OF SELF-ESTEEM PIQUED[1]
Pique is a manifestation of vanity; I do not want my antagonist to go
higher than myself and _I take that antagonist himself as judge of
my worth_. I want to produce an effect on his heart. It is this that
carries us so far beyond all reasonable limits.
Sometimes, to justify our own extravagance, we go so far as to tell
ourselves that this rival has a mind to dupe us.
Pique, being an infirmity of honour, is far more common in monarchies;
it must, surely, be exceedingly rare in countries, where the habit is
rampant of valuing things according to their utility--for example, in
the United States.
Every man, and a Frenchman sooner than any other, loathes being taken
for a dupe; and yet the lightness of the French character under the old
monarchic _régime_[2], prevented pique from working great havoc beyond
the domains of gallantry and gallant-love. Pique has produced serious
tragedies only in monarchies, where, through the climate, the shade of
character is darker (Portugal, Piedmont).
The provincial in France forms a ludicrous idea of what is considered
a gentleman in good society--and then he takes cover behind his model,
and waits there all his
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life to see that no one trespasses. And so good-bye naturalness! He is
always in a state of pique, a mania which gives a laughable character
even to his love affairs. This enviousness is what makes it most
unbearable to live in small towns, and one should remind oneself of
this, when one admires the picturesque situation of any of them. The
most generous and noble emotions are there paralysed by contact with
all that is most low in the products of civilisation. In order to put
the finishing touch to their awfulness, these bourgeois talk of nothing
but the corruption of great cities.[3]
Pique cannot exist in passion-love; it is feminine pride. "If I let my
lover treat me badly, he will despise me and no longer be able to love
me." It may also be jealousy in all its fury.
Jealousy desires the death of the object it fears. The man in a state
of pique is miles away from that--he wants his enemy to live, and,
above all, be witness of his triumph.
He would be sorry to see his rival renounce the struggle, for the
fellow may have the insolence to say in the depth of his heart: "If I
had persevered in my original object, I should have outdone him."
With pique, there is no interest in the apparent purpose--the point of
everything is victory. This is well brought out in the love affairs
of chorus-girls; take away the rival, and the boasted passion, which
threatened suicide from the fifth-floor window, instantly subsides.
Love from pique, contrary to passion-love, passes in a moment; it
is enough for the antagonist by an irrevocable step to own that he
renounces the struggle. I hesitate, however, to advance this maxim,
having only one example, and that leaves doubts in my mind. Here are
the facts--the reader will judge. Dona Diana is a
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young person of twenty-three, daughter of one of the richest and
proudest citizens of Seville. She is beautiful, without any doubt, but
of a peculiar type of beauty, and is credited with ever so much wit and
still more pride. She was passionately in love, to all appearances at
least, with a young officer, with whom her family would have nothing to
do. The officer left for America with Morillo, and they corresponded
continuously. One day in the midst of a lot of people, assembled round
the mother of Dona Diana, a fool announced the death of the charming
officer. All eyes are turned upon Dona Diana; Dona Diana says nothing
but these words: "What a pity--so young."
Just that day we had been reading a play of old Massinger, which ends
tragically, but in which the heroine takes the death of her lover with
this apparent tranquillity. I saw the mother shudder in spite of her
pride and dislike; the father went out of the room to hide his joy. In
the midst of this scene and the dismay of all present, who were making
eyes at the fool who had told the story, Dona Diana, the only one at
ease, proceeded with the conversation, as if nothing had happened. Her
mother, in apprehension, set her maid to watch her, but nothing seemed
to be altered in her behaviour.
Two years later, a very fine young man paid his attentions to her.
This time again, and, still for the same reason, Dona Diana's parents
violently opposed the marriage, because the aspirant was not of noble
birth. She herself declared it should take place. A state of pique
ensues between the daughter's sense of honour and the father's. The
young man is forbidden the house. Dona Diana is no longer taken to the
country and hardly ever to church. With scrupulous care, every means
of meeting her lover is taken from her. He disguises himself and sees
her secretly at long intervals. She becomes more and more resolute, and
refuses the most
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brilliant matches, even a title and a great establishment at the Court
of Ferdinand VII. The whole town is talking of the misfortunes of the
two lovers and of their heroic constancy. At last the majority of Dona
Diana draws near. She gives her father to understand that she means to
make use of her right of disposing of her own hand. The family, driven
back on its last resources, opens negotiations for the marriage. When
it is half concluded, at an official meeting of the two families, the
young man, after six years' constancy, refuses Dona Diana.[4]
A quarter of an hour later no trace of anything--she was consoled. Did
she love from pique? Or are we face to face with a great soul, that
disclaims to parade its sorrow before the eyes of the world?
In passion-love satisfaction, if I can call it such, is often only to
be won by piquing the loved one's self-esteem. Then, in appearance, the
lover realises all that can be desired; complaints would be ridiculous
and seem senseless. He cannot speak of his misfortune, and yet how
constantly he knows and feels its prick! Its traces are inwoven, so
to speak, with circumstances, the most flattering and the most fit to
awaken illusions of enchantment. This misfortune rears its monstrous
head at the tenderest moments, as if to taunt the lover and make him
feel, at one and the same instant, all the delight of being loved by
the charming and unfeeling creature in his arms, and the impossibility
of this delight being his. Perhaps after jealousy, this is the
cruellest unhappiness.
