OF FEMININE PRIDE
All their lives women hear mention made by men of things claiming
importance--large profits, success in war, people killed in duels,
fiendish or admirable revenges, and so on. Those of them, whose heart
is proud, feel that, being unable to reach these things, they are not
in a position to display any pride remarkable for the importance of
what it rests on. They feel a heart beat in their breast, superior
by the force and pride of its movements to all which surrounds them,
and yet they see the meanest of men esteem himself above them. They
find out, that all their pride can only be for little things, or at
least for things, which are without importance except for sentiment,
and of which a third party cannot judge. Maddened by this desolating
contrast between the meanness of their fortune and the conscious worth
of their soul, they set about making their pride worthy of respect by
the intensity of its fits or by the relentless tenacity with which they
hold by its dictates. Before intimate intercourse women of this kind
imagine, when they see their lover, that he has laid siege to them.
Their imagination is absorbed in irritation at his endeavours, which,
after all, cannot do otherwise than witness to his love--seeing that
he does love. Instead of enjoying the feelings of the man of their
preference, their vanity is up in arms against him; and it comes to
this, that, with a soul of the tenderest, so long as its sensibility is
not centred on a special object, they have only to love, in
[Pg 91]
order, like a common flirt, to be reduced to the barest vanity.
A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times
for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of
pride--for the opening or shutting of a door. Therein lies their point
of honour. Well! Napoleon came to grief rather than yield a village.
I have seen a quarrel of this kind last longer than a year. It was a
woman of the greatest distinction who sacrificed all her happiness,
sooner than give her lover the chance of entertaining the slightest
possible doubt of the magnanimity of her pride. The reconciliation
was the work of chance, and, on my friend's side, due to a moment of
weakness, which, on meeting her lover, she was unable to overcome.
She imagined him forty miles away, and found him in a place, where
certainly he did not expect to see her. She could not hide the first
transports of delight; her lover was more overcome than she; they
almost fell at each other's feet and never have I seen tears flow so
abundantly--it was the unlooked-for appearance of happiness. Tears are
the supreme smile.
The Duke of Argyll gave a fine example of presence of mind, in not
drawing Feminine Pride into a combat, in the interview he had at
Richmond with Queen Caroline.[1] The more nobility in a woman's
character, the more terrible are these storms--
As the blackest sky
Foretells the heaviest tempest.
(_Don Juan_.)
Can it be that the more fervently, in the normal course of life, a
woman delights in the rare qualities of her lover, the more she tries,
in those cruel moments, when sympathy seems turned to the reverse, to
wreak her vengeance on what usually she sees in him superior
[Pg 92]
to other people? She is afraid of being confounded with them.
It is a precious long time since I read that boring _Clarissa_; but I
think it is through feminine pride that she lets herself die, and does
not accept the hand of Lovelace.
Lovelace's fault was great; but as she did love him a little, she could
have found pardon in her heart for a crime, of which the cause was love.
Monime, on the contrary, seems to me a touching model of feminine
delicacy. What cheek does not blush with pleasure to hear from the lips
of an actress worthy of the part:--
That fatal love which I had crushed and conquered,
* * * * *
Your wiles detected, and I cannot now
Disown what I confess'd; you cannot raze
Its memory; the shame of that avowal,
To which you forced me, will abide for ever
Present before my mind, and I should think
That you were always of my faith uncertain.
The grave itself to me were less abhorrent
Than marriage bed shared with a spouse, who took
Cruel advantage of my simple trust,
And, to destroy my peace for ever, fann'd
A flame that fired my cheek for other love
Than his.[2]
I can picture to myself future generations saying: "So that's what
Monarchy[3] was good for--to produce that sort of character and their
portrayal by great artists. "
And yet I find an admirable example of this delicacy even in the
republics of the Middle Ages; which seems to destroy my system of the
influence of governments on the passions, but which I shall cite in
good faith.
