Stendhal

SCATTERED FRAGMENTS

Under this title, which I would willingly have made still more modest, I have brought together, without excessive severity, a selection made from three or four hundred playing cards, on which I found a few lines scrawled in pencil. That which, I suppose, must be called the original manuscript, for want of a simpler name, was in many places made up of pieces of paper of all sizes, written on in pencil, and joined together by Lisio with sealing-wax, to save him the trouble of copying them afresh. He told me once that nothing he ever noted down seemed to him worth the trouble of recopying an hour later. I have entered so fully into all this in the hope that it may serve as an excuse for repetitions.

I

Everything can be acquired in solitude, except character.

II

1821. Hatred, love and avarice, the three ruling passions at Rome, and with gambling added, almost the only ones.

At first sight the Romans seem ill-natured, but they are only very much on their guard and blessed with an imagination which flares up at the least suggestion.

If they give a gratuitous proof of ill-nature, it is the case of a man, gnawed by fear, and testing his gun to reassure himself.

III

If I were to say, as I believe, that good-nature is the keynote of the Parisian's character, I should be very frightened of having offended him.—"I won't be good!"

IV

A proof of love comes to light, when all the pleasures and all the pains, which all the other passions and wants of man can produce, in a moment cease working.

V

Prudery is a kind of avarice—the worst of all.

VI

To have a solid character is to have a long and tried experience of life's disillusions and misfortunes. Then it is a question of desiring constantly or not at all.

VII

Love, such as it exists in smart society, is the love of battle, the love of gambling.

VIII

Nothing kills gallant love like gusts of passion-love from the other side. (Contessina L. ForlÌ—1819).

IX

A great fault in women, and the most offensive of all to a man a little worthy of that name: The public, in matters of feeling, never soars above mean ideas, and women make the public the supreme judge of their lives—even the most distinguished women, I maintain, often unconsciously, and even while believing and saying the contrary. (Brescia, 1819).

X

Prosaic is a new word, which once I thought absurd, for nothing could be colder than our poetry. If there has been any warmth in France for the last fifty years, it is assuredly to be found in its prose.

But anyhow, the little Countess L—— used the word and I like writing it.

The definition of prosaic is to be got from Don Quixote, and "the complete contrast of Knight and Squire." The Knight tall and pale; the Squire fat and fresh. The former all heroism and courtesy; the latter all selfishness and servility. The former always full of romantic and touching fancies; the latter a model of worldly wisdom, a compendium of wise saws. The one always feeding his soul on dreams of heroism and daring; the other ruminating some really sensible scheme in which, never fear, he will take into strict account all the shameful, selfish little movements the human heart is prone to.

At the very moment when the former should be brought to his senses by the non-success of yesterday's dreams, he is already busy on his castles in Spain for to-day.

You ought to have a prosaic husband and to choose a romantic lover.

Marlborough had a prosaic soul: Henry IV, in love at fifty-five with a young princess, who could not forget his age, a romantic heart.[1]

There are fewer prosaic beings among the nobility than in the middle-class.

This is the fault of trade, it makes people prosaic.

[1] Dulaure, History of Paris.

Silent episode in the queen's apartment the evening of the flight of the Princesse de CondÉ: the ministers transfixed to the wall and mute, the King striding up and down.

XI

Nothing so interesting as passion: for there everything is unforeseen, and the principal is the victim. Nothing so flat as gallantry, where everything is a matter of calculation, as in all the prosaic affairs of life.

XII

At the end of a visit you always finish by treating a lover better than you meant to. (L., November 2nd, 1818).

XIII

In spite of genius in an upstart, the influence of rank always makes itself felt. Think of Rousseau losing his heart to all the "ladies" he met, and weeping tears of rapture because the Duke of L——, one of the dullest courtiers of the period, deigns to take the right side rather than the left in a walk with a certain M. Coindet, friend of Rousseau! (L., May 3rd, 1820.)

XIV

Women's only educator is the world. A mother in love does not hesitate to appear in the seventh heaven of delight, or in the depth of despair, before her daughters aged fourteen or fifteen. Remember that, under these happy skies, plenty of women are quite nice-looking till forty-five, and the majority are married at eighteen.

Think of La Valchiusa saying yesterday of Lampugnani: "Ah, that man was made for me, he could love, ... etc., etc," and so on in this strain to a friend—all before her daughter, a little thing of fourteen or fifteen, very much on the alert, and whom she also took with her on the more than friendly walks with the lover in question.

Sometimes girls get hold of sound rules of conduct, For examples take Madame Guarnacci, addressing her two daughters and two men, who have never called on her before. For an hour and a half she treats them to profound maxims, based on examples within their own knowledge (that of La Cercara in Hungary), on the precise point at which it is right to punish with infidelity a lover who misbehaves himself. (Ravenna, January 23rd, 1820.)

XV

The sanguine man, the true Frenchman (Colonel M——) instead of being tormented by excess of feeling, like Rousseau, if he has a rendezvous for the next evening at seven, sees everything, right up to the blessed moment, through rosy spectacles. People of this kind are not in the least susceptible to passion-love; it would upset their sweet tranquillity. I will go so far as to say that perhaps they would find its transports a nuisance, or at all events be humiliated by the timidity it produces.

XVI

Most men of the world, through vanity, caution or disaster, let themselves love a woman freely only after intimate intercourse.

XVII

With very gentle souls a woman needs to be easy-going in order to encourage crystallisation.

XVIII

A woman imagines that the voice of the public is speaking through the mouth of the first fool or the first treacherous friend who claims to be its faithful interpreter to her.

XIX

There is a delicious pleasure in clasping in your arms a woman who has wronged you grievously, who has been your bitter enemy for many a day, and is ready to be so again. Good fortune of the French officers in Spain, 1812.

XX

Solitude is what one wants, to relish one's own heart and to love; but to succeed one must go amongst men, here, there and everywhere.

XXI

"All the observations of the French on love are well written, carefully and without exaggeration, but they bear only on light affections," said that delightful person, Cardinal Lante.

XXII

In Goldoni's comedy, the Innamorati, all the workings of passion are excellent; it is the very repulsive meanness of style and thought which revolts one. The contrary is true of a French comedy.

XXIII

The youth of 1822: To say "serious turn of mind, active disposition" means "sacrifice of the present to the future." Nothing develops the soul like the power and the habit of making such sacrifices. I foresee the probability of more great passions in 1832 than in 1772.

XXIV

The choleric temperament, when it does not display itself in too repulsive a form, is one perhaps most apt of all to strike and keep alive the imagination of women. If the choleric temperament does not fall among propitious surroundings, as Lauzun in Saint-Simon (Memoirs), the difficulty is to grow used to it. But once grasped by a woman, this character must fascinate her: yes, even the savage and fanatic Balfour (Old Mortality). For women it is the antithesis of the prosaic.

XXV

In love one often doubts what one believes most strongly (La R., 355). In every other passion, what once we have proved, we no longer doubt.

XXVI

Verse was invented to assist the memory. Later it was kept to increase the pleasure of reading by the sight of the difficulty overcome. Its survival nowadays in dramatic art is a relic of barbarity. Example: the Cavalry Regulations put into verse by M. de Bonnay.

XXVII

While this jealous slave feeds his soul on boredom, avarice, hatred and other such poisonous, cold passions, I spend a night of happiness dreaming of her—of her who, through mistrust, treats me badly.

XXVIII

It needs a great soul to dare have a simple style. That is why Rousseau put so much rhetoric into the Nouvelle HÉloÏse—which makes it unreadable for anyone over thirty.

XXIX

"The greatest reproach we could possibly make against ourselves is, certainly, to have let fade, like the shadowy phantoms produced by sleep, the ideas of honour and justice, which from time to time well up in our hearts." (Letter from Jena, March, 1819.)

XXX

A respectable woman is in the country and passes an hour in the hot-house with her gardener. Certain people, whose views she has upset, accuse her of having found a lover in this gardener. What answer is there?

Speaking absolutely, the thing is possible. She could say: "My character speaks for me, look at my behaviour throughout life"—only all this is equally invisible to the eyes of the ill-natured who won't see, and the fools who can't. (Salviati, Rome, July 23rd, 1819.)

XXXI

I have known a man find out that his rival's love was returned, and yet the rival himself remain blinded to the fact by his passion.

XXXII

The more desperately he is in love, the more violent the pressure a man is forced to put upon himself, in order to risk annoying the woman he loves by taking her hand.

XXXIII

Ludicrous rhetoric but, unlike that of Rousseau, inspired by true passion. (Memoirs of M. de Mau..., Letter of S——.)

XXXIV

Naturalness

I saw, or I thought I saw, this evening the triumph of naturalness in a young woman, who certainly seems to me to possess a great character. She adores, obviously, I think, one of her cousins and must have confessed to herself the state of her heart. The cousin is in love with her, but as she is very serious with him, thinks she does not like him, and lets himself be fascinated by the marks of preference shown him by Clara, a young widow and friend of MÉlanie. I think he will marry her. MÉlanie sees it and suffers all that a proud heart, struggling involuntarily with a violent passion, is capable of suffering. She has only to alter her ways a little; but she would look upon it as a piece of meanness, the consequences of which would affect her whole life, to depart one instant from her natural self.

XXXV

Sappho saw in love only sensual intoxication or physical pleasure made sublime by crystallisation. Anacreon looked for sensual and intellectual amusement. There was too little security in Antiquity for people to find leisure for passion-love.

XXXVI

The foregoing fact fully justifies me in rather laughing at people who think Homer superior to Tasso. Passion-love did exist in the time of Homer, and at no great distance from Greece.

XXXVII

Woman with a heart, if you wish to know whether the man you adore loves you with passion-love, study your lover's early youth. Every man of distinction in the early days of his life is either a ridiculous enthusiast or an unfortunate. A man easy to please, of gay and cheerful humour, can never love with the passion your heart requires.

Passion I call only that which has gone through long misfortunes, misfortunes which novels take good care not to depict—what's more they can't!

XXXVIII

A bold resolution can change in an instant the most extreme misfortune into quite a tolerable state of things. The evening of a defeat, a man is retreating in hot haste, his charger already spent. He can hear distinctly the troop of cavalry galloping in pursuit. Suddenly he stops, dismounts, recharges his carbine and pistols, and makes up his mind to defend himself. Straightway, instead of having death, he has a cross of the Legion of Honour before his eyes.

