her about me, you will certainly give her pleasure." "I'll tell her willingly," answered the girl. And thereupon she ran straight to Om-el-Bonain to tell her about Oueddah. "Take care what you say," cried Om-el-Bonain. "What? Oueddah is alive?" "Certainly he is," said the girl. "Go and tell him," Om-el-Bonain went on, "on no account to depart until a messenger comes to him from me." Then she took measures to get Oueddah brought to her, where she kept him hidden in a coffer. She let him come out to be with her when she thought it safe; but if someone arrived who might have seen him, she made him get inside the coffer again. It happened one day that a pearl was brought to Oualid and he said to one of his attendants: "Take this pearl and give it to Om-el-Bonain." The attendant took the pearl and gave it to Om-el-Bonain. As he was not announced, he entered where she dwelt at a time when she was with Oueddah, and thus he was able to throw a glance into Om-el-Bonain's apartment without her noticing him. Oualid's attendant fulfilled his mission and asked something of Om-el-Bonain for the jewel he had brought her. She refused him with severity and reprimanded him. The attendant went out incensed against her, and went to tell Oualid what he had seen, describing the coffer into which he had seen Oueddah enter. "You lie, bastard slave! You lie," said Oualid. And he ran in haste to Om-el-Bonain. There were several coffers in her apartment; he sat down on the one in which Oueddah was hid and which the slave had described, saying: "Give me one of these coffers." "They are all yours, as much as I myself," answered Om-el-Bonain. "Then," continued Oualid, "I would like to have the one on which I am seated." "There are some things in it that only a woman needs," said Om-el-Bonain. "It is not them, it is the coffer I desire," added Oualid. "It is yours," she answered. Oualid had the coffer taken away at once, and summoned two slaves, whom he ordered to dig a pit in the earth down to the depth where they would find water. Then placing his mouth against the coffer: "I have heard something of you," he cried. "If I have heard the truth, may all trace of you be lost, may all memory of you be buried. If they have told me false I do no harm by entombing a coffer: it is only the funeral of a box." Then he had the coffer pushed into the pit and covered with the stones and the earth which had been dug up. From that time Om-el-Bonain never ceased to frequent this spot and to weep, until one day they found her there lifeless, her face pressed towards the earth.*[6]
CHAPTER LIV(43)
OF THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN In the actual education of girls, which is the fruit of chance and the most idiotic pride, we allow their most shining faculties, and those most fertile in happiness for themselves and for us, to lie fallow. But what man is there, who at least once in his life has not exclaimed:— At Paris, this is the highest praise for a young girl of a marriageable age: "There is so much that's sweet in her character, and she's as gentle as a lamb." Nothing has more effect on the idiots looking out for wives. But see them two years later, lunching tÊte-À-tÊte with their wives some dull day, hats on and surrounded by three great lackeys! We have seen a law carried in the United States, in 1818, which condemns to thirty-four strokes of the cat anyone teaching a Virginian negro to read.[1] Nothing could be more consequent and more reasonable than a law of this kind. Were the United States of America themselves more useful to the motherland when they were her slaves or since they have become her equals? If the work of a free man is worth two or three times that of a man reduced to slavery, why should not the same be true of that man's thought? If we dared, we would give girls the education of a slave; and the proof of this is that if they know anything useful, it is against our wish we teach it them. "But they turn against us the little education which unhappily they get hold of," some husbands might say. No doubt; and Napoleon was also quite right not to give arms to the National Guard; and the reactionaries are also quite right to proscribe the monitorial system(44). Arm a man, and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you, as soon as he can. Even if it were permissible to bring girls up like idiots, on Ave Marias and lewd songs, as they did in the convents of 1770, there would still be several little objections:— 1. In the case of the husband's death, they are called upon to manage the young family. 2. As mothers, they give their male children, the young tyrants of the future, their first education, that education which forms the character, and accustoms the soul to seek happiness by this route rather than by that—and the choice is always an accomplished fact by four or five. 3. In spite of all our pride, the advice of the inevitable partner of our whole life has great influence on those domestic affairs on which our happiness depends so particularly; for, in the absence of passion, happiness is based on the absence of small everyday vexations. Not that we would willingly accord this advice the least influence, but she may repeat the same thing to us for twenty years together. Whose is the spirit of such Roman fortitude as to resist the same idea repeated throughout a whole lifetime? The world is full of husbands who let themselves be led, but it is from weakness and not from a feeling for justice and equality. As they yield perforce, the wife is always tempted to abuse her power, and it is sometimes necessary to abuse power in order to keep it. 4. Finally, in love, and during a period which, in southern countries, often comprises twelve or fifteen years, and those the fairest of our life, our happiness is entirely in the hands of the woman we love. One moment of untimely pride can make us for ever miserable, and how should a slave raised up to a throne not be tempted to abuse her power? This is the origin of women's false refinement and pride. Of course, there is nothing more useless than these pleas: men are despots and we see what respect other despots show to the wisest counsels. A man who is all-powerful relishes only one sort of advice, the advice of those that tell him to increase his power. Where are poor young girls to find a Quiroga or a Riego(45) to give the despots, who oppress them, and degrade them the better to oppress them, that salutary advice, whose just recompense are favours and orders instead of Porlier's(45) gallows? If a revolution of this kind needs several centuries, it is because, by a most unlucky chance, all our first experiences must necessarily contradict the truth. Illuminate a girl's mind, form her character, give her, in short, a good education in the true sense of the word—remarking sooner or later her own superiority over other women, she becomes a pedant, that is to say, the most unpleasant and the most degraded creature that there is in the world. There isn't one of us who wouldn't prefer a servant to a savante, if we had to pass our life with her. Plant a young tree in the midst of a dense forest, deprived of air and sun by the closeness of the neighbouring trees: its leaves will be blighted, and it will get an overgrown and ridiculous shape—not its natural shape. We ought to plant the whole forest at once. What woman is there who is proud of knowing how to read?Pedants have repeated to us for two thousand years that women were more quick and men more judicious, women more remarkable for delicacy of expression and men for stronger powers of concentration. A Parisian simpleton, who used once upon a time to take his walk in the gardens of Versailles, similarly concluded from all he saw that trees grow ready clipped. I will allow that little girls have less physical strength than little boys: this must be conclusive as regards intellect; for everyone knows that Voltaire and d'Alembert were the first boxers of their age! Everyone agrees, that a little girl of ten is twenty times as refined as a little boy of the same age. Why, at twenty, is she a great idiot, awkward, timid, and afraid of a spider, while the little boy is a man of intellect? Women only learn the things we do not wish to teach them, and only read the lessons taught them by experience of life. Hence the extreme disadvantage it is for them to be born in a very rich family; instead of coming into contact with beings who behave naturally to them, they find themselves surrounded by maidservants and governesses, who are already corrupted and blighted by wealth.[2] There is nothing so foolish as a prince. Young girls soon see that they are slaves and begin to look about them very early; they see everything, but they are too ignorant to see properly. A woman of thirty in France has not the acquired knowledge of a small boy of fifteen, a woman of fifty has not the reason of a man of twenty-five. Look at Madame de SÉvignÉ admiring Louis XIV's most ridiculous actions. Look at the puerility of Madame d'Épinay's reasonings.[3] "Women ought to nurse and look after their children." I deny the first proposition, I allow the second. "They ought, moreover, to keep their kitchen accounts."—And so have not time to equal a small boy of fifteen in acquired knowledge! Men must be judges, bankers, barristers, merchants, doctors, clergymen, etc., and yet they find time to read Fox's speeches and the Lusiad of CamoËns. The Pekin magistrate, who hastens at an early hour to the law courts in order to find the means of imprisoning and ruining, in perfect good faith, a poor journalist who has incurred the displeasure of an Under-Secretary of State, with whom he had the honour of dining the day before, is surely as busy as his wife, who keeps her kitchen accounts, gets stockings made for her little daughter, sees her through her dancing and piano lessons, receives a visit from the vicar of the parish who brings her the Quotidienne, and then goes to choose a hat in the Rue de Richelieu and take a turn in the Tuileries. In the midst of his noble occupations this magistrate still finds time to think of this walk his wife is taking in the Tuileries, and, if he were in as good odour with the Power that rules the universe as with that which rules the State, he would pray Heaven to grant women, for their own good, eight or ten hours more sleep. In the present condition of society, leisure, which for man is the source of all his happiness and all his riches, is for women so far from being an advantage as to rank among those baneful liberties, from which the worthy magistrate would wish to help deliver us.