[Pg 93]
The reference is to those very touching verses of Dante:
Deh! quando tu sarai tomato al mondo
* * * * *
Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fè; disfecemi Maremma;
Salsi colui, che inanellata pria
Disposando, m'avea con la sua gemma.
_Purgatorio_, Cant. V.[4]
The woman, who speaks with so much restraint, had suffered in secret
the fate of Desdemona, and, by a word, could make known her husband's
crime to the friends, whom she had left on earth.
Nello della Pietra won the hand of Madonna Pia(14), sole heiress of the
Tolomei, the richest and noblest family of Sienna. Her beauty, which
was the admiration of Tuscany, sowed in her husband's heart the seed
of jealousy, which, envenomed by false reports and suspicions ever and
anon rekindled, led him to a heinous project. It is difficult, at this
hour, to decide whether his wife was altogether innocent, but Dante
represents her as such.
Her husband carried her off into the fens of Volterra, famous then, as
now, for the effects of the _aria cattiva_. Never would he tell his
unhappy wife the reason of her exile in so dangerous a place. His pride
did not deign to utter complaint or accusation. He lived alone with her
in a deserted tower, the ruins of which by the edge of the sea I have
been myself to visit. There he never broke his scornful silence, never
answered his young wife's questions, never listened to her prayers.
Coldly he waited at her side for the pestilential air to have its
effect. The exhalations of these morasses were not long in withering
those features--the loveliest, it is said,
[Pg 94]
which, in that century, the world had seen. In a few months she died.
Some chroniclers of those remote times report that Nello used the
dagger to hasten her end. She died in the fens in some horrible way;
but the kind of death was a mystery even to her contemporaries. Nello
della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which
he never broke.
Nothing nobler and more delicate than the way in which young la Pia
addresses Dante. She wishes to be recalled to the memory of the
friends, whom she had left on earth so young; and yet, telling who she
is and giving the name of her husband, she will not allow herself the
slightest complaint against a piece of cruelty unheard of, but for the
future irreparable; she only points out that he knows the story of her
death.
This constancy in pride's revenge is not met, I think, except in the
countries of the South.
In Piedmont I happened to be the involuntary witness of something very
nearly parallel; though at the time I did not know the details. I was
sent with twenty-five dragoons into the woods along the Sesia, to
intercept contraband. Arriving in the evening at this wild and desolate
spot, I caught sight between the trees of the ruins of an old castle.
I went up to it and to my great surprise--it was inhabited. I found
within a nobleman of the country, of sinister appearance, a man six
foot high and forty years old. He gave me two rooms with a bad grace.
I passed my time playing music with my quartermaster; after some days,
we discovered that our friend kept a woman in the background, whom
we used to call Camille, laughingly; but we were far from suspecting
the fearful truth. Six weeks later she was dead. I had the morbid
curiosity to see her in the coffin, paying a monk, who was watching, to
introduce me into the chapel towards midnight, under pretext of going
to sprinkle holy water. There I found one of those superb faces, which
are beautiful even in the arms of death;
[Pg 95]
she had a large aquiline nose--the nobility and delicacy of its outline
I shall never forget. Then I left that deadly spot. Five years later,
a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation
as King of Italy(15), I had the whole story told me. I learnt that the
jealous husband, Count ----, had found one morning fastened to his
wife's bed an English watch, belonging to a young man of the small town
in which they lived. That very day he carried her off to the ruined
castle in the midst of the woods of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra,
he never uttered a single word. If she made him any request, he coldly
and silently presented to her the English watch, which he carried
always with him. Almost three years passed, spent thus alone with her.
At last she died of despair, in the flower of life. Her husband tried
to put a knife into the proprietor of the watch, missed him, passed on
to Genoa, took ship and no one has heard of him since. His property has
been divided.
As for these women with feminine pride, if you take their injuries with
a good grace, which the habits of a military life make easy, you annoy
these proud souls; they take you for a coward, and very soon become
outrageous. Such lofty characters yield with pleasure to men whom they
see overbearing with other men. That is, I fancy, the only way--you
must often pick a quarrel with your neighbour in order to avoid one
with your mistress.