XXXIX

Basis of English habits. About 1730, while we already had Voltaire and Fontenelle, a machine was invented in England to separate the grain, after threshing, from the chaff. It worked by means of a wheel, which gave the air enough movement to blow away the bits of chaff. But in that biblical country the peasants pretended that it was wicked to go against the will of Divine Providence, and to produce an artificial wind like this, instead of begging Heaven with an ardent prayer for enough wind to thresh the corn and waiting for the moment appointed by the God of Israel. Compare this with French peasants.[1]

[1] For the actual state of English habits, see the Life of Mr. Beattie, written by an intimate friend. The reader will be edified by the profound humility of Mr. Beattie, when he receives ten guineas from an old Marchioness in order to slander Hume. The trembling aristocracy relies on the bishops with incomes of £200,000, and pays in money and honour so-called liberal writers to throw mud at ChÉnier. (Edinburgh Review, 1821.)

The most disgusting cant leaks through on all sides. Everything except the portrayal of primitive and energetic feelings is stifled by it: impossible to write a joyous page in English.

XL

No doubt about it—'tis a form of madness to expose oneself to passion-love. In some cases, however, the cure works too energetically. American girls in the United States are so saturated and fortified with reasonable ideas, that in that country love, the flower of life, has deserted youth. At Boston a girl can be left perfectly safely alone with a handsome stranger—in all probability she's thinking of nothing but her marriage settlement.

XLI

In France men who have lost their wives are melancholy; widows, on the contrary, merry and light-hearted. There is a proverb current among women on the felicity of this state. So there must be some inequality in the articles of union.

XLII

People who are happy in their love have an air of profound preoccupation, which, for a Frenchman, is the same as saying an air of profound gloom. (Dresden, 1818.)

XLIII

The more generally a man pleases, the less deeply can he please.

XLIV

As a result of imitation in the early years of life, we contract the passions of our parents, even when these very passions poison our life. (L.'s pride.)

XLV

The most honourable source of feminine pride is a woman's fear of degrading herself in her lover's eyes by some hasty step or some action that he may think unwomanly.

XLVI

Real love renders the thought of death frequent, agreeable, unterrifying, a mere subject of comparison, the price we are willing to pay for many a thing.

XLVII

How often have I exclaimed for all my bravery: "If anyone would blow out my brains, I'd thank him before I expired, if there were time." A man can only be brave, with the woman he loves, by loving her a little less. (S., February, 1820.)

XLVIII

"I could never love!" a young woman said to me. "Mirabeau and his letters to Sophie have given me a disgust for great souls. Those fatal letters impressed me like a personal experience."

Try a plan which you never read of in novels; let two years' constancy assure you, before intimate intercourse, of your lover's heart.

XLIX

Ridicule scares love. Ridicule is impossible in Italy: what's good form in Venice is odd at Naples—consequently nothing's odd in Italy. Besides, nothing that gives pleasure is found fault with. 'Tis this that does away with the fool's honour and half the farce.

L

Children command by tears, and if people do not attend to their wishes, they hurt themselves on purpose. Young women are piqued from a sense of honour.

LI

'Tis a common reflection, but one for that reason easily forgotten, that every day sensitive souls become rarer, cultured minds commoner.

LII

Feminine Pride

I have just witnessed a striking example—but on mature consideration I should need fifteen pages to give a proper idea of it. If I dared, I would much rather note the consequences; my eyes have convinced me beyond the possibility of doubt. But, no, it is a conviction I must give up all idea of communicating, there are too many little details. Such pride is the opposite of French vanity. So far as I can remember, the only work, in which I have seen a sketch of it, is that part of Madame Roland's Memoirs, where she recounts the petty reasonings she made as a girl. (Bologna, April 18th, 2 a.m.)

LIII

In France, most women make no account of a young man until they have turned him into a coxcomb. It is only then that he can flatter their vanity. (Duclos.)

LIV

Zilietti said to me at midnight (at the charming Marchesina R...'s): "I'm not going to dine at San Michele (an inn). Yesterday I said some smart things—I was joking with Cl...; it might make me conspicuous."

Don't go and think that Zilietti is either a fool or a coward. He is a prudent and very rich man in this happy land. (Modena, 1820.)

LV

What is admirable in America is the government, not society. Elsewhere government does the harm. At Boston they have changed parts, and government plays the hypocrite, in order not to shock society.

LVI

Italian girls, if they love, are entirely given over to natural inspiration. At the very most all that can aid them is a handful of excellent maxims, which they have picked up by listening at the keyhole. As if fate had decreed that everything here should combine to preserve naturalness, they read no novels—and for this reason, that there are none. At Geneva or in France, on the contrary, a girls falls in love at sixteen in order to be a heroine, and at each step, almost at each tear, she asks herself: "Am I not just like Julie d'Étanges? "

LVII

The husband of a young woman adored by a lover, whom she treats unkindly and scarcely allows to kiss her hand, has, at the very most, only the grossest physical pleasure, where the lover would find the charms and transports of the keenest happiness that exists on earth.

LVIII

The laws of the imagination are still so little understood, that I include the following estimate, though perhaps it is all quite wrong.

I seem to distinguish two sorts of imagination:—

1. Imagination like Fabio's, ardent, impetuous, inconsiderate, leading straight to action, consuming itself, and already languishing at a delay of twenty-four hours. Impatience is its prime characteristic; it becomes enraged against that which it cannot obtain. It sees all exterior objects, but they only serve to inflame it. It assimilates them to its own substance, and converts them straight away to the profit of passion.

2. Imagination which takes fire slowly and little by little, but which loses in time the perception of exterior objects, and comes to find occupation and nourishment in nothing but its own passion. This last sort of imagination goes quite easily with slowness, or even scarcity, of ideas. It is favourable to constancy. It is the imagination of the greater part of those poor German girls, who are dying of love and consumption. That sad spectacle, so frequent beyond the Rhine, is never met with in Italy.

LIX

Imaginative habits. A Frenchman is really shocked by eight changes of scenery in one act of a tragedy. Such a man is incapable of pleasure in seeing Macbeth. He consoles himself by damning Shakespeare.

LX

In France the provinces are forty years behind Paris in all that regards women. A. C., a married woman, tells me that she only liked to read certain parts of Lanzi's Memoirs. Such stupidity is too much for me; I can no longer find a word to say to her. As if that were a book one could put down!

Want of naturalness—the great failing in provincial women.

Their effusive and gracious gestures; those who play the first fiddle in the town are worse than the others.

LXI

Goethe, or any other German genius, esteems money at what it's worth. Until he has got an income of six thousand francs, he must think of nothing but his banking-account. After that he must never think of it again. The fool, on his side, does not understand the advantage there is of feeling and thinking like Goethe. All his life he feels in terms of money and thinks of sums of money. It is owing to this support from both sides, that the prosaic in this world seem to come off so much better than the high-minded.

LXII

In Europe, desire is inflamed by constraint; in America it is dulled by liberty.

LXIII

A mania for discussion has got hold of the younger generation and stolen it from love. While they are considering whether Napoleon was of service to France, they let the age of love speed past. Even with those who mean to be young, it is all affectation—a tie, a spur, their martial swagger, their all-absorbing self—and they forget to cast a glance at the girl who passes by so modestly and cannot go out more than once a week through want of means.

LXIV

I have suppressed a chapter on Prudery, and others as well.

I am happy to find the following passage in Horace Walpole's Memoirs:

The Two Elizabeths. Let us compare the daughters of two ferocious men, and see which was sovereign of a civilised nation, which of a barbarous one. Both were Elizabeths. The daughter of Peter (of Russia) was absolute, yet spared a competitor and a rival; and thought the person of an empress had sufficient allurements for as many of her subjects as she chose to honour with the communication. Elizabeth of England could neither forgive the claim of Mary Stuart nor her charms, but ungenerously imprisoned her (as George IV did Napoleon[1]) when imploring protection, and, without the sanction of either despotism or law, sacrificed many to her great and little jealousy. Yet this Elizabeth piqued herself on chastity; and while she practised every ridiculous art of coquetry to be admired at an unseemly age, kept off lovers whom she encouraged, and neither gratified her own desires nor their ambition. Who can help preferring the honest, open-hearted barbarian empress? (Lord Orford's Memoirs.)

[1] [Added, of course, by Stendhal.—Tr.]

LXV

Extreme familiarity may destroy crystallisation. A charming girl of sixteen fell in love with a handsome youth of the same age, who never failed one evening to pass under her window at nightfall. Her mother invites him to spend a week with them in the country—a desperate remedy, I agree. But the girl was romantic, and the youth rather dull: after three days she despised him.

LXVI

Ave Maria—twilight in Italy, the hour of tenderness, of the soul's pleasures and of melancholy—sensation intensified by the sound of those lovely bells.

Hours of pleasure, which only in memory touch the senses.... (Bologna, April 17th, 1817.)

LXVII

A young man's first love-affair on entering society is ordinarily one of ambition. He rarely declares his love for a sweet, amiable and innocent young girl. How tremble before her, adore her, feel oneself in the presence of a divinity? Youth must love a being whose qualities lift him up in his own eyes. It is in the decline of life that we sadly come back to love the simple and the innocent, despairing of the sublime. Between the two comes true love, which thinks of nothing but itself.

LXVIII

The existence of great souls is not suspected. They hide away; all that is seen is a little originality. There are more great souls than one would think.

LXIX

The first clasp of the beloved's hand—what a moment that is! The only joy to be compared to it is the ravishing joy of power—which statesmen and kings make pretence of despising. This joy also has its crystallisation, though it demands a colder and more reasonable imagination. Think of a man whom, a quarter of an hour ago, Napoleon has called to be a minister.

LXX

The celebrated Johannes von MÜller(54) said to me at Cassel in 1808—Nature has given strength to the North and wit to the South.

LXXI

Nothing more untrue than the maxim: No man is a hero before his valet. Or, rather, nothing truer in the monarchic sense of the word hero—the affected hero, like Hippolytus in PhÈdre. Desaix, for example, would have been a hero even before his valet (it's true I don't know if he had one), and a still greater hero for his valet than for anyone else. Turenne and FÉnelon might each have been a Desaix, but for "good form" and the necessary amount of force.

LXXII

Here is blasphemy. I, a Dutchman, dare say this: the French possess neither the true pleasures of conversation nor the true pleasures of the theatre; instead of relaxation and complete unrestraint, they mean hard labour. Among the sources of fatigue which hastened on the death of Mme. de StaËl I have heard counted the strain of conversation during her last winter.[1]

[1] Memoirs of Marmontel, Montesquieu's conversation.