CHAPTER LV(43)
OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN "But women are charged with the petty labours of the household." The Colonel of my regiment, M. S——, has four daughters, brought up on the best principles, which means that they work all day. When I come, they sing the music of Rossini, that I brought them from Naples. For the rest, they read the Bible of Royaumont, they learn what's most foolish in history, that is to say, chronological tables and the verses of Le Ragois; they know a great deal of geography, embroider admirably—and I expect that each of these pretty little girls could earn, by her work, eight sous a day. Taking three hundred days, that means four hundred and eighty francs a year, which is less than is given to one of their masters. It is for four hundred and eighty francs a year that they lose for ever the time, during which it is granted to the human machine to acquire ideas. "If women read with pleasure the ten or twelve good volumes that appear every year in Europe, they will soon give up the care of their children."—'Tis as if we feared, by planting the shore of the ocean with trees, to stop the motion of the waves. It is not in this sense that education is all-powerful. Besides, for four hundred years the same objection has been offered to every sort of education. And yet a Parisian woman has more good qualities in 1820 than she ever had in 1720, the age of Law's system and the Regency, and at that time the daughter of the richest farmer-general had a less good education than the daughter of the pettiest attorney gets to-day. Are her household duties less well performed as a result? Certainly not. And why? Because poverty, illness, shame, instinct, all force her to fulfil them. It is as if you said of an officer who is becoming too sociable, that he will forget how to handle his horse; you have to remember that he'll break his arm the first time he's slack in the saddle. Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to one sex as to the other. We shall never lack vanity, even in the completest absence of any reason for having it—look at the middle class in a small town. Why not force it at least to repose on real merit, on merit useful or agreeable to society? Demi-fools, carried away by the revolution that is changing everything in France, began twenty years ago to allow that women are capable of something. But they must give themselves up to occupations becoming their sex: educate flowers, make friendships with birds, and pick up plants. These are called innocent amusements. These innocent pleasures are better than idleness. Well! let's leave them to stupid women; just as we leave to stupid men the glory of composing verses for the birthday of the master of the house. But do men in good faith really mean to suggest to Madame Roland or to Mistress Hutchinson[1] that they should spend their time in tending a little Bengal rose-bush? All such reasoning can be reduced to this: a man likes to be able to say of his slave: "She's too big a fool to be a knave." But owing to a certain law called sympathy—a law of nature which, in truth, vulgar eyes never perceive—the defects in the companion of your life are not destructive of your happiness by reason only of the direct ill they can occasion you. I would almost prefer that my wife should, in a moment of anger, attempt to stab me once a year, than that she should welcome me every evening with bad spirits. Finally, happiness is contagious among people who live together. Let your mistress have passed the morning, while you were on parade or at the House of Commons, in painting a rose after a masterpiece of RedoutÉ, or in reading a volume of Shakespeare, her pleasure therein will have been equally innocent. Only, with the ideas that she has got from her rose she will soon bore you on your return, and, indeed, she will crave to go out in the evening among people to seek sensations a little more lively. Suppose, on the contrary, she has read Shakespeare, she is as tired as you are, she has had as much pleasure, and she will be happier to give you her arm for a solitary walk in the Bois de Vincennes than to appear at the smartest party. The pleasures of the fashionable world are not meant for happy women. Women have, of course, all ignorant men for enemies to their instruction. To-day they spend their time with them, they make love to them and are well received by them; what would become of them if women began to get tired of Boston? When we return from America or the West Indies with a tanned skin and manners that for six months remain somewhat coarse, how would these fellows answer our stories, if they had not this phrase: "As for us, the women are on our side. While you were at New York the colour of tilburies has changed; it's grey-black that's fashionable at present." And we listen attentively, for such knowledge is useful. Such and such a pretty woman will not look at us if our carriage is in bad taste. These same fools, who think themselves obliged, in virtue of the pre-eminence of their sex, to have more knowledge than women, would be ruined past all hope, if women had the audacity to learn something. A fool of thirty says to himself, as he looks at some little girls of twelve at the country house of one of his friends: "It's in their company that I shall spend my life ten years from now." We can imagine his exclamations and his terror, if he saw them studying something useful. Instead of the society and conversation of effeminate men, an educated woman, if she has acquired ideas without losing the graces of her sex, can always be sure of finding among the most distinguished men of her age a consideration verging on enthusiasm. "Women would become the rivals instead of the companions of man." Yes, as soon as you have suppressed love by edict. While we are waiting for this fine law, love will redouble its charms and its ecstasy. These are the plain facts: the basis on which crystallisation rests will be widened; man will be able to take pleasure in all his ideas in company of the woman he loves; nature in all its entirety will in their eyes receive new charms; and as ideas always reflect some of the refinements of character, they will understand each other better and will be guilty of fewer imprudent acts—love will be less blind and will produce less unhappiness. The desire of pleasing secures all that delicacy and reserve which are of such inestimable value to women from the influence of any scheme of education. 