One day Miss Cornel, the celebrated London actress, was surprised by
the unexpected appearance of the rich colonel, whom she found useful.
She happened to be with a little lover, whom she just liked--and
nothing more. "Mr. So-and-so," says she in great confusion to the
colonel, "has come to see the pony I want to sell." "I am here for
something very different," put in proudly the little lover who was
beginning to bore her, but whom, from the moment of that answer, she
started
[Pg 96]
to love again madly.[5] Women of that kind sympathise with their
lover's haughtiness, instead of exercising at his expense their own
disposition to pride.
The character of the Duc de Lauzun (that of 1660[6]), if they can
forgive the first day its want of grace, is very fascinating for
such women, and perhaps for all women of distinction. Grandeur on a
higher plane escapes them; they take for coldness the calm gaze which
nothing escapes, but which a detail never disturbs. Have I not heard
women at the Court of Saint-Cloud maintain that Napoleon had a dry and
prosaic character?[7] A great man is like an eagle: the higher he rises
the less he is visible, and he is punished for his greatness by the
solitude of his soul.
From feminine pride arises what women call want of refinement. I fancy,
it is not at all unlike what kings call _lèse majesté_, a crime all the
more dangerous, because
[Pg 97]
one slips into it without knowing. The tenderest lover may be accused
of wanting refinement, if he is not very sharp, or, what is sadder, if
he dares give himself up to the greatest charm of love--the delight of
being perfectly natural with the loved one and of not listening to what
he is told.
These are the sort of things, of which a well-born heart could have no
inkling; one must have experience, in order to believe in them; for
we are misled by the habit of dealing justly and frankly with our men
friends.
It is necessary to keep in mind incessantly that we have to do with
beings, who can, however wrongly, think themselves inferior in vigour
of character, or, to put it better, can think that others believe they
are inferior.
Should not a woman's true pride reside in the power of the feeling
she inspires? A maid of honour to the queen and wife of Francis I was
chaffed about the fickleness of her lover, who, it was said, did not
really love her. A little time after, this lover had an illness and
reappeared at Court--dumb. Two years later, people showing surprise one
day that she still loved him, she turned to him, saying: "Speak." And
he spoke.
[1] _The Heart of Midlothian_.
[2] Racine, _Mithridates_, Act IV, Sc. 4. [From the Metrical English
version of R. B. Boswell. (Bohn's Standard Library.--Tr.)]
[3] Monarchy without charter and without chambers.
[4] Ah! when you are returned to the world of the living, give me a
passing thought. I am la Pia. Sienna gave me life, death took me in our
fens. He who, wedding me, gave me his ring, knows my story.
[5] I always come back from Miss Cornel's full of admiration and
profound views on the passions laid bare. Her very imperious way of
giving orders to her servants has nothing of despotism in it: she
merely sees with precision and rapidity what has to be done.
Incensed against me at the beginning of the visit, she thinks no more
about it at the end. She tells me in detail of the economy of her
passion for Mortimer. "I prefer seeing him in company than alone with
me." A woman of the greatest genius could do no better, for she has
the courage to be perfectly natural and is unhampered by any theory.
"I'm happier an actress than the wife of a peer."--A great soul whose
friendship I must keep for my enlightenment.
[6] Loftiness and courage in small matters, but a passionate care for
these small matters.--The vehemence of the choleric temperament.--His
behaviour towards Madame de Monaco (Saint-Simon, V. 383) and adventure
under the bed of Madame de Montespan while the king was there.--Without
the care for small matters, this character would remain invisible to
the eye of women.
[7] When Minna Troil heard a tale of woe or of romance, it was
then her blood rushed to her cheeks and showed plainly how warm it
beat, notwithstanding the generally serious, composed and retiring
disposition which her countenance and demeanour seemed to exhibit.
(_The Pirate_, Chap. III.)
Souls like Minna Troil, in whose judgment ordinary circumstances are
not worth emotion, by ordinary people are thought cold.
[Pg 98]