LXXIII

The degree of tension of the nerves in the ear, necessary to hear each note, explains well enough the physical part of one's pleasure in music.

LXXIV

What degrades rakish women is the opinion, which they share with the public, that they are guilty of a great sin.

LXXV

In an army in retreat, warn an Italian soldier of a danger which it is no use running—he'll almost thank you and he'll carefully avoid it. If, from kindness, you point out the same danger to a French soldier, he'll think you're defying him—his sense of honour is piqued, and he runs his head straight against it. If he dared, he'd like to jeer at you. (Gyat, 1812.)

LXXVI

In France, any idea that can be explained only in the very simplest terms is sure to be despised, even the most useful. The Monitorial system(43), invented by a Frenchman, could never catch on. It is exactly the opposite in Italy.

LXXVII

Suppose you are passionately in love with a woman and that your imagination has not run dry. One evening she is tactless enough to say, looking at you tenderly and abashed: "Er—yes—come to-morrow at midday; I shall be in to no one but you." You cannot sleep; you cannot think of anything; the morning is torture. At last twelve o'clock strikes, and every stroke of the clock seems to clash and clang on your heart.

LXXVIII

In love, to share money is to increase love, to give it is to kill love.

You are putting off the present difficulty, and the odious fear of want in the future; or rather you are sowing the seeds of policy, of the feeling of being two.—You destroy sympathy.

LXXIX

Court ceremonies involuntarily call to mind scenes from Aretine—the way the women display their bare shoulders, like officers their uniform, and, for all their charms, make no more sensation!

There you see what in a mercenary way all will do to win a man's approval; there you see a whole world acting without morality and, what's more, without passion. All this added to the presence of the women with their very low dresses and their expression of malice, greeting with a sardonic smile everything but selfish advantage payable in the hard cash of solid pleasures—why! it gives the idea of scenes from the Bagno. It drives far away all doubts suggested by virtue or the conscious satisfaction of a heart at peace with itself. Yet I have seen the feeling of isolation amidst all this dispose gentle hearts to love. (Mars at the Tuileries, 1811.)

LXXX

A soul taken up with bashfulness and the effort to suppress it, is incapable of pleasure. Pleasure is a luxury—to enjoy it, security is essential and must run no risks.

LXXXI

A test of love in which mercenary women cannot disguise their feelings.—"Do you feel real delight in reconciliation or is it only the thought of what you'll gain by it?"

LXXXII

The poor things who fill La Trappe(55) are wretches who have not had quite enough courage to kill themselves. I except, of course, the heads, who find pleasure in being heads.

LXXXIII

It is a misfortune to have known Italian beauty: you lose your sensibility. Out of Italy, you prefer the conversation of men.

LXXXIV

Italian prudence looks to the preservation of life, and this allows free play to the imagination. (Cf. a version of the death of Pertica the famous comic actor, December 24th, 1821.) On the other hand, English prudence, wholly relative to the gain and safe-keeping of just enough money to cover expenses, demands detailed and everyday exactitude, and this habit paralyses the imagination. Notice also how enormously it strengthens the conception of duty.

LXXXV

The immense respect for money, which is the first and foremost vice of Englishmen and Italians, is less felt in France and reduced to perfectly rational limits in Germany.

LXXXVI

French women, having never known the happiness of true passion, are anything but exacting over internal domestic happiness and the everyday side of life. (CompiÈgne.)

LXXXVII

"You talk to me of ambition for driving away boredom," said Kamensky: "but all the time I used to gallop a couple of leagues every evening, for the pleasure of seeing the Princess at Kolich, I was on terms of intimacy with a despot whom I respected, who had my whole good fortune in his power and the satisfaction of all my possible desires."

LXXXVIII

Pretty contrast! On the one hand—perfection in the little niceties of worldly wisdom and of dress, great kindliness, want of genius, daily cult of a thousand and one petty observances, and incapacity for three days' attention to the same event: on the other—puritan severity, biblical cruelty, strict probity, timid, morbid self-love and universal cant! And yet these are the two foremost nations of the world.

LXXXIX

As among princesses there has been an Empress Catherine II, why should a female Samuel Bernard(56), or a Lagrange(57) not appear among the middle-class?

XC

Alviza calls this an unpardonable want of refinement—to dare to make love by letter to a woman you adore and who looks at you tenderly, but declares that she can never love you.

XCI

It was a mistake of the greatest philosopher that France has had, not to have stayed in some Alpine solitude, in some remote abode, thence to launch his book on Paris without ever coming there himself(58). Seeing HelvÉtius so simple and straightforward, unnatural, hot-house people like Suard, Marmontel or Diderot could never imagine they had a great philosopher before them. They were perfectly honest in their contempt for his profound reason. First of all, it was simple—a fault unpardonable in France; secondly, the author, not, of course, his book, was lowered in value by this weakness—the extreme importance he attached to getting what in France is called glory, to being, like Balzac, Voiture or Fontenelle, the fashion among his contemporaries.

Rousseau had too much feeling and too little logic, Buffon, in his Botanical Garden, was too hypocritical, and Voltaire too paltry to be able to judge the principle of HelvÉtius.

HelvÉtius was guilty of a little slip in calling this principle interest, instead of giving it a pretty name like pleasure;[1] but what are we to think of a nation's literature, which shows its sense by letting itself be led astray by a fault so slight?

The ordinary clever man, Prince Eugene of Savoy for example, finding himself in the position of Regulus, would have stayed quietly at Rome, and even laughed at the stupidity of the Carthaginian Senate. Regulus goes back to Carthage. Prince Eugene would have been prosecuting his own interest, and in exactly the same way Regulus was prosecuting his.

All through life a noble spirit is seeing possibilities of action, of which a common spirit can form no idea. The very second the possibility of that action becomes visible to the noble spirit, it is its interest thus to act.

If this noble spirit did not perform the action, which it has just perceived, it would despise itself—it would be unhappy. Man's duties are in the ratio of his moral range. The principle of HelvÉtius holds good, even in the wildest exaltations of love, even in suicide. It is contrary to his nature, it is an impossibility for a man not to do, always and at any moment you choose to take, that which is possible and which gives him most pleasure at that moment to do.

[1]

Torva leoena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam;
Florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella.
.... Trahit sua quemque voluptas. (Virgil, Eclogue II.)

XCII

To have firmness of character means to have experienced the influence of others on oneself. Therefore others are necessary.

XCIII

Ancient Love

No posthumous love-letters of Roman ladies have been printed. Petronius has written a charming book, but it is only debauch that he has painted.

For love at Rome, apart from Virgil's story of Dido[1] and his second Eclogue, we have no evidence more precise than the writings of the three great poets, Ovid, Tibullus and Propertius.

Now, Parny's Elegies or Colardeau's Letter of HÉloÏse to Abelard are pictures of a very imperfect and vague kind, if you compare them to some of the letters in the Nouvelle HÉloÏse, to those of the Portuguese Nun, of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, of Mirabeau's Sophie, of Werther, etc., etc.Poetry, with its obligatory comparisons, its mythology in which the poet doesn't believe, its dignity of style À la Louis XIV, and all its superfluous stock of ornaments called poetical, is very inferior to prose when it comes to a question of giving a clear and precise idea of the working of the heart. And, in this class of writing, clearness alone is effective.

Tibullus, Ovid and Propertius had better taste than our poets; they have painted love such as it was to be found among the proud citizens of Rome: moreover, they lived under Augustus, who, having shut the temple of Janus, sought to debase these citizens to the condition of the loyal subjects of a monarchy.

The mistresses of these three great poets were coquettes, faithless and venal women; in their company the poets only sought physical pleasure, and never, I should think, caught a glimpse of the sublime sentiments[2] which, thirteen centuries later, stirred the heart of the gentle HÉloÏse.

I borrow the following passage from a distinguished man of letters,[3] and one who knows the Latin poets much better than I do:—

The brilliant genius of Ovid, the rich imagination of Propertius, the impressionable heart of Tibullus, doubtless inspired them with verses of a different flavour, but all, in the same manner, they loved women of much the same kind. They desire, they triumph, they have fortunate rivals, they are jealous, they quarrel and make it up; they are faithless in their turn, they are forgiven; and they recover their happiness only to be ruffled by the return of the same mischances.

Corinna is married. The first lessons that Ovid gives her are to teach her the address with which to deceive her husband: the signs they are to make each other before him and in society, so that they can understand each other and be understood only by themselves. Enjoyment quickly follows; afterwards quarrels, and, what you wouldn't expect from so gallant a man as Ovid, insults and blows; then excuses, tears and forgiveness. Sometimes he addresses himself to subordinates—to the servants, to his mistress' porter, who is to open to him at night, to a cursed old beldam who corrupts her and teaches her to sell herself for gold, to an old eunuch who keeps watch over her, to a slave-girl who is to convey the tablets in which he begs for a rendezvous. The rendezvous is refused: he curses his tablets, that have had such sorry fortune. Fortune shines brighter: he adjures the dawn not to come to interrupt his happiness.

Soon he accuses himself of numberless infidelities, of his indiscriminate taste for women. A moment after, Corinna is herself faithless; he cannot bear the idea that he has given her lessons from which she reaps the profit with someone else. Corinna in her turn is jealous; she abuses him like a fury rather than a gentle woman; she accuses him of loving a slave-girl. He swears that there is nothing in it and writes to the slave—yet everything that made Corinna angry was true. But how did she get to know of it? What clue had led to their betrayal? He asks the slave-girl for another rendezvous. If she refuse him, he threatens to confess everything to Corinna. He jokes with a friend about his two loves and the trouble and pleasure they give him. Soon after, it is Corinna alone that fills his thoughts. She is everything to him. He sings his triumph, as if it were his first victory. After certain incidents, which for more than one reason we must leave in Ovid, and others, which it would be too long to recount, he discovers that Corinna's husband has become too lax. He is no longer jealous; our lover does not like this, and threatens to leave the wife, if the husband does not resume his jealousy. The husband obeys him but too well; he has Corinna watched so closely, that Ovid can no longer come to her. He complains of this close watch, which he had himself provoked—but he will find a way to get round it. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to succeed therein. Corinna's infidelities begin again and multiply; her intrigues become so public, that the only boon that Ovid can crave of her, is that she will take some trouble to deceive him, and show a little less obviously what she really is. Such were the morals of Ovid and his mistress, such is the character of their love.