'Tis as though you feared teaching the nightingales not to sing in the spring-time. The graces of women do not depend on their ignorance; look at the worthy spouses of our village bourgeois, look at the wives of the opulent merchants in England. Affectation is a kind of pedantry; for I call pedantry the affectation of letting myself talk out of season of a dress by Leroy or a novel by Romagnesi, just as much as the affectation of quoting Fra Paolo(46) and the Council of Trent À propos of a discussion on our own mild missionaries. It is the pedantry of dress and good form, it is the necessity of saying exactly the conventional phrase about Rossini, which kills the graces of Parisian women. Nevertheless, in spite of the terrible effects of this contagious malady, is it not in Paris that exist the most delightful women in France? Would not the reason be that chance filled their heads with the most just and interesting ideas? Well, it is these very ideas that I expect from books. I shall not, of course, suggest that they read Grotius of Puffendorf, now that we have Tracy's(47) commentary on Montesquieu. Woman's delicacy depends on the hazardous position in which she finds herself so early placed, on the necessity of spending her life in the midst of cruel and fascinating enemies. There are, perhaps, fifty thousand females in Great Britain who are exempted by circumstances from all necessary labour: but without work there is no happiness. Passion forces itself to work, and to work of an exceedingly rough kind—work that employs the whole activity of one's being. A woman with four children and ten thousand francs income works by making stockings or a frock for her daughter. But it cannot be allowed that a woman who has her own carriage is working when she does her embroidery or a piece of tapestry. Apart from some faint glow of vanity, she cannot possibly have any interest in what she is doing. She does not work. And thus her happiness runs a grave risk. And what is more, so does the happiness of her lord and master, for a woman whose heart for two months has been enlivened by no other interest than that of her needlework, may be so insolent as to imagine that gallant-love, vanity-love, or, in fine, even physical love, is a very great happiness in comparison with her habitual condition. "A woman ought not to make people speak about her." To which I answer once more: "Is any woman specially mentioned as being able to read?" And what is to prevent women, while awaiting a revolution in their destiny, from hiding a study which forms their habitual occupation and furnishes them every day with an honourable share of happiness. I will reveal a secret to them by the way. When you have given yourself a task—for example, to get a clear idea about the conspiracy of Fiescho(48), at Genoa in 1547—the most insipid book becomes interesting. The same is true, in love, of meeting someone quite indifferent, who has just seen the person whom you love. This interest is doubled every month, until you give up the conspiracy of Fiescho. "The true theatre for a woman is the sick-chamber." But you must be careful to secure that the divine goodness redoubles the frequency of illnesses, in order to give occupation to our women. This is arguing from the exceptional. Moreover, I maintain that a woman ought to spend three or four hours of leisure every day, just as men of sense spend their hours of leisure. A young mother, whose little son has the measles, could not, even if she would, find pleasure in reading Volney's Travels in Syria, any more than her husband, a rich banker, could get pleasure out of meditating on Malthus in the midst of bankruptcy. There is one, and only one, way for rich women to distinguish themselves from the vulgar: moral superiority. For in this there is a natural distinction of feeling.[2] "We do not wish a lady to write books." No, but does giving your daughter a singing-master engage you to make her into an opera-singer? If you like, I'll say that a woman ought only to write, like Madame de StaËl (de Launay), posthumous works to be published after her death. For a woman of less than fifty to publish is to risk her happiness in the most terrible lottery: if she has the good fortune to have a lover, she will begin by losing him. I know but one exception: it is that of a woman who writes books in order to keep or bring up her family. In that case she ought always to confine herself to their money-value when talking of her own works, and say, for example, to a cavalry major: "Your rank gives you four thousand francs a year, and I, with my two translations from the English, was able last year to devote an extra three thousand five hundred francs to the education of my two boys." Otherwise, a woman should publish as Baron d'Holbach or Madame de la Fayette did; their best friends knew nothing of it. To print a book can only be without inconvenience for a courtesan; the vulgar, who can despise her at their will for her condition, will exalt her to the heavens for her talent, and even make a cult of it. Many men in France, among those who have an income of six thousand francs, find their habitual source of happiness in literature, without thinking of publishing anything; to read a good book is for them one of the greatest pleasures. At the end of ten years they find that their mind is enlarged twofold, and no one will deny that, in general, the larger the mind the fewer will be its passions incompatible with the happiness of others.[3] I don't suppose anyone will still deny that the sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will have more genius than the children of one who tells her beads and reads Madame de Genlis. A young barrister, a merchant, an engineer can be launched on life without any education; they pick it up themselves every day by practising their profession. But what resources have their wives for acquiring estimable or necessary qualities? Hidden in the solitude of their household, for them the great book of life necessarily remains shut. They spend always in the same way, after discussing the accounts with their cook, the three louis they get every Monday from their husbands. I say this in the interest of the tyrant: the least of men, if he is twenty and has nice rosy cheeks, is a danger to a woman with no knowledge, because she is wholly a creature of instinct. In the eyes of a woman of intellect he will produce as much effect as a handsome lackey. The amusing thing in present-day education is that you teach young girls nothing that they won't have to forget as soon as they are married. It needs four hours a day, for six years, to learn to play the harp well; to paint well in miniature or water-colours needs half that time. Most young girls do not attain even to a tolerable mediocrity—hence the very true saying: "Amateur means smatterer."[4] And even supposing a young girl has some talent; three years after she is married she won't take up her harp or her brushes once a month. These objects of so much study now only bore her—unless chance has given her the soul of an artist, and this is always a rarity and scarcely helpful in the management of a household. And thus under the vain pretext of decency you teach young girls nothing that can give them guidance in the circumstances they will encounter in their lives. You do more—you hide and deny these circumstances in order to add to their strength, through the effect (i) of surprise, and (ii) of mistrust; for education, once found deceitful, must bring mistrust on education as a whole.[5] I maintain that one ought to talk of love to girls who have been well brought up. Who will dare suggest in good faith that, in the actual state of our manners, girls of sixteen do not know of the existence of love? From whom do they get this idea so important and so difficult to give properly? Think of Julie d'Étanges deploring the knowledge that she owes to la Chaillot, one of the maidservants. One must thank Rousseau for having dared be a true painter in an age of false decency. The present-day education of women being perhaps the most delightful absurdity in modern Europe, strictly speaking the less education they have, the better they are.[6] It is for this reason perhaps that in Italy and Spain they are so superior to the men, and I will even say so superior to the women of other countries.
