OF HOPE
A very small degree of hope is enough to cause the birth of love.
In the course of events hope may fail--love is none the less born. With
a firm, daring and impetuous character, and in an imagination developed
by the troubles of life, the degree of hope may be smaller: it can come
sooner to an end, without killing love.
If a lover has had troubles, if he is of a tender, thoughtful
character, if he despairs of other women, and if his admiration is
intense for her whom he loves, no ordinary pleasure will succeed in
distracting him from the second crystallisation. He will prefer to
dream of the most doubtful chance of pleasing her one day, than to
accept from an ordinary woman all she could lavish.
The woman whom he loves would have to kill his hope at that period, and
(note carefully, not later) in some inhuman manner, and overwhelm him
with those marks of patent contempt, which make it impossible to appear
again in public.
Far longer delays between all these periods are compatible with the
birth of love.
It demands much more hope and much more substantial hope, in the case
of the cold, the phlegmatic and the prudent. The same is true of people
no longer young.
It is the second crystallisation which ensures love's duration, for
then every moment makes it clear that the question is--be loved or die.
Long months of love have
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turned into habit this conviction of our every moment--how find means
to support the thought of loving no more? The stronger the character
the less is it subject to inconstancy.
This second crystallisation is almost entirely absent from the passions
inspired by women who yield too soon.
After the crystallisations have worked--especially the second, which
is far the stronger--the branch is no longer to be recognised by
indifferent eyes, for:--
(1) It is adorned with perfections which they do not see.
(2) It is adorned with perfections which for them are not perfections
at all.
The perfection of certain charms, mentioned to him by an old friend of
his love, and a certain hint of liveliness noticed in her eye, are a
diamond in the crystallisation[1]
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of Del Rosso. These ideas, conceived during the evening, keep him
dreaming all the night.
An unexpected answer, which makes me see more clearly a tender,
generous, ardent, or, as it is popularly called, romantic[2] soul,
preferring to the happiness of kings the simple pleasures of a walk
with the loved one at midnight in a lonely wood, gives me food for
dreams[3] for a whole night.
Let him call my mistress a prude: I shall call his a whore.
[1] I have called this essay a book of Ideology. My object was to
indicate that, though it is called "Love," it is not a novel and still
less diverting like a novel. I apologise to philosophers for having
taken the word Ideology: I certainly did not intend to usurp a title
which is the right of another. If Ideology is a detailed description
of ideas and all the parts which can compose ideas, the present book
is a detailed description of all the feelings which can compose the
passion called Love. Proceeding, I draw certain consequences from this
description: for example, the manner of love's cure. I know no word to
say in Greek "discourse on ideas." I might have had a word invented by
one of my learned friends, but I am already vexed enough at having to
adopt the new word crystallisation, and, if this essay finds readers,
it is quite possible that they will not allow my new word to pass. To
avoid it, I own, would have been the work of literary talent: I tried,
but without success. Without this word, which expresses, according to
me, the principal phenomenon of that madness called Love--madness,
however, which procures for man the greatest pleasures which it is
given to the beings of his species to taste on earth--without the use
of this word, which it were necessary to replace at every step by a
paraphrase of considerable length, the description, which I give of
what passes in the head and the heart of a man in love, would have
become obscure, heavy and tedious, even for me who am the author: what
would it have been for the reader?
I invite, therefore, the reader, whose feelings the word
crystallisation shocks too much, to close the book. To be read by many
forms no part of my prayers--happily, no doubt, for me. I should love
dearly to give great pleasure to thirty or forty people of Paris,
whom I shall never see, but for whom, without knowing, I have a blind
affection. Some young Madame Roland, for example, reading her book
in secret and precious quickly hiding it, at the least noise, in the
drawers of her father's bench--her father the engraver of watches. A
soul like that of Madame Roland will forgive me, I hope, not only the
word crystallisation, used to express that act of madness which makes
us perceive every beauty, every kind of perfection, in the woman whom
we begin to love, but also several too daring ellipses besides. The
reader has only to take a pencil and write between the lines the five
or six words which are missing.
[2] All his actions had at first in my eyes that heavenly air, which
makes of a man a being apart, and differentiates him from all others. I
thought that I could read in his eyes that thirst for a happiness more
sublime, that unavowed melancholy, which yearns for something better
than we find here below, and which in all the trials that fortune and
revolution can bring upon a romantic soul,
... still prompts the celestial sight
For which we wish to live or dare to die.
(Last letter of Bianca to her mother. Forlì, 1817.)
[3] It is in order to abridge and to be able to paint the interior
of the soul, that the author, using the formula of the first person,
alleges several feelings to which he is a stranger: personally, he
never had any which would be worth quoting.
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