Cynthia is the first love of Propertius, and she will be his last. No sooner is he happy, but he is jealous. Cynthia is too fond of dress; he begs her to shun luxury and to love simplicity. He himself is given up to more than one kind of debauch. Cynthia expects him; he only comes to her at dawn, leaving a banquet in his cups. He finds her asleep; it is a long time before she wakes, in spite of the noise he makes and even of his kisses; at last she opens her eyes and reproaches him as he deserves. A friend tries to detach him from Cynthia; he gives his friend a eulogy of her beauty and talents. He is threatened with losing her; she goes off with a soldier; she means to follow the army; she will expose herself to every danger in order to follow her soldier. Propertius does not storm; he weeps and prays heaven for her happiness. He will never leave the house she has deserted; he will look out for strangers who have seen her, and will never leave off asking them for news of Cynthia. She is touched by love so great. She deserts the soldier and stays with the poet. He gives thanks to Apollo and the Muses; he is drunk with his happiness. This happiness is soon troubled by a new access of jealousy, interrupted by separation and by absence. Far from Cynthia, he can only think of her. Her past infidelities make him fear for news. Death does not frighten him, he only fears to lose Cynthia; let him be but certain that she will be faithful and he will go down without regret to the grave.

After more treachery, he fancies he is delivered from his love; but soon he is again in its bonds. He paints the most ravishing portrait of his mistress, her beauty, the elegance of her dress, her talents in singing, poetry and dancing; everything redoubles and justifies his love. But Cynthia, as perverse as she is captivating, dishonours herself before the whole town by such scandalous adventures that Propertius can no longer love her without shame. He blushes, but he cannot shake her off. He will be her lover, her husband; he will never love any but Cynthia. They part and come together again. Cynthia is jealous, he reassures her. He will never love any other woman. But in fact it is never one woman he loves—it is all women. He never has enough of them, he is insatiable of pleasure. To recall him to himself, Cynthia has to desert him yet again. Then his complaints are as vigorous as if he had never been faithless himself. He tries to escape. He seeks distraction in debauch.—Is he drunk as usual? He pretends that a troupe of loves meets him and brings him back to Cynthia's feet. Reconciliation is followed by more storms. Cynthia, at one of their supper parties, gets heated with wine like himself, upsets the table and hits him over the head. Propertius thinks this charming. More perfidy forces him at last to break his chains; he tries to go away; he means to travel in Greece; he completes all his plans for the journey, but he renounces the project—and all in order to see himself once more the butt of new outrages. Cynthia does not confine herself to betraying him; she makes him the laughing-stock of his rivals. But illness seizes her and she dies. She reproaches him with his faithlessness, his caprices and his desertion of her in her last moments, and swears that she herself, in spite of appearances, was always faithful.

Such are the morals and adventures of Propertius and his mistress; such in abstract is the history of their love. Such was the woman that a soul like Propertius was reduced to loving.

Ovid and Propertius were often faithless, but never inconstant. Confirmed libertines, they distribute their homage far and wide, but always return to take up the same chains again. Corinna and Cynthia have womankind for rivals, but no woman in particular. The Muse of these two poets is faithful, if their love is not, and no other names besides those of Corinna and of Cynthia figure in their verses. Tibullus, a tender lover and tender poet, less lively and less headlong in his tastes, has not their constancy. Three beauties are one after the other the objects of his love and of his verses. Delia is the first, the most celebrated and also the best beloved. Tibullus has lost his fortune, but he still has the country and Delia. To enjoy her amid the peaceful fields; to be able, at his ease, to press Delia's hand in his; to have her for his only mourner at his funeral—he makes no other prayers. Delia is kept shut up by a jealous husband; he will penetrate into her prison, in spite of any Argus and triple bolts. He will forget all his troubles in her arms. He falls ill and Delia alone fills his thoughts. He exhorts her to be always chaste, to despise gold, and to grant none but him the love she has granted him. But Delia does not follow his advice. He thought he could put up with her infidelity; but it is too much for him and he begs Delia and Venus for pity. He seeks in wine a remedy and does not find it; he can neither soften his regret nor cure himself of his love. He turns to Delia's husband, deceived like himself, and reveals to him all the tricks she uses to attract and see her lovers. If the husband does not know how to keep watch over her, let her be trusted to himself; he will manage right enough to ward the lovers off and to keep from their toils the author of their common wrongs. He is appeased and returns to her; he remembers Delia's mother who favoured their love; the memory of this good woman opens his heart once more to tender thoughts, and all Delia's wrongs are forgotten. But she is soon guilty of others more serious. She lets herself be corrupted by gold and presents; she gives herself to another, to others. At length Tibullus breaks his shameful chains and says good-bye to her for ever.

He passes under the sway of Nemesis and is no happier; she loves only gold and cares little for poetry and the gifts of genius. Nemesis is a greedy woman who sells herself to the highest bidder; he curses her avarice, but he loves her and cannot live unless she loves him. He tries to move her with touching images. She has lost her young sister; he will go and weep on her tomb and confide his grief to her dumb ashes. The shade of her sister will take offence at the tears that Nemesis causes to flow. She must not despise her anger. The sad image of her sister might come at night to trouble her sleep.... But these sad memories force tears from Nemesis—and at that price he could not buy even happiness. Neaera is his third mistress. He has long enjoyed her love; he only prays the gods that he may live and die with her; but she leaves him, she is gone; he can only think of her, she is his only prayer; he has seen in a dream Apollo, who announces to him that Neaera is unfaithful. He refuses to believe this dream; he could not survive his misfortune, and none the less the misfortune is there. Neaera is faithless; once more Tibullus is deserted. Such was his character and fortune, such is the triple and all unhappy story of his loves.

In him particularly there is a sweet, all-pervading melancholy, that gives even to his pleasures the tone of dreaminess and sadness which constitutes his charm. If any poet of antiquity introduced moral sensibility into love, it was Tibullus; but these fine shades of feeling which he expresses so well, are in himself; he expects no more than the other two to find them or engender them in his mistresses. Their grace, their beauty is all that inflames him; their favours all he desires or regrets; their perfidy, their venality, their loss, all that torments him. Of all these women, celebrated in the verses of three great poets, Cynthia seems the most lovable. The attraction of talent is joined to all the others; she cultivates singing and poetry; and yet all these talents, which were found not infrequently in courtesans of a certain standing, were of no avail—it was none the less pleasure, gold and wine which ruled her. And Propertius, who boasts only once or twice of her artistic tastes, in his passion for her is none the less seduced by a very different power!

These great poets are apparently to be numbered among the most tender and refined souls of their century—well! this is how they loved and whom. We must here put literary considerations on one side. I only ask of them evidence concerning their century; and in two thousand years a novel by Ducray-Duminil(59) will be evidence concerning the annals of ours.

[1] Mark Dido's look in the superb sketch by M. Guerin at the Luxembourg.

XCIII(b)

One of my great regrets is not to have been able to see Venice in 1760.[1] A run of happy chances had apparently united, in so small a space, both the political institutions and the public opinion that are most favourable to the happiness of mankind. A soft spirit of luxury gave everyone an easy access to happiness. There were no domestic struggles and no crimes. Serenity was seen on every face; no one thought about seeming richer than he was; hypocrisy had no point. I imagine it must have been the direct contrary to London in 1822.

XCIV

If in the place of the want of personal security you put the natural fear of economic want, you will see that the United States of America bears a considerable resemblance to the ancient world as regards that passion, on which we are attempting to write a monograph.

In speaking of the more or less imperfect sketches of passion-love which the ancients have left us, I see that I have forgotten the Loves of Medea in the Argonautica(60). Virgil copied them in his picture of Dido. Compare that with love as seen in a modern novel—Le Doyen de Killerine, for example.

XCV

The Roman feels the beauties of Nature and Art with amazing strength, depth and justice; but if he sets out to try and reason on what he feels so forcibly, it is pitiful.

The reason may be that his feelings come to him from Nature, but his logic from government.

You can see at once why the fine arts, outside Italy, are only a farce; men reason better, but the public has no feeling.

XCVI

London, November 20th, 1821.

A very sensible man, who arrived yesterday from Madras, told me in a two hours' conversation what I reduce to the following few lines:—

This gloom, which from an unknown cause depresses the English character, penetrates so deeply into their hearts, that at the end of the world, at Madras, no sooner does an Englishman get a few days' holiday, than he quickly leaves rich and flourishing Madras and comes to revive his spirits in the little French town of Pondicherry, which, without wealth and almost without commerce, flourishes under the paternal administration of M. Dupuy. At Madras you drink Burgundy that costs thirty-six francs a bottle; the poverty of the French in Pondicherry is such that, in the most distinguished circles, the refreshments consist of large glasses of water. But in Pondicherry they laugh.

At present there is more liberty in England than in Prussia. The climate is the same as that of Koenigsberg, Berlin or Warsaw, cities which are far from being famous for their gloom. The working classes in these towns have less security and drink quite as little wine as in England; and they are much worse clothed.The aristocracies of Venice and Vienna are not gloomy.

I can see only one point of difference: in gay countries the Bible is little read, and there is gallantry. I am sorry to have to come back so often to a demonstration with which I am unsatisfied. I suppress a score of facts pointing in the same direction.

XCVII

I have just seen, in a fine country-house near Paris, a very good-looking, very clever, and very rich young man of less than twenty; he has been left there by chance almost alone, for a long time too, with a most beautiful girl of eighteen, full of talent, of a most distinguished mind, and also very rich. Who wouldn't have expected a passionate love-affair? Not a bit of it—such was the affectation of these two charming creatures that both were occupied solely with themselves and the effect they were to produce.

XCVIII

I am ready to agree that on the morrow of a great action a savage pride has made this people fall into all the faults and follies that lay open to it. But you will see what prevents me from effacing my previous praises of this representative of the Middle Ages.

The prettiest woman in Narbonne is a young Spaniard, scarcely twenty years old, who lives there very retired with her husband, a Spaniard also, and an officer on half-pay. Some time ago there was a fool whom this officer was obliged to insult. The next day, on the field of combat, the fool sees the young Spanish woman arrive. He begins a renewed flow of affected nothings:—

"No, indeed, it's shocking! How could you tell your wife about it? You see, she has come to prevent us fighting!" "I have come to bury you," she answered.Happy the husband who can tell his wife everything! The result did not belie this woman's haughty words. Her action would have been considered hardly the thing in England. Thus does false decency diminish the little happiness that exists here below.