CHAPTER LVI(43)
OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN
(continued) In France all our ideas about women are got from a twopence-halfpenny catechism. The delightful part of it is that many people, who would not allow the authority of this book to regulate a matter of fifty francs, foolishly follow it word for word in that which bears most nearly on their happiness. Such is the vanity of nineteenth-century ways! There must be no divorce because marriage is a mystery—and what mystery? The emblem of the union of Jesus Christ with the Church. And what had become of this mystery, if the Church had been given a name of the masculine gender?[1] But let us pass over prejudices already giving way,[2] and let us merely observe this singular spectacle: the root of the tree sapped by the axe of ridicule, but the branches continuing to flower. Now to return to the observation of facts and their consequences. In both sexes it is on the manner in which youth has been employed that depends the fate of extreme old age—this is true for women earlier than for men. How is a woman of forty-five received in society? Severely, or more often in a way that is below her dignity. Women are flattered at twenty and abandoned at forty. A woman of forty-five is of importance only by reason of her children or her lover. A mother who excels in the fine arts can communicate her talent to her son only in the extremely rare case, where he has received from nature precisely the soul for this talent. But a mother of intellect and culture will give her young son a grasp not only of all merely agreeable talents, but also of all talents that are useful to man in society; and he will be able to make his own choice. The barbarism of the Turks depends in great part on the state of moral degradation among the beautiful Georgians. Two young men born at Paris owe to their mothers the incontestable superiority that they show at sixteen over the young provincials of their age. It is from sixteen to twenty-five that the luck turns. The men who invented gunpowder, printing, the art of weaving, contribute every day to our happiness, and the same is true of the Montesquieus, the Racines and the La Fontaines. Now the number of geniuses produced by a nation is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture,[3] and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.[4] Owing to the present system of girls' education, all geniuses who are born women are lost to the public good. So soon as chance gives them the means of displaying themselves, you see them attain to talents the most difficult to acquire. In our own days you see a Catherine II, who had no other education but danger and ...; a Madame Roland; an Alessandra Mari, who raised a regiment in Arezzo and sent it against the French; a Caroline, Queen of Naples, who knew how to put a stop to the contagion of liberalism better than all our Castlereaghs and our Pitts. As for what stands in the way of women's superiority in works of art, see the chapter on Modesty, article 9. What might Miss Edgeworth not have done, if the circumspection necessary to a young English girl had not forced her at the outset of her career to carry the pulpit into her novel? What man is there, in love or in marriage, who has the good fortune to be able to communicate his thoughts, just as they occur to him, to the woman with whom he passes his life? He may find a good heart that will share his sorrows, but he is always obliged to turn his thoughts into small change if he wishes to be understood, and it would be ridiculous to expect reasonable counsel from an intellect that has need of such a method in order to seize the facts. The most perfect woman, according to the ideas of present-day education, leaves her partner isolated amid the dangers of life and soon runs the risk of wearying him.What an excellent counsellor would a man not find in a wife, if only she could think—a counsellor, after all, whose interests, apart from one single object, and one which does not last beyond the morning of life, are exactly identical with his own! One of the finest prerogatives of the mind is that it provides old age with consideration. See how the arrival of Voltaire in Paris makes the Royal majesty pale. But poor women! so soon as they have no longer the brilliance of youth, their one sad happiness is to be able to delude themselves on the part they take in society. The ruins of youthful talents become merely ridiculous, and it were a happiness for our women, such as they actually are, to die at fifty. As for a higher morality—the clearer the mind, the surer the conviction that justice is the only road to happiness. Genius is a power; but still more is it a torch, to light the way to the great art of being happy. Most men have a moment in their life when they are capable of great things—that moment when nothing seems impossible to them. The ignorance of women causes this magnificent chance to be lost to the human race. Love, nowadays, at the very most will make a man a good horseman or teach him to choose his tailor. I have no time to defend myself against the advances of criticism. If my word could set up systems, I should give girls, as far as possible, exactly the same education as boys. As I have no intention of writing a book about everything and nothing, I shall be excused from explaining in what regards the present education of men is absurd. But taking it such as it is (they are not taught the two premier sciences, logic and ethics), it is better, I say, to give this education to girls than merely to teach them to play the piano, to paint in water-colours and to do needlework. Teach girls, therefore, reading, writing and arithmetic by the monitorial(44) system in the central convent schools, in which the presence of any man, except the masters, should be severely punished. The great advantage of bringing children together is that, however narrow the masters may be, in spite of them the children learn from their little comrades the art of living in the world and of managing conflicting interests. A sensible master would explain their little quarrels and friendships to the children, and begin his course of ethics in this way rather than with the story of the Golden Calf.[5] No doubt some years hence the monitorial system will be applied to everything that is learnt; but, taking things as they actually are, I would have girls learn Latin like boys. Latin is a good subject because it accustoms one to be bored; with Latin should go history, mathematics, a knowledge of the plants useful as nourishment or medicine; then logic and the moral sciences, etc. Dancing, music and drawing ought to begin at five. At sixteen a girl ought to think about finding a husband, and get from her mother right ideas on love, marriage, and the want of honesty that exists among men.[6]
CHAPTER LVI
(Part II)
ON MARRIAGE The fidelity of married women, where love is absent, is probably something contrary to nature.[1] Men have attempted to obtain this unnatural result by the fear of hell and sentiments of religion; the example of Spain and Italy shows how far they have succeeded. In France they have attempted to obtain it by public opinion—the one dyke capable of resistance, yet it has been badly built. It is absurd to tell a young girl: "You must be faithful to the husband of your choice," and then to marry her by force to a boring old dotard.[2]"But girls are pleased to get married." Because, under the narrow system of present-day education, the slavery that they undergo in their mother's house is intolerably tedious; further, they lack enlightenment; and, lastly, there are the demands of nature. There is but one way to obtain more fidelity among married women: it is to give freedom to girls and divorce to married people. A woman always loses the fairest days of her youth in her first marriage, and by divorce she gives fools the chance of talking against her. Young women who have plenty of lovers have nothing to get from divorce, and women of a certain age, who have already had them, hope to repair their reputation—in France they always succeed in doing so—by showing themselves extremely severe against the errors which have left them behind. It is generally some wretched young woman, virtuous and desperately in love, who seeks a divorce, and gets her good name blackened at the hands of women who have had fifty different men.
CHAPTER LVII
OF VIRTUE, SO CALLED Myself, I honour with the name of virtue the habit of doing painful actions which are of use to others. St. Simon Stylites, who sits twenty-two years on the top of a column beating himself with a strap, is in my eyes, I confess, not at all virtuous; and it is this that gives this essay a tone only too unprincipled. I esteem not a bit more the Chartreux monk who eats nothing but fish and allows himself to talk only on Thursday. I own I prefer General Carnot, who, at an advanced age, puts up with the rigours of exile in a little northern town rather than do a base action. I have some hope that this extremely vulgar declaration will lead the reader to skip the rest of this chapter. This morning, a holiday, at Pesaro (May 7th, 1819), being obliged to go to Mass, I got hold of a Missal and fell upon these words:— Joanna, Alphonsi quinti Lusitaniae regis filia, tanta divini amoris flamma praeventa fuit, ut ab ipsa pueritia rerum caducarum pertaesa, solo coelestis patriae desiderio flagraret.
The virtue so touchingly preached by the very beautiful words of the GÉnie du Christianisme(50) is thus reduced to not eating truffles for fear of a stomach-ache. It is quite a reasonable calculation, if you believe in hell; but it is a self-interested calculation, the most personal and prosaic possible. That philosophic virtue, which so well explains the return of Regulus to Carthage, and which was responsible for some similar incidents in our own Revolution,[1] proves, on the contrary, generosity of soul. It is merely in order not to be burned in the next world, in a great caldron of boiling oil, that Madame de Tourvel resists Valmont. I cannot imagine how the idea, with all its ignominy, of being the rival of a caldron of boiling oil does not drive Valmont away. How much more touching is Julie d'Étanges, respecting her vows and the happiness of M. de Wolmar. What I say of Madame de Tourvel, I find applicable to the lofty virtue of Mistress Hutchinson. What a soul did Puritanism steal away from love! One of the oddest peculiarities of this world is that men always think they know whatever it is clearly necessary for them to know. Hear them talk about politics, that very complicated science; hear them talk of marriage and morals. [1] Memoirs of Madame Roland. M. Grangeneuve, who goes out for a walk at eight o'clock in a certain street, in order to be killed by the Capuchin Chabot. A death was thought expedient in the cause of liberty.
CHAPTER LVIII
STATE OF EUROPE WITH REGARD TO MARRIAGE So far we have only treated the question of marriage according to theory;[1] we are now to treat it according to the facts. Which of all countries is that in which there are the most happy marriages? Without dispute, Protestant Germany(52). I extract the following fragment from the diary of Captain Salviati, without changing a single word in it:— "Halberstadt, June 23rd, 1807.... Nevertheless, M. de BÜlow is absolutely and openly in love with Mademoiselle de Feltheim; he follows her about everywhere, always, talks to her unceasingly, and very often keeps her yards away from us. Such open marks of affection shock society, break it up—and on the banks of the Seine would pass for the height of indecency. The Germans think much less than we do about what breaks up society; indecency is little more than a conventional evil. For five years M. de BÜlow has been paying court in this way to Mina, whom he has been unable to marry owing to the war. All the young ladies in society have their lover, and he is known to everyone. Among all the German acquaintances of my friend M. de Mermann(53) there is not a single one who has not married for love. "Mermann, his brother George, M. de Voigt, M. de Lazing, etc. He has just given me the names of a dozen of them. "The open and passionate way in which these lovers pay their court to their mistresses would be the height of indecency, absurdity and shame in France. "Mermann told me this evening, as we were returning from the Chasseur Vert, that, among all the women of his very numerous family, he did not suppose there was a single one who had deceived her husband. Allowing that he is wrong about half of them, it is still a singular country. "His shady proposal to his sister-in-law, Madame de Munichow, whose family is about to die out for want of male heirs and its very considerable possessions revert to the crown, coldly received, but merely with: 'Let's hear no more of that.' "He tells the divine Philippine (who has just obtained a divorce from her husband, who only wanted to sell her to his Sovereign) something about it in very covert terms. Unfeigned indignation, toned down in its expression instead of being exaggerated: 'Have you, then, no longer any respect for our sex? I prefer to think, for the sake of your honour, that you're joking.' "During a journey to the Brocken with this really beautiful woman, she reclined on his shoulder while asleep or pretending to sleep; a jolt threw her somewhat on to the top of him, and he put his arm round her waist; she threw herself into the other corner of the carriage. He doesn't think that she is incorruptible, but he believes that she would kill herself the day after her mistake. What is certain is that he loved her passionately and that he was similarly loved by her, that they saw each other continually and that she is without reproach. But the sun is very pale at Halberstadt, the Government very meddling, and these two persons very cold. In their most passionate interviews Kant and Klopstock were always of the party."Mermann told me that a married man, convicted of adultery, could be condemned by the courts of Brunswick to ten years' imprisonment; the law has fallen into disuse, but at least ensures that people do not joke about this sort of affair. The distinction of being a man with a past is very far from being such an advantage here as it is in France, where you can scarcely refuse it a married man in his presence without insulting him. "Anyone who told my Colonel or Ch... that they no longer have women since their marriage would get a very poor reception. "Some years ago a woman of this country, in a fit of religious fervour, told her husband, a gentleman of the Court of Brunswick, that she had deceived him for six years together. The husband, as big a fool as his wife, went to tell the news to the Duke; the gallant was obliged to resign all his employments and to leave the country in twenty-four hours, under a threat from the Duke to put the laws in motion. " "Halberstadt, July 7th, 1807. "Husbands are not deceived here, 'tis true—but ye gods, what women! Statues, masses scarcely organic! Before marriage they are exceedingly attractive, graceful as gazelles, with quick tender eyes that always understand the least hint of love. The reason is that they are on the look out for a husband. So soon as the husband is found, they become absolutely nothing but getters of children, in a state of perpetual adoration before the begetter. In a family of four or five children there must always be one of them ill, since half the children die before seven, and in this country, immediately one of the babies is ill, the mother goes out no more. I can see that they find an indescribable pleasure in being caressed by their children. Little by little they lose all their ideas. It is the same at Philadelphia. There girls of the wildest and most innocent gaiety become, in less than a year, the most boring of women. To have done with the marriages of Protestant Germany—a wife's dowry is almost nil because of the fiefs. Mademoiselle de Diesdorff, daughter of a man with an income of forty thousand francs, will have a dowry of perhaps two thousand crowns (seven thousand five hundred francs). "M. de Mermann got four thousand crowns with his wife. "The rest of the dowry is payable in vanity at the Court. 