XCIX

The delightful DonÉzan said yesterday: "In my youth, and well on in my career—for I was fifty in '89—women wore powder in their hair.

"I own that a woman without powder gives me a feeling of repugnance; the first impression is always that of a chamber-maid who hasn't had time to get dressed."

Here we have the one argument against Shakespeare and in favour of the dramatic unities.

While young men read nothing but La Harpe(61), the taste for great powdered toupÉes, such as the late Queen Marie Antoinette used to wear, can still last some years. I know people too, who despise Correggio and Michael Angelo, and, to be sure, M. DonÉzan was extremely clever.

C

Cold, brave, calculating, suspicious, contentious, for ever afraid of being attracted by anyone who might possibly be laughing at them in secret, absolutely devoid of enthusiasm, and a little jealous of people who saw great events with Napoleon, such was the youth of that age, estimable rather than lovable. They forced on the country that Right-Centre form of government-to-the-lowest-bidder. This temper in the younger generation was to be found even among the conscripts, each of whom only longed to finish his time.

All systems of education, whether given expressly or by chance, form men for a certain period in their life. The education of the age of Louis XV made twenty-five the finest moment in the lives of its pupils.[1]

It is at forty that the young men of this period will be at their best; they will have lost their suspiciousness and pretensions, and have gained ease and gaiety.

CI

Discussion between an Honest Man and an Academic

"In this discussion, the academic always saved himself by fixing on little dates and other similar errors of small importance; but the consequences and natural qualifications of things, these he always denied, or seemed not to understand: for example, that Nero was a cruel Emperor or Charles II a perjurer. Now, how are you to prove things of this kind, or, even if you do, manage not to put a stop to the general discussion or lose the thread of it?

"This, I have always remarked, is the method of discussion between such folk, one of whom seeks only the truth and advancement thereto, the other the favour of his master or his party and the glory of talking well. And I always consider it great folly and waste of time for an honest man to stop and talk with the said academics." (Œuvres badines of Guy Allard de Voiron.)

CII

Only a small part of the art of being happy is an exact science, a sort of ladder up which one can be sure of climbing a rung per century—and that is the part which depends on government. (Still, this is only theory. I find the Venetians of 1770 happier than the people of Philadelphia to-day.)

For the rest, the art of being happy is like poetry; in spite of the perfecting of all things, Homer, two thousand seven hundred years ago, had more talent than Lord Byron.

Reading Plutarch with attention, I think I can see that men were happier in Sicily in the time of Dion than we manage to be to-day, although they had no printing and no iced punch!

I would rather be an Arab of the fifth century than a Frenchman of the nineteenth.

CIII

People go to the theatre, never for that kind of illusion which is lost one minute and found again the next, but for an opportunity of convincing their neighbour, or at least themselves, that they have read their La Harpe and are people who know what's good. It is an old pedant's pleasure that the younger generation indulges in.

CIV

A woman belongs by right to the man who loves her and is dearer to her than life.

CV

Crystallisation cannot be excited by an understudy, and your most dangerous rivals are those most unlike you.

CVI

In a very advanced state of society passion-love is as natural as physical love among savages. (M.)

CVII

But for an infinite number of shades of feeling, to have a woman you adore would be no happiness and scarcely a possibility. (L., October 7th.)

CVIII

Whence comes the intolerance of Stoic philosophers? From the same source as that of religious fanatics. They are put out because they are struggling against nature, because they deny themselves, and because it hurts them. If they would question themselves honestly on the hatred they bear towards those who profess a code of morals less severe, they would have to own that it springs from a secret jealousy of a bliss which they envy and have renounced, without believing in the rewards which would make up for this sacrifice. (Diderot.)

CIX

Women who are always taking offence might well ask themselves whether they are following a line of conduct, which they think really and truly is the road to happiness. Is there not a little lack of courage, mixed with a little mean revenge, at the bottom of a prude's heart? Consider the ill-humour of Madame de DeshouliÈres in her last days. (Note by M. Lemontey.)(62).

CX

Nothing more indulgent than virtue without hypocrisy—because nothing happier; yet even Mistress Hutchinson might well be more indulgent.

CXI

Immediately below this kind of happiness comes that of a young, pretty and easy-going woman, with a conscience that does not reproach her. At Messina people used to talk scandal about the Contessina Vicenzella. "Well, well!" she would say, "I'm young, free, rich and perhaps not ugly. I wish the same to all the ladies of Messina!" It was this charming woman, who would never be more than a friend to me, who introduced me to the AbbÉ Melli's sweet poems in Sicilian dialect. His poetry is delicious, though still disfigured by mythology.

(Delfante.)

CXII

The public of Paris has a fixed capacity for attention—three days: after which, bring to its notice the death of Napoleon or M. BÉranger(63) sent to prison for two months—the news is just as sensational, and to bring it up on the fourth day just as tactless. Must every great capital be like this, or has it to do with the good nature and light heart of the Parisian? Thanks to aristocratic pride and morbid reserve, London is nothing but a numerous collection of hermits; it is not a capital. Vienna is nothing but an oligarchy of two hundred families surrounded by a hundred and fifty thousand workpeople and servants who wait on them. No more is that a capital.—Naples and Paris, the only two capitals. (Extract from Birkbeck's Travels, p. 371.)

CXIII

According to common ideas, or reasonable-ideas, as they are called by ordinary people, if any period of imprisonment could possibly be tolerable, it would be after several years' confinement, when at last the poor prisoner is only separated by a month or two from the moment of his release. But the ways of crystallisation are otherwise. The last month is more painful than the last three years. In the gaol at Melun, M. d'Hotelans has seen several prisoners die of impatience within a few months of the day of release.

CXIV

I cannot resist the pleasure of copying out a letter written in bad English by a young German woman. It proves that, after all, constant love exists, and that not every man of genius is a Mirabeau. Klopstock, the great poet, passes at Hamburg for having been an attractive person. Read what his young wife wrote to an intimate friend:

"After having seen him two hours, I was obliged to pass the evening in a company, which never had been so wearisome to me. I could not speak, I could not play; I thought I saw nothing but Klopstock; I saw him the next day and the following and we were very seriously friends. But the fourth day he departed. It was a strong hour the hour of his departure! He wrote soon after; from that time our correspondence began to be a very diligent one. I sincerely believed my love to be friendship. I spoke with my friends of nothing but Klopstock, and showed his letters. They raillied at me and said I was in love. I raillied then again, and said that they must have a very friendshipless heart, if they had no idea of friendship to a man as well as to a woman. Thus it continued eight months, in which time my friends found as much love in Klopstock's letters as in me. I perceived it likewise, but I would not believe it. At the last Klopstock said plainly that he loved; and I startled as for a wrong thing; I answered that it was no love, but friendship, as it was what I felt for him; we had not seen one another enough to love (as if love must have more time than friendship). This was sincerely my meaning, and I had this meaning till Klopstock came again to Hamburg. This he did a year after we had seen one another the first time. We saw, we were friends, we loved; and a short time after, I could even tell Klopstock that I loved. But we were obliged to part again, and wait two years for our wedding. My mother would not let me marry a stranger. I could marry then without her consent, as by the death of my father my fortune depended not on her; but this was a horrible idea for me; and thank heaven that I have prevailed by prayers! At this time knowing Klopstock, she loves him as her lifely son, and thanks God that she has not persisted. We married and I am the happiest wife in the world. In some few months it will be four years that I am so happy...." (Correspondence of Richardson, Vol. III, p. 147.)

CXV

The only unions legitimate for all time are those that answer to a real passion.

CXVI

To be happy with laxity of morals, one wants the simplicity of character that is found in Germany and Italy, but never in France. (The Duchess de C——)

CXVII

It is their pride that makes the Turks deprive their women of everything that can nourish crystallisation. I have been living for the last three months in a country where the titled folk will soon be carried just as far by theirs.

Modesty is the name given here by men to the exactions of aristocratic pride run mad. Who would risk a lapse of modesty? Here also, as at Athens, the intellectuals show a marked tendency to take refuge with courtesans—that is to say, with the women whom a scandal shelters from the need to affect modesty. (Life of Fox.)

CXVIII

In the case of love blighted by too prompt a victory, I have seen in very tender characters crystallisation trying to form later. "I don't love you a bit," she says, but laughing.

CXIX

The present-day education of women—that odd mixture of works of charity and risky songs ("Di piacer mi balza il cor," in La Gazza Ladra)(64)—is the one thing in the world best calculated to keep off happiness. This form of education produces minds completely inconsequent. Madame de R——, who was afraid of dying, has just met her death through thinking it funny to throw her medicines out of the window. Poor little women like her take inconsequence for gaiety, because, in appearance, gaiety is often inconsequent. 'Tis like the German, who threw himself out of the window in order to be sprightly.

CXX

Vulgarity, by stifling imagination, instantly produces in me a deadly boredom. Charming Countess K——, showing me this evening her lovers' letters, which to my mind were in bad taste. (ForlÌ, March 17th, Henri.)

Imagination was not stifled: it was only deranged, and very soon from mere repugnance ceased to picture the unpleasantness of these dull lovers.

CXXI

Metaphysical Reverie

Belgirate, 26th October, 1816.

Real passion has only to be crossed for it to produce apparently more unhappiness than happiness. This thought may not be true in the case of gentle souls, but it is absolutely proved in the case of the majority of men, and particularly of cold philosophers, who, as regards passion, live, one might say, only on curiosity and self-love.

I said all this to the Contessina Fulvia yesterday evening, as we were walking together near the great pine on the eastern terrace of Isola Bella. She answered: "Unhappiness makes a much stronger impression on a man's life than pleasure.

"The prime virtue in anything which claims to give us pleasure, is that it strikes hard.

"Might we not say that life itself being made up only of sensation, there is a universal taste in all living beings for the consciousness that the sensations of their life are the keenest that can be? In the North people are hardly alive—look at the slowness of their movements. The Italian's dolce far niente is the pleasure of relishing one's soul and one's emotions, softly reclining on a divan. Such pleasure is impossible, if you are racing all day on horseback or in a drosky, like the Englishman or the Russian. Such people would die of boredom on a divan. There is no reason to look into their souls.