'One could find among the middle class,' Mermann told me, 'matches with a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand crowns (six hundred thousand francs instead of fifteen). But one could no longer be presented at Court; one would be barred all society in which a prince or princess appeared: it's terrible.' These were his words, and they came from the heart. "A German woman with the soul of Phi..., her intellect, her noble and sensitive face, the fire she must have had at eighteen (she is now twenty-seven), a woman such as this country produces, with her virtue, naturalness and no more than a useful little dose of religion—such a woman would no doubt make her husband very happy. But how flatter oneself that one would remain true to such insipid matrons? "'But he was married,' she answered me this morning when I blamed the four years'silence of Corinne's lover, Lord Oswald. She sat up till three o'clock to read Corinne. The novel gave her profound emotion, and now she answers me with touching candour: 'But he was married.' "Phi... is so natural, with so naive a sensibility, that even in this land of the natural, she seems a prude to the petty heads that govern petty hearts; their witticisms make her sick, and she in no way hides it. "When she is in good company, she laughs like mad at the most lively jokes. It was she who told me the story of the young princess of sixteen, later on so well known. who often managed to make the officer on guard at her door come up into her rooms. " Switzerland I know few families happier than those of the Oberland, the part of Switzerland that lies round Berne; and it is a fact of public notoriety (1816) that the girls there spend Saturday to Sunday nights with their lovers. The fools who know the world, after a voyage from Paris to Saint Cloud, will cry out; happily I find in a Swiss writer confirmation of what I myself[2] saw during four months. "An honest peasant complained of certain losses he had sustained in his orchard; I asked him why he didn't keep a dog: 'My daughters would never get married.' I did not understand his answer; he told me he had had such a bad-tempered dog that none of the young men dared climb up to the windows any longer. "Another peasant, mayor of his village, told me in praise of his wife, that when she was a girl no one had had more Kilter or WÄchterer—that is, had had more young men come to spend the night with her. "A Colonel, widely esteemed, was forced, while crossing the mountains, to spend the night at the bottom of one of the most lonely and picturesque valleys in the country. He lodged with the first magistrate in the valley, a man rich and of good repute. On entering, the stranger noticed a young girl of sixteen, a model of gracefulness, freshness and simplicity: she was the daughter of the master of the house. That night there was a village ball; the stranger paid court to the girl, who was really strikingly beautiful. At last, screwing up courage, he ventured to ask her whether he couldn't 'keep watch' with her. 'No,' answered the girl, 'I share a room with my cousin, but I'll come myself to yours.' You can judge of the confusion this answer gave him. They had supper, the stranger got up, the girl took a torch and followed him into his room; he imagined the moment was at hand. 'Oh no,' she said simply, 'I must first ask Mamma's permission.' He would have been less staggered by a thunderbolt! She went out; his courage revived; he slipped into these good folks' parlour, and listened to the girl begging her mother in a caressing tone to grant her the desired permission; in the end she got it. 'Eh, old man,' said the mother to her husband who was already in bed, 'd'you allow Trineli to spend the night with the Colonel?' 'With all my heart,' answers the father, 'I think I'd lend even my wife to such a man.' 'Right then, go,' says the mother to Trineli; 'but be a good girl, and don't take off your petticoat...' At day-break, Trineli, respected by the stranger, rose still virgin. She arranged the bedclothes, prepared coffee and cream for her partner and, after she had breakfasted with him, seated on his bed, cut off a little piece of her broustpletz (a piece of velvet going over the breast). 'Here,' she said, 'keep this souvenir of a happy night; I shall never forget it.—Why are you a Colonel?' And giving him a last kiss, she ran away; he didn't manage to see her again.[3] Here you have the absolute opposite of French morals, and I am far from approving them." Were I a legislator, I would have people adopt in France, as in Germany, the custom of evening dances. Three times a week girls would go with their mothers to a ball, beginning at seven and ending at midnight, and demanding no other outlay but a violin and a few glasses of water. In a neighbouring room the mothers, maybe a little jealous of their daughters' happy education, would play boston; in a third, the fathers would find papers and could talk politics. Between midnight and one o'clock all the families would collect together and return to the paternal roof. Girls would get to know young men; they would soon come to loathe fatuity and the indiscretions it is responsible for—in fact they would choose themselves husbands. Some girls would have unhappy love-affairs, but the number of deceived husbands and unhappy matches would diminish to an immense degree. It would then be less absurd to attempt to punish infidelity with dishonour. The law could say to young women: "You have chosen your husband—be faithful to him." In those circumstances I would allow the indictment and punishment by the courts of what the English call criminal conversation. The courts could impose, to the profit of prisons and hospitals, a fine equal to two-thirds of the seducer's fortune and imprisonment for several years. A woman could be indicted for adultery before a jury. The jury should first declare that the husband's conduct had been irreproachable. A woman, if convicted, could be condemned to imprisonment for life. If the husband had been absent more than two years, the woman could not be condemned to more than some years' imprisonment. Public morals would soon model themselves on these laws and would perfect them.[4]And then the nobles and the priests, still regretting bitterly the proper times of Madame de Montespan or Madame du Barry, would be forced to allow divorce.[5] There would be in a village within sight of Paris an asylum for unfortunate women, a house of refuge into which, under pain of the galleys, no man besides the doctor and the almoner should enter. A woman who wished to get a divorce would be bound, first of all, to go and place herself as prisoner in this asylum; there she would spend two years without going out once. She could write, but never receive an answer. A council composed of peers of France and certain magistrates of repute would direct, in the woman's name, the proceedings for a divorce and would regulate the pension to be paid to the institution by the husband. A woman who failed in her plea before the courts would be allowed to spend the rest of her life in the asylum. The Government would compensate the administration of the asylum with a sum of two thousand francs for each woman who sought its refuge. To be received in the asylum, a woman must have had a dowry of over twenty thousand francs. The moral rÉgime would be one of extreme severity. After two years of complete seclusion from the world, a divorced woman could marry again. Once arrived at this point, Parliament could consider whether, in order to infuse in girls a spirit of emulation, it would not be advisable to allow the sons a share of the paternal heritage double that of their sisters. The daughters who did not find husbands would have a share equal to that of the male children. It may be remarked, by the way, that this system would, little by little, destroy the only too inconvenient custom of marriages of convenience. The possibility of divorce would render useless such outrageous meanness. At various points in France, and in certain poor villages, thirty abbeys for old maids should be established. The Government should endeavour to surround these establishments with consideration, in order to console a little the sorrows of the poor women who were to end their lives there. They should be given all the toys of dignity. But enough of such chimeras!
CHAPTER LIX
WERTHER AND DON JUAN Among young people, when they have done with mocking at some poor lover, and he has left the room, the conversation generally ends by discussing the question, whether it is better to deal with women like Mozart's Don Juan or like Werther. The contrast would be more exact, if I had said Saint-Preux, but he is so dull a personage, that in making him their representative, I should be wronging feeling hearts. Don Juan's character requires the greater number of useful and generally esteemed virtues—admirable daring, resourcefulness, vivacity, a cool head, a witty mind, etc. The Don Juans have great moments of bitterness and a very miserable old age—but then most men do not reach old age. The lover plays a poor rÔle in the drawing-room in the evening, because to be a success and a power among women a man must show just as much keenness on winning them as on a game of billiards. As everybody knows that the lover has a great interest in life, he exposes himself, for all his cleverness, to mockery. Only, next morning he wakes, not to be in a bad temper until something piquant or something nasty turns up to revive him, but to dream of her he loves and build castles in the air for love to dwell in. Love À la Werther opens the soul to all the arts, to all sweet and romantic impressions, to the moonlight, to the beauty of the forest, to the beauty of pictures—in a word, to the feeling and enjoyment of the beautiful, under whatever form it be found, even under the coarsest cloak. It causes man to find happiness even without riches.[1] Such souls, instead of growing weary like Mielhan, Bezenval, etc., go mad, like Rousseau, from an excess of sensibility. Women endowed with a certain elevation of soul, who, after their first youth, know how to recognise love, both where it is and what it is, generally escape the Don Juan—he is remarkable in their eyes rather by the number than the quality of his conquests. Observe, to the prejudice of tender hearts, that publicity is as necessary to Don Juan's triumph as secrecy is to Werther's. Most of the men who make women the business of their life are born in the lap of luxury; that is to say, they are, as a result of their education and the example set by everything that surrounded them in youth, hardened egoists.[2] The real Don Juan even ends by looking on women as the enemy, and rejoicing in their misfortunes of every sort. On the other hand, the charming Duke delle Pignatelle showed us the proper way to find happiness in pleasures, even without passion. "I know that I like a woman," he told me one evening, "when I find myself completely confused in her company, and don't know what to say to her." So far from letting his self-esteem be put to shame or take its revenge for these embarrassing moments, he cultivated them lovingly as the source of his happiness. With this charming young man gallant-love was quite free from the corroding influence of vanity; his was a shade of true love, pale, but innocent and unmixed; and he respected all women, as charming beings, towards whom we are far from just. (February 20, 1820.) As a man does not choose himself a temperament, that is to say, a soul, he cannot play a part above him. J. J. Rousseau and the Duc de Richelieu might have tried in vain; for all their cleverness, they could never have exchanged their fortunes with respect to women. I could well believe that the Duke never had moments such as those that Rousseau experienced in the park de la Chevrette with Madame d'Houdetot; at Venice, when listening to the music of the Scuole; and at Turin at the feet of Madame Bazile. But then he never had to blush at the ridicule that overwhelmed Rousseau in his affair with Madame de Larnage, remorse for which pursued him during the rest of his life. A Saint-Preux's part is sweeter and fills up every moment of existence, but it must be owned that that of a Don Juan is far more brilliant. Saint-Preux's tastes may change at middle age: solitary and retired, and of pensive habits, he takes a back place on the stage of life, while Don Juan realises the magnificence of his reputation among men, and could yet perhaps please a woman of feeling by making sincerely the sacrifice of his libertine's tastes. After all the reasons offered so far, on both sides of the question, the balance still seems to be even. What makes me think that the Werthers are the happier, is that Don Juan reduces love to the level of an ordinary affair. Instead of being able, like Werther, to shape realities to his desires, he finds, in love, desires which are imperfectly satisfied by cold reality, just as in ambition, avarice or other passions. Instead of losing himself in the enchanting reveries of crystallisation, he thinks, like a general, of the success of his manoeuvres[3] and, in a word, he kills love, instead of enjoying it more keenly than other men, as ordinary people imagine. This seems to me unanswerable. And there is another reason, which is no less so in my eyes, though, thanks to the malignity of Providence, we must pardon men for not recognising it. The habit of justice is, to my thinking, apart from accidents, the most assured way of arriving at happiness—and a Werther is no villain.[4] To be happy in crime, it is absolutely necessary to have no remorse. I do not know whether such a creature can exist;[5] I have never seen him. I would bet that the affair of Madame Michelin disturbed the Duc de Richelieu's nights. One ought either to have absolutely no sympathy or be able to put the human race to death—which is impossible.[6] People who only know love from novels will experience a natural repugnance in reading these words in favour of virtue in love. The reason is that, by the laws of the novel, the portraiture of a virtuous love is essentially tiresome and uninteresting. Thus the sentiment of virtue seems from a distance to neutralise that of love, and the words "a virtuous love" seem synonymous with a feeble love. But all this comes from weakness in the art of painting, and has nothing to do with passion such as it exists in nature.[7] I beg to be allowed to draw a picture of my most intimate friend. Don Juan renounces all the duties which bind him to the rest of men. In the great market of life he is a dishonest merchant, who is always buying and never paying. The idea of equality inspires the same rage in him as water in a man with hydrophobia; it is for this reason that pride of birth goes so well with the character of Don Juan. With the idea of the equality of rights disappears that of justice, or, rather, if Don Juan is sprung from an illustrious family, such common ideas have never come to him. I could easily believe that a man with an historic name is sooner disposed than another to set fire to the town in order to get his egg cooked.[8] We must excuse him; he is so possessed with self-love that he comes to the point of losing all idea of the evil he causes, and of seeing no longer anything in the universe capable of joy or sorrow except himself. In the fire of youth, when passion fills our own hearts with the pulse of life and keeps us from mistrust of others, Don Juan, all senses and apparent happiness, applauds himself for thinking only of himself, while he sees other men pay their sacrifices to duty. He imagines that he has found out the great art of living. But, in the midst of his triumph, while still scarcely thirty years of age, he perceives to his astonishment that life is wanting, and feels a growing disgust for what were all his pleasures. Don Juan told me at Thorn, in an access of melancholy: "There are not twenty different sorts of women, and once you have had two or three of each sort, satiety sets in." I answered: "It is only imagination that can for ever escape satiety. Each woman inspires a different interest, and, what is more, if chance throws the same woman in your way two or three years earlier or later in the course of life, and if chance means you to love, you can love the same woman in different manners. But a woman of gentle heart, even when she loved you, would produce in you, because of her pretensions to equality, only irritation to your pride. Your way of having women kills all the other pleasures of life; Werther's increases them a hundredfold." This sad tragedy reaches the last act. You see Don Juan in old age, turning on this and that, never on himself, as the cause of his own satiety. You see him, tormented by a consuming poison, flying from this to that in a continual change of purpose. But, however brilliant the appearances may be, in the end he only changes one misery for another. He tries the boredom of inaction, he tries the boredom of excitement—there is nothing else for him to choose. At last he discovers the fatal truth and confesses it to himself; henceforward he is reduced for all his enjoyment to making display of his power, and openly doing evil for evil's sake. In short, 'tis the last degree of settled gloom; no poet has dared give us a faithful picture of it—the picture, if true, would strike horror. But one may hope that a man, above the ordinary, will retrace his steps along this fatal path; for at the bottom of Don Juan's character there is a contradiction. I have supposed him a man of great intellect, and great intellect leads us to the discovery of virtue by the road that runs to the temple of glory.