"Love gives the keenest possible of all sensations—and the proof is that in these moments of 'inflammation,' as physiologists would say, the heart is open to those 'complex sensations' which HelvÉtius, Buffon and other philosophers think so absurd. The other day, as you know, Luizina fell into the lake; you see, her eye was following a laurel leaf that had fallen from a tree on Isola-Madre (one of the Borromean Islands). The poor woman owned to me that one day her lover, while talking to her, threw into the lake the leaves of a laurel branch he was stripping, and said: 'Your cruelty and the calumnies of your friend are preventing me from turning my life to account and winning a little glory.'

"It is a peculiar and incomprehensible fact that, when some great passion has brought upon the soul moments of torture and extreme unhappiness, the soul comes to despise the happiness of a peaceful life, where everything seems framed to our desires. A fine country-house in a picturesque position, substantial means, a good wife, three pretty children, and friends charming and numerous—this is but a mere outline of all our host. General C——, possesses. And yet he said, as you know, he felt tempted to go to Naples and take the command of a guerilla band. A soul made for passion soon finds this happy life monotonous, and feels, perhaps, that it only offers him commonplace ideas. 'I wish,' C. said to you, 'that I had never known the fever of high passion. I wish I could rest content with the apparent happiness on which people pay me every day such stupid compliments, which, to put the finishing touch to, I have to answer politely.'"

I, a philosopher, rejoin: "Do you want the thousandth proof that we are not created by a good Being? It is the fact that pleasure does not make perhaps half as much impression on human life as pain...."[1] The Contessina interrupted me. "In life there are few mental pains that are not rendered sweet by the emotion they themselves excite, and, if there is a spark of magnanimity in the soul, this pleasure is increased a hundredfold. The man condemned to death in 1815 and saved by chance (M. de Lavalette(65), for example), if he was going courageously to his doom, must recall that moment ten times a month. But the coward, who was going to die crying and yelling (the exciseman, Morris, thrown into the lake, Rob Roy)—suppose him also saved by chance—can at most recall that instant with pleasure because he was saved, not for the treasures of magnanimity that he discovered with him, and that take away for the future all his fears."

I: "Love, even unhappy love, gives a gentle soul, for whom a thing imagined is a thing existent, treasures of this kind of enjoyment. He weaves sublime visions of happiness and beauty about himself and his beloved. How often has Salviati heard LÉonore, with her enchanting smile, say, like Mademoiselle Mars in Les Fausses Confidences: 'Well, yes, I do love you!' No, these are never the illusions of a prudent mind."

Fulvia (raising her eyes to heaven): "Yes, for you and me, love, even unhappy love, if only our admiration for the beloved knows no limit, is the supreme happiness."

(Fulvia is twenty-three,—the most celebrated beauty of ... Her eyes were heavenly as she talked like this at midnight and raised them towards the glorious sky above the Borromean Islands. The stars seemed to answer her. I looked down and could find no more philosophical arguments to meet her. She continued:)

"And all that the world calls happiness is not worth the trouble. Only contempt, I think, can cure this passion; not contempt too violent, for that is torture. For you men it is enough to see the object of your adoration love some gross, prosaic creature, or sacrifice you in order to enjoy pleasures of luxurious comfort with a woman friend."

CXXII

To will means to have the courage to expose oneself to troubles; to expose oneself is to take risks—to gamble. You find military men who cannot exist without such gambling—that's what makes them intolerable in home-life.

CXXIII

General TeuliÉ told me this evening that he had found out why, as soon as there were affected women in a drawing-room, he became so horribly dry and floored for ideas. It was because he was sure to be bitterly ashamed of having exposed his feelings with warmth before such creatures. General TeuliÉ had to speak from his heart, though the talk were only of Punch and Judy; otherwise he had nothing to say. Moreover, I could see he never knew the conventional phrase about anything nor what was the right thing to say. That is really where he made himself so monstrously ridiculous in the eyes of affected women. Heaven had not made him for elegant society.

CXXIV

Irreligion is bad form at Court, because it is calculated to be contrary to the interests of princes: irreligion is also bad form in the presence of girls, for it would prevent their finding husbands. It must be owned that, if God exists, it must be nice for Him to be honoured from motives like these.

CXXV

For the soul of a great painter or a great poet, love is divine in that it increases a hundredfold the empire and the delight of his art, and the beauties of art are his soul's daily bread. How many great artists are unconscious both of their soul and of their genius! Often they reckon as mediocre their talent for the thing they adore, because they cannot agree with the eunuchs of the harem, La Harpe and such-like. For them even unhappy love is happiness.

CXXVI

The picture of first love is taken generally as the most touching. Why? Because it is the same in all countries and in all characters. But for this reason first love is not the most passionate.

CXXVII

Reason! Reason! Reason! That is what the world is always shouting at poor lovers. In 1760, at the most thrilling moment in the Seven Years' War, Grimm wrote: "... It is indubitable that the King of Russia, by yielding Silesia, could have prevented the war from ever breaking out. In so doing he would have done a very wise thing. How many evils would he have prevented! And what can there be in common between the possession of a province and the happiness of a king? Was not the great Elector a very happy and highly respected prince without possessing Silesia? It is also quite clear that a king might have taken this course in obedience to the precepts of the soundest reason, and yet—I know not how—that king would inevitably have been the object of universal contempt, while Frederick, sacrificing everything to the necessity of keeping Silesia, has invested himself with immortal glory.

"Without any doubt the action of Cromwell's son was the wisest a man could take: he preferred obscurity and repose to the bother and danger of ruling over a people sombre, fiery and proud. This wise man won the contempt of his own time and of posterity; while his father, to this day, has been held a great man by the wisdom of nations.

"The Fair Penitent is a sublime subject on the Spanish[1] stage, but spoilt by Otway and Colardeau in England and France. Calista has been dishonoured by a man she adores; he is odious from the violence of his inborn pride, but talent, wit and a handsome face—everything, in fact—combine to make him seductive. Indeed, Lothario would have been too charming could he have moderated these criminal outbursts. Moreover, an hereditary and bitter feud separates his family from that of the woman he loves. These families are at the head of two factions dividing a Spanish town during the horrors of the Middle Age. Sciolto, Calista's father, is the chief of the faction, which at the moment has the upper hand; he knows that Lothario has had the insolence to try to seduce his daughter. The weak Calista is weighed down by the torment of shame and passion. Her father has succeeded in getting his enemy appointed to the command of a naval armament that is setting out on a distant and perilous expedition, where Lothario will probably meet his death. In Colardeau's tragedy, he has just told his daughter this news. At his words Calista can no longer hide her passion:

"Think of the danger she is placed in. Another word, and Sciolto will learn the secret of his daughter's passion for Lothario. The father is confounded and cries:—

"At this Calista recovers herself and answers:—

"By these words Calista stifles her father's rising suspicions; yet there is no deceit, for the sentiment she utters is true. The existence of a man, who has succeeded after winning her love in dishonouring her, must poison her life, were he even at the ends of the earth. His death alone could restore her peace of mind, if for unfortunate lovers peace of mind existed.... Soon after Lothario is killed and, happily for her, Calista dies.

"'There's a lot of crying and moaning over nothing!' say the chilly folk who plume themselves on being philosophers. 'Somebody with an enterprising and violent nature abuses a woman's weakness for him—that is nothing to tear our hair over, or at least there is nothing in Calista's troubles to concern us. She must console herself with having satisfied her lover, and she will not be the first woman of merit who has made the best of her misfortune in that way.'"[5]Richard Cromwell, the King of Prussia and Calista, with the souls given them by Heaven, could only find peace and happiness by acting as they did. The conduct of the two last is eminently unreasonable and yet it is those two that we admire. (Sagan, 1813.)

CXXVIII

The likelihood of constancy when desire is satisfied can only be foretold from the constancy displayed, in spite of cruel doubts and jealousy and ridicule, in the days before intimate intercourse.

CXXIX

A woman is in despair at the death of her lover, who has been killed in the wars—of course she means to follow him. Now first make quite sure that it is not the best thing for her to do; then, if you decide it is not, attack her on the side of a very primitive habit of the human kind—the desire to survive. If the woman has an enemy, one may persuade her that her enemy has obtained a warrant for her imprisonment. Unless that threat only increases her desire of death, she may think about hiding herself in order to escape imprisonment. For three weeks she will lie low, escaping from refuge to refuge. She must be caught, but must get away after three days.

Then people must arrange for her to withdraw under a false name to some very remote town, as unlike as possible the one in which she was so desperately unhappy. But who is going to devote himself to the consolation of a being so unfortunate and so lost to friendship? (Warsaw, 1808).

CXXX

Academical wise-heads can see a people's habits in its language. In Italy, of all the countries in the world, the word love is least often spoken—always "amicizia" and "avvicinar" (amicizia or friendship, for love; avvicinar, to approach, for courtship that succeeds).

CXXXI

A dictionary of music has never been achieved, nor even begun. It is only by chance that you find the phrase for: "I am angry" or "I love you," and the subtler feelings involved therein. The composer finds them only when passion, present in his heart or memory, dictates them to him. Well! that is why people, who spend the fire of youth studying instead of feeling, cannot be artists—the way that works is perfectly simple.

CXXXII

In France far too much power is given to Women, far too little to Woman.

CXXXIII

The most flattering thing that the most exalted imagination could find to say to the generation now arising among us to take possession of life, of public opinion and of power, happens to be a piece of truth plainer than the light of day. This generation has nothing to continue, it has everything to create. Napoleon's great merit is to have left the road clear.

CXXXIV

I should like to be able to say something on consolation. Enough is not done to console.

The main principle is that you try to form a kind of crystallisation as remote as possible from the source of present suffering.

In order to discover an unknown principle, we must bravely face a little anatomy.If the reader will consult Chapter II of M. VillermÉ's work on prisons (Paris, 1820), he will see that the prisoners "si maritano fra di loro" (it is the expression in the prisoners' language). The women also "si maritano fra di loro," and in these unions, generally speaking, much fidelity is shown. That is an outcome of the principle of modesty, and is not observed among the men.

"At Saint-Lazare," says M. VillermÉ, page 96, "a woman, seeing a new-comer preferred to her, gave herself several wounds with a knife. (October, 1818.)

"Usually it is the younger woman who is more fond than the other."

CXXXV

VivacitÀ, leggerezza, soggettissima a prendere puntiglio, occupazione di ogni momento delle apparenze della propria esistenza agli occhi altrui: Ecco i tre gran caratteri di questa pianta che risveglia Europa nell 1808.[1]

Of Italians, those are preferable who still preserve a little savagery and taste for blood—the people of the Romagna, Calabria, and, among the more civilised, the Brescians, Piedmontese and Corsicans.

The Florentine bourgeois has more sheepish docility than the Parisian. Leopold's spies have degraded him. See M. Courier's(12) letter on the Librarian Furia and the Chamberlain Puccini.

CXXXVI

I smile when I see earnest people never able to agree, saying quite unconcernedly the most abusive things of each other—and thinking still worse. To live is to feel life—to have strong feelings. But strength must be rated for each individual, and what is painful—that is, too strong—for one man is exactly enough to stir another's interest. Take, for example, the feeling of just being spared by the cannon shot in the line of fire, the feeling of penetrating into Russia in pursuit of Parthian hordes.... And it is the same with the tragedies of Shakespeare and those of Racine, etc., etc.... (Orcha, August 13, 1812.)

CXXXVII

Pleasure does not produce half so strong an impression as pain—that is the first point. Then, besides this disadvantage in the quantity of emotion, it is certainly not half as easy to excite sympathy by the picture of happiness as by that of misfortune. Hence poets cannot depict unhappiness too forcibly. They have only one shoal to fear, namely, things that disgust. Here again, the force of feeling must be rated differently for monarchies and republics. A Lewis XIV increases a hundredfold the number of disgusting things. (Crabbe's Poems.)

By the mere fact of its existence a monarchy À la Lewis XIV, with its circle of nobles, makes everything simple in Art become coarse. The noble personage for whom the thing is exposed feels insulted; the feeling is sincere—and in so far worthy.

See what the gentle Racine has been able to make of the heroic friendship, so sacred to antiquity, of Orestes and Pylades. Orestes addresses Pylades with the familiar "thou."[1] Pylades answers him "My Lord."[1] And then people pretend Racine is our most touching writer! If they won't give in after this example, we must change the subject.

CXXXVIII

Directly the hope of revenge is possible, the feeling of hatred returns. Until the last weeks of my imprisonment it never entered my head to run away and break the solemn oath I had sworn to my friend. Two confidences these—made this morning in my presence by a gentleman cut-throat who favoured us with the history of his life. (Faenza, 1817.)

CXXXIX

All Europe, put together, could never make one French book of the really good type—the Lettres Persanes, for example.

CXL

I call pleasure every impression which the soul would rather receive than not receive.[1]

I call pain every impression which the soul would rather not receive than receive.

If I want to go to sleep rather than be conscious of my feelings, they are undoubtedly pain. Hence the desire of love is not pain, for the lover will leave the most agreeable society in order to day-dream in peace.

Time weakens pleasures of the body and aggravates its pains.

As for spiritual pleasures—they grow weaker or stronger according to the passion. For example, after six months passed in the study of astronomy you like astronomy all the more, and after a year of avarice money is still sweeter.

Spiritual pains are softened by time—how many widows, really inconsolable, console themselves with time!—Vide Lady Waldegrave—Horace Walpole.

Given a man in a state of indifference—now let him have a pleasure;

Given another man in a state of poignant suffering—suddenly let the suffering cease;

Now is the pleasure this man feels of the same nature as that of the other? M. Verri(66) says Yes, but, to my mind—No.

Not all pleasures come from cessation of pain.A man had lived for a long time on an income of six thousand francs—he wins five hundred thousand in the lottery. He had got out of the way of having desires which wealth alone can satisfy.—And that, by the bye, is one of my objections to Paris—it is so easy to lose this habit there.

The latest invention is a machine for cutting quills. I bought one this morning and it's a great joy to me, as I cannot stand cutting them myself. But yesterday I was certainly not unhappy for not knowing of this machine. Or was Petrarch unhappy for not taking coffee?

What is the use of defining happiness? Everyone knows it—the first partridge you kill on the wing at twelve, the first battle you come through safely at seventeen....

Pleasure which is only the cessation of pain passes very quickly, and its memory, after some years, is even distasteful. One of my friends was wounded in the side by a bursting shell at the battle of Moscow, and a few days later mortification threatened. After a delay of some hours they managed to get together M. BÉclar, M. Larrey and some surgeons of repute, and the result of their consultation was that my friend was informed that mortification had not set up. At the moment I could see his happiness—it was a great happiness, but not unalloyed. In the secret depth of his heart he could not believe that it was really all over, he kept reconsidering the surgeons' words and debating whether he could rely on them entirely. He never lost sight completely of the possibility of mortification. Nowadays, after eight years, if you speak to him of that consultation, it gives him pain—it brings to mind unexpectedly a passed unhappiness.

Pleasure caused by the cessation of pain consists in:—

1. Defeating the continual succession of one's own misgivings:

2. Reviewing all the advantages one was on the point of losing.

Pleasure caused by winning five hundred thousand francs consists in foreseeing all the new and unusual pleasures one is going to indulge in.

There is this peculiar reservation to be made. You have to take into account whether a man is too used, or not used enough, to wishing for wealth. If he is not used enough, if his mind is closely circumscribed, for two or three days together he will feel embarrassed; while if he is inclined very often to wish for great riches, he will find he has used up their enjoyments in advance by too frequently foretasting them.

This misfortune is unknown to passion-love.

A soul on fire pictures to itself not the last favour, but the nearest—perhaps just her hand to press, if, for example, your mistress is unkind to you. Imagination does not pass beyond that of its own accord; you may force it, but a moment later it is gone—for fear of profaning its idol.

When pleasure has run through the length of its career, we fall again, of course, into indifference, but this is not the same indifference as we felt before. The second state differs from the first in that we are no longer in a position to relish with such delight the pleasure that we have just tasted. The organs we use for plucking pleasures are worn out. The imagination is no longer so inclined to offer fancies for the enjoyment of desire—desire is satisfied.

In the midst of enjoyment to be torn from pleasure produces pain.

[1] Maupertius.

CXLI

With regard to physical love and, in fact, physical pleasure, the disposition of the two sexes is not the same. Unlike men, practically all women are at least susceptible in secret to one kind of love. Ever after opening her first novel at fifteen, a woman is silently waiting for the coming of passion-love, and towards twenty, when she is just over the irresponsibility of life's first flush, the suspense redoubles. As for men, they think love impossible or ridiculous, almost before they are thirty.

CXLII

From the age of six we grow used to run after pleasure in our parents' footsteps.

The pride of Contessina Nella's mother was the starting-point of that charming woman's troubles, and by the same insane pride she now makes them hopeless. (Venice, 1819.)

CXLIII

Romanticism

I hear from Paris that there are heaps and heaps of pictures to be seen there (Exhibition of 1822), representing subjects taken from the Bible, painted by artists who hardly believe in it, admired and criticised by people who don't believe, and finally paid for by people who don't believe.

After that—you ask why art is decadent.

The artist who does not believe what he is saying is always afraid of appearing exaggerated or ridiculous. How is he to touch the sublime? Nothing uplifts him. (Lettera di Roma, Giugno, 1822.)

CXLIV

One of the greatest poets the world has seen in modern times is, to my mind, Robert Burns, a Scotch peasant, who died of want. He had a salary of seventy pounds as exciseman—for himself, his wife and four children. One cannot help saying, by the way, that Napoleon was more liberal towards his enemy ChÉnier. Burns had none of the English prudery about him. His was a Roman genius, without chivalry and without honour. I have no space here to tell of his love-affairs with Mary Campbell and their mournful ending. I shall merely point out that Edinburgh is on the same latitude as Moscow—a fact which perhaps upsets my system of climates a little.

"One of Burns' remarks, when he first came to Edinburgh, was that between the men of rustic life and those of the polite world he observed little difference; that in the former, though unpolished by fashion and unenlightened by science, he had found much observation and much intelligence; but that a refined and accomplished woman was a being almost new to him, and of which he had formed but a very inadequate idea." (London, November 1st, 1821, Vol. V, p. 69.)

CXLV

Love is the only passion that mints the coin to pay its own expenses.

CXLVI

The compliments paid to little girls of three furnish exactly the right sort of education to imbue them with the most pernicious vanity. To look pretty is the highest virtue, the greatest advantage on earth. To have a pretty dress is to look pretty.

These idiotic compliments are not current except in the middle class. Happily they are bad form outside the suburbs—being too easy to pay.

CXLVII

Loretto, September 11th, 1811.

I have just seen a very fine battalion composed of natives of this country—the remains, in fact, of four thousand who left for Vienna in 1809. I passed along the ranks with the Colonel, and asked several of the soldiers to tell me their story. Theirs is the virtue of the republics of the Middle Age, though more or less debased by the Spaniards,[1] the Roman Church,[2] and two centuries of the cruel, treacherous governments, which, one after another, have spoiled the country.

Flashing, chivalrous honour, sublime but senseless, is an exotic plant introduced here only a very few years back.

In 1740 there was no trace of it. Vide de Brosses. The officers of Montenotte(67) and of Rivoli(67) had too many chances of showing their comrades true virtue to go and imitate a kind of honour unknown to the cottage homes from which the soldiery of 1796 was drawn—indeed, it would have seemed to them highly fantastic.

In 1796 there was no Legion of Honour, no enthusiasm for one man, but plenty of simple truth and virtue À la Desaix. We may conclude that honour was imported into Italy by people too reasonable and too virtuous to cut much of a figure. One is sensible of a large gap between the soldiers of '96, often shoeless and coatless, the victors of twenty battles in one year, and the brilliant regiments of Fontenoy, taking off their hats and saying to the English politely: Messieurs, tirez les premiers—gentlemen, pray begin.

CXLVIII

I am ready to agree that one must judge the soundness of a system of life by the perfect representative of its supporters. For example, Richard Coeur-de-Lion is the perfect pattern on the throne of heroism and chivalrous valour, and as a king was a ludicrous failure.

CXLIX

Public opinion in 1822: A man of thirty seduces a girl of fifteen—the girl loses her reputation.

CL

Ten years later I met Countess Ottavia again; on seeing me once more she wept bitterly. I reminded her of Oginski. "I can no longer love," she told me. I answered in the poet's words: "How changed, how saddened, yet how elevated was her character!"

CLI

French morals will be formed between 1815 and 1880, just as English morals were formed between 1668 and 1730. There will be nothing finer, juster or happier than moral France about the year 1900. At the present day it does not exist. What is considered infamous in Rue de Belle-Chasse is an act of heroism in Rue du Mont-Blanc, and, allowing for all exaggeration, people really worthy of contempt escape by a change of residence. One remedy we did have—the freedom of the Press. In the long run the Press gives each man his due, and when this due happens to fall in with public opinion, so it remains. This remedy is now torn from us—and it will somewhat retard the regeneration of morals.