[9] La Rochefoucauld, who, however, was a master of self-love, and who in real life was nothing but a silly man of letters,[10] says(267): "The pleasure of love consists in loving, and a man gets more happiness from the passion he feels than from the passion he inspires." Don Juan's happiness consists in vanity, based, it is true, on circumstances brought about by great intelligence and activity; but he must feel that the most inconsiderable general who wins a battle, the most inconsiderable prefect who keeps his department in order, realises a more signal enjoyment than his own. The Duc de Nemours' happiness when Madame de ClÈves tells him that she loves him, is, I imagine, above Napoleon's happiness at Marengo. Love À la Don Juan is a sentiment of the same kind as a taste for hunting. It is a desire for activity which must be kept alive by divers objects and by putting a man's talents continually to the test. Love À la Werther is like the feeling of a schoolboy writing a tragedy—and a thousand times better; it is a new goal, to which everything in life is referred and which changes the face of everything. Passion-love casts all nature in its sublimer aspects before the eyes of a man, as a novelty invented but yesterday. He is amazed that he has never seen the singular spectacle that is now discovered to his soul. Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most passionate interest.[11] A lover sees the woman he loves on the horizon of every landscape he comes across, and, while he travels a hundred miles to go and catch a glimpse of her for an instant, each tree, each rock speaks to him of her in a different manner and tells him something new about her. Instead of the tumult of this magic spectacle, Don Juan finds that external objects have for him no value apart from their degree of utility, and must be made amusing by some new intrigue. Love À la Werther has strange pleasures; after a year or two, the lover has now, so to speak, but one heart with her he loves; and this, strange to say, even independent of his success in love—even under a cruel mistress. Whatever he does, whatever he sees, he asks himself: "What would she say if she were with me? What would I say to her about this view of Casa-Lecchio?" He speaks to her, he hears her answer, he smiles at her fun. A hundred miles from her, and under the weight of her anger, he surprises himself, reflecting: "LÉonore was very gay that night." Then he wakes up: "Good God!" he says to himself with a sigh, "there are madmen in Bedlam less mad than I." "You make me quite impatient," said a friend of mine, to whom I read out this remark: "you are continually opposing the passionate man to the Don Juan, and that is not the point in dispute. You would be right, if a man could provide himself with passion at will. But what about indifference—what is to be done then?"—Gallant-love without horrors. Its horrors always come from a little soul, that needs to be reassured as to its own merit. To continue.—The Don Juans must find great difficulty in agreeing with what I was saying just now of this state of the soul. Besides the fact that they can neither see nor feel this state, it gives too great a blow to their vanity. The error of their life is expecting to win in a fortnight what a timid lover can scarcely obtain in six months. They base their reckoning on experience got at the expense of those poor devils, who have neither the soul to please a woman of feeling by revealing its ingenuous workings, nor the necessary wit for the part of a Don Juan. They refuse to see that the same prize, though granted by the same woman, is not the same thing. L'homme prudent sans cesse se mÉfie.
C'est pour cela que des amants trompeurs
Le nombre est grand. Les dames que l'on prie
Font soupirer longtemps des serviteurs
Qui n'ont jamais ÉtÉ faux de leur vie.
Mais du trÉsor qu'elles donnent enfin
Le prix n'est su que du coeur qui le goÛte;
Plus on l'achÈte et plus il est divin:
Le los d'amour ne vaut pas ce qu'il coÛte.[12]
(Nivernais, Le Troubadour Guillaume de la Tour, III, 342.)
Passion-love in the eyes of a Don Juan may be compared to a strange road, steep and toilsome, that begins, 'tis true, amidst delicious copses, but is soon lost among sheer rocks, whose aspect is anything but inviting to the eyes of the vulgar. Little by little the road penetrates into the mountain-heights, in the midst of a dark forest, where the huge trees, intercepting the daylight with their shaggy tops that seem to touch the sky, throw a kind of horror into souls untempered by dangers.After wandering with difficulty, as in an endless maze, whose multiple turnings try the patience of our self-love, on a sudden we turn a corner and find ourselves in a new world, in the delicious valley of Cashmire of Lalla Rookh. How can the Don Juans, who never venture along this road, or at most take but a few steps along it, judge of the views that it offers at the end of the journey?...
So you see inconstancy is good: "Il me faut du nouveau, n'en fÛt-il plus au monde."[13]
Very well, I reply, you make light of oaths and justice, and what can you look for in inconstancy? Pleasure apparently. But the pleasure to be got from a pretty woman, desired a fortnight and loved three months, is different from the pleasure to be found in a mistress, desired three years and loved ten. If I do not insert the word "always" the reason is that I have been told old age, by altering our organs, renders us incapable of loving; myself, I don't believe it. When your mistress has become your intimate friend, she can give you new pleasures, the pleasures of old age. 'Tis a flower that, after it has been a rose in the morning—the season of flowers—becomes a delicious fruit in the evening, when the roses are no longer in season.[14] A mistress desired three years is really a mistress in every sense of the word; you cannot approach her without trembling; and let me tell the Don Juans that a man who trembles is not bored. The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fear. The evil of inconstancy is weariness; the evil of passion is despair and death. The cases of despair are noted and become legend. No one pays attention to the weary old libertines dying of boredom, with whom the streets of Paris are lined. "Love blows out more brains than boredom." I have no doubt of it: boredom robs a man of everything, even the courage to kill himself. There is a certain type of character which can find pleasure only in variety. A man who cries up Champagne at the expense of Bordeaux is only saying, with more or less eloquence: "I prefer Champagne." Each of these wines has its partisans, and they are all right, so long as they quite understand themselves, and run after the kind of happiness best suited to their organs[15] and their habits. What ruins the case for inconstancy is that all fools range themselves on that side from lack of courage. But after all, everyone, if he will take the trouble to look into himself, has his ideal, and there always seems to me something a little ridiculous in wanting to convert your neighbour.
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