CLII

The AbbÉ Rousseau was a poor young man (1784), reduced to running all over the town, from morn till night, giving lessons in history and geography. He fell in love with one of his pupils, like Abelard with HÉloÏse or Saint-Preux with Julie. Less happy than they, no doubt—yet, probably, pretty nearly so—as full of passion as Saint-Preux, but with a heart more virtuous, more refined and also more courageous, he seems to have sacrificed himself to the object of his passion. After dining in a restaurant at the Palais-Royal with no outward sign of distress or frenzy, this is what he wrote before blowing out his brains. The text of his note is taken from the enquiry held on the spot by the commissary and the police, and is remarkable enough to be preserved.

"The immeasurable contrast that exists between the nobility of my feelings and the meanness of my birth, my love, as violent as it is invincible, for this adorable girl[1] and my fear of causing her dishonour, the necessity of choosing between crime and death—everything has made me decide to say good-bye to life. Born for virtue, I was about to become a criminal; I preferred death." (Grimm, Part III, Vol. II, p. 395.)

This is an admirable case of suicide, but would be merely silly according to the morals of 1880.

CLIII

Try as they may, the French, in Art, will never get beyond the pretty.

The comic presupposes "go" in the public, and brio in the actor. The delicious foolery of Palomba, played at Naples by Casaccia, is an impossibility at Paris. There we have the pretty—always and only the pretty—cried up sometimes, it is true, as the sublime.

I don't waste much thought, you see, on general considerations of national honour.

CLIV

We are very fond of a beautiful picture, say the French—and quite truly—but we exact, as the essential condition of beauty, that it be produced by a painter standing on one leg the whole time he is working.—Verse in dramatic art.

CLV

Much less envy in America than in France, and much less intellect.

CLVI

Since 1530 tyranny À la Philip II has so degraded men's intellect, has so overshadowed the garden of the world, that the poor Italian writers have not yet plucked up enough courage to invent a national novel. Yet, thanks to the naturalness which reigns there, nothing could be simpler. They need only copy faithfully what stares the world in the face. Think of Cardinal Gonzalvi, for three hours gravely looking for flaws in the libretto of an opera-bouffe, and saying uneasily to the composer: "But you're continually repeating this word Cozzar, cozzar."

CLVII

HÉloÏse speaks of love, a coxcomb of his love—don't you see that these things have really nothing but their name in common? Just so, there is the love of concerts and the love of music: the love of successes that tickle your vanity—successes your harp may bring you in the midst of a brilliant society—or the love of a tender day-dream, solitary and timid.

CLVIII

When you have just seen the woman you love, the sight of any other woman spoils your vision, gives your eyes physical pain. I know why.

CLIX

Reply to an objection:—

Perfect naturalness in intimate intercourse can find no place but in passion-love, for in all the other kinds of love a man feels the possibility of a favoured rival.

CLX

In a man who, to be released from life, has taken poison, the moral part of his being is dead. Dazed by what he has done and by what he is about to experience, he no longer attends to anything. There are some rare exceptions.

CLXI

An old sea captain, to whom I respectfully offered my manuscript, thought it the silliest thing in the world to honour with six hundred pages so trivial a thing as love. But, however trivial, love is still the only weapon which can strike strong souls, and strike home.

What was it prevented M. de M——, in 1814, from despatching Napoleon in the forest of Fontainebleau? The contemptuous glance of a pretty woman coming into the Bains-Chinois.[1] What a difference in the destiny of the world if Napoleon and his son had been killed in 1814!

CLXII

I quote the following lines from a French letter received from Znaim, remarking at the same time that there is not a man in the provinces capable of understanding my brilliant lady correspondent:—

"... Chance means a lot in love. When for a whole year I have read no English, I find the first novel I pick up delicious. One who is used to the love of a prosaic being—slow, shy of all that is refined, and passionately responsive to none but material interests, the love of shekels, the glory of a fine stable and bodily desires, etc.—can easily feel disgust at the behaviour of impetuous genius, ardent and uncurbed in fancy, mindful of love, forgetful of all the rest, always active and always headlong, just where the other let himself be led and never acted for himself. The shock, which genius causes, may offend what, last year at Zithau, we used to call feminine pride, l'orgueil fÉminin—(is that French?) With the man of genius comes the startling feeling which with his predecessor was unknown—and, remember, this predecessor came to an untimely end in the wars and remains a synonym for perfection. This feeling may easily be mistaken for repulsion by a soul, lofty but without that assurance which is the fruit of a goodly number of intrigues."

CLXIII

"Geoffry Rudel, of Blaye, was a very great lord, prince of Blaye, and he fell in love, without knowing her, with the Princess of Tripoli, for the great goodness and great graciousness, which he heard tell of her from the pilgrims, who came from Antioch. And he made for her many fair songs, with good melodies and suppliant words, and, for the desire he had to see her, he took the cross and set out upon the sea to go to her. And it happened that in the ship a grievous malady took him, in such wise that those that were with him believed him to be dead, but they contrived to bring him to Tripoli into a hostelry, like one dead. They sent word to the countess and she came to his bed and took him in her arms. Then he knew that she was the countess and he recovered his sight and his hearing and he praised God, giving Him thanks that He had sustained his life until he had seen her. And thus he died in the arms of the countess, and she gave him noble burial in the house of the Temple at Tripoli. And then the same day she took the veil for the sorrow she had for him and for his death."[1]

CLXIV

Here is a singular proof of the madness called crystallisation, to be found in Mistress Hutchinson's Memoirs:

"He told to M. Hutchinson a very true story of a gentleman who not long before had come for some time to lodge in Richmond, and found all the people he came in company with bewailing the death of a gentlewoman that had lived there. Hearing her so much deplored, he made enquiry after her, and grew so in love with the description, that no other discourse could at first please him nor could he at last endure any other; he grew desperately melancholy and would go to a mount where the print of her foot was cut and lie there pining and kissing it all the day long, till at length death in some months' space concluded his languishment. This story was very true." (Vol. I, p. 83.)

CLXV

Lisio Visconti was anything but a great reader. Not to mention what he may have seen while knocking about the world, his essay is based on the Memoirs of some fifteen or twenty persons of note. In case it happens that the reader thinks such trifling points worthy of a moment's attention, I give the books from which Lisio drew his reflexions and conclusions:—

• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.
• The novels of Cervantes and Scarron.
• Manon Lescaut and Le Doyen de Killerine, by the AbbÉ PrÉvÔt.
• The Latin Letters of HÉloÏse to Abelard.
• Tom Jones.
• Letters of a Portuguese Nun.
• Two or three stories by Auguste La Fontaine.
• Pignotti's History of Tuscany.
• Werther.
• BrantÔme.
• Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi (Venice, 1760)—only the eighty pages on the history of his love affairs.
• The Memoirs of Lauzun, Saint-Simon, d'Épinay, de StaËl, Marmontel, Bezenval, Roland, Duclos, Horace Walpole, Evelyn, Hutchinson.
• Letters of Mademoiselle Lespinasse.

CLXVI

One of the most important persons of our age, one of the most prominent men in the Church and in the State, related to us this evening (January, 1822), at Madame de M——'s, the very real dangers he had gone through under the Terror.

"I had the misfortune to be one of the most prominent members of the Constituent Assembly. I stayed in Paris, trying to hide myself as best I could, so long as there was any hope of success there for the good cause. At last, as the danger grew greater and greater, while the foreigner made no energetic move in our favour, I decided to leave—only I had to leave without a passport. Everyone was going off to Coblentz, so I determined to make for Calais. But my portrait had been so widely circulated eighteen months before, that I was recognised at the last post. However, I was allowed to pass and arrived at an inn at Calais, where, you can imagine, I did not sleep a wink—and very lucky it was, since at four o'clock in the morning I heard someone pronounce my name quite distinctly. While I got up and was dressing in all haste I could clearly distinguish, in spite of the darkness, the National Guards with their rifles; the people had opened the main door for them and they were entering the courtyard of the inn. Fortunately it was raining in torrents—a winter morning, very dark and with a high wind. The darkness and the noise of the wind enabled me to escape by the back courtyard and stables. There I stood in the street at seven o'clock in the morning, utterly resourceless! i I imagined they were following me from my inn. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I went down to the port, on to the jetty. I own I had rather lost my head—everywhere the vision of the guillotine floated before my eyes.

A packet-boat was leaving the port in a very rough sea—it was already a hundred yards from the jetty. Suddenly I heard a shout from out at sea, as if I were being called. I saw a small boat approaching. "Hi! sir, come on! We're waiting for you!" Mechanically I got into the boat. A man was in it. "I saw you walking on the jetty with a scared look," he whispered, "I thought you might be some poor fugitive. I've told them you are a friend I was expecting; pretend to be sea-sick and go and hide below in a dark corner of the cabin."

"Oh, what a fine touch!" cried our hostess. She was almost speechless and had been moved to tears by the AbbÉ's long and excellently told story of his perils. "How you must have thanked your unknown benefactor! What was his name?"

"I do not know his name," the AbbÉ answered, a little confused.

And there was a moment of profound silence in the room.

CLXVII

The Father and the Son

(A dialogue of 1787)

The Father (Minister of ——): "I congratulate you, my son; it's a splendid thing for you to be invited to the Duke of ——; it's a distinction for a man of your age. Don't fail to be at the Palace punctually at six o'clock."

The Son: "I believe, sir, you are dining there also."

The Father: "The Duke of —— is always more than kind to our family, and, as he's asking you for the first time, he has been pleased to invite me as well."

The son, a young man of high birth and most distinguished intellect, does not fail to be at the Palace punctually at six o'clock. Dinner was at seven. The son found himself placed opposite his father. Each guest had a naked woman next to him. The dinner was served by a score of lackeys in full livery.[1]

CLXVIII

London, August, 1817.

Never in my life have I been so struck or intimidated by the presence of beauty as to-night, at a concert given by Madame Pasta.

She was surrounded, as she sang, by three rows of young women, so beautiful—of a beauty so pure and heavenly—that I felt myself lower my eyes, out of respect, instead of raising them to admire and enjoy. This has never happened to me in any other land, not even in my beloved Italy.

CLXIX

In France one-thing is absolutely impossible in the arts, and that is "go." A man really carried away would be too much laughed at—he would look too happy. See a Venetian recite Buratti's satires.