The story is still fresh in a certain large town[5] of a man of soft
and gentle nature, who was carried away by a rage of this kind to spill
the blood of his mistress, who only loved him from pique against her
sister. He arranged
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with her, one evening, to come for a row on the sea by themselves, in
a pretty little boat he had devised himself. Once well out to sea, he
touches a spring, the boat divides and disappears for ever.
I have seen a man of sixty set out to keep an actress, the most
capricious, irresponsible, delightful and wonderful on the London
stage--Miss Cornel.
"And you expect that she'll be faithful?" people asked him.
"Not in the least. But she'll be in love with me--perhaps madly in
love."
And for a whole year she did love him--often to distraction. For three
whole months together she never even gave him subject for complaint.
He had put a state of pique, disgraceful in many ways, between his
mistress and his daughter.
Pique wins the day in gallant-love, being its very life and blood. It
is the ordeal best fitted to differentiate between gallant-love and
passion-love. There is an old maxim of war, given to young fellows new
to their regiment, that if you are billeted on a house, where there are
two sisters, and you want to have one, you must pay your attentions to
the other. To win the majority of Spanish women, who are still young
and ready for love affairs, it is enough to give out, seriously and
modestly, that you have no feelings whatever for the lady of the house.
I have this useful maxim from dear General Lassale. This is the most
dangerous way of attacking passion-love.
Piqued self-esteem is the bond which ties the happiest marriages,
after those formed by love. Many husbands make sure of their wives'
love for many years, by taking up with some little woman a couple of
months after their marriage.[6] In this way the habit is engendered of
thinking only of one man, and family ties succeed in making the habit
invincible.
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If in the past century at the Court of Louis XV a great lady (Madame
de Choiseul) was seen to worship her husband,[7] the reason is that he
seemed to take a keen interest in her sister, the Duchesse de Grammont.
The most neglected mistress, once she makes us see that she prefers
another man, robs us of our peace and afflicts our heart with all the
semblance of passion.
The courage of an Italian is an access of rage; the courage of a German
a moment of intoxication; that of a Spaniard an outburst of pride. If
there were a nation, in which courage were generally a matter of piqued
self-esteem between the soldiers of each company and the regiments of
each division, in the case of a rout there would be no support, and
consequently there would be no means of rallying the armies of such
a nation. To foresee the danger and try to remedy it, would be the
greatest of all absurdities with such conceited runaways.
"It is enough to have opened any single description of a voyage
among the savages of North America," says one of the most delightful
philosophers of France,[8] "to know that the ordinary fate of
prisoners of war is not only to be burnt alive and eaten, but first to
be bound to a stake near a flaming bonfire and to be tortured there
for several hours, by all the most ferocious and refined devices
that fury can imagine. Read what travellers, who have witnessed
these fearful scenes, tell of the cannibal joy of the assistants,
above all, of the fury of the women and children, and of their
gruesome delight in this competition of cruelty. See also what they
add about the heroic firmness and immutable self-possession of the
prisoner, who not only gives no sign of pain, but taunts and defies
his torturers, by all that pride can make most haughty, irony most
bitter, and sarcasm most insulting--singing his own glorious deeds,
going through the number of the relations and friends of the onlookers
whom he has killed, detailing the sufferings he has inflicted on them,
and accusing all that stand around him of cowardice, timidity and
ignorance of the methods of torture; until falling limb from limb,
devoured alive
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under his own eyes by enemies drunk with fury, he gasps out his last
whisper and his last insult together with his life's breath.[9] All
this would be beyond belief in civilised nations, will look like fable
to the most fearless captains of our grenadiers, and will one day be
brought into doubt by posterity."
This physiological phenomenon is closely connected with a particular
moral state in the prisoner, which constitutes, between him on the one
side and all his torturers on the other, a combat of self-esteem--of
vanity against vanity, as to who can hold out longer.
Our brave military doctors have often observed that wounded soldiers,
who, in a calm state of mind and senses, would have shrieked out,
during certain operations, display, on the contrary, only calmness
and heroism, if they are prepared for it in a certain manner. It is a
matter of piquing their sense of honour; you have to pretend, first
in a roundabout way, and then with irritating persistence, that it is
beyond their present power to bear the operation without shrieking.
[1] In Italian _puntiglio_(20).
[2] Three-quarters of the great French noblemen about 1778 would have
been on the high road to prison in a country where the laws were
executed without respect of persons.
[3] As the one keeps strict watch on the other in all that touches
love, there is less love and more immorality in provincial towns. Italy
is luckier.
[4] Every year there is more than one example of women abandoned just
as vilely, and so I can pardon suspiciousness in respectable women.
Mirabeau, _Lettres à Sophie_(21). Opinion is powerless in despotic
countries: there is nothing solid but the friendship of the pasha.
[5] Leghorn, 1819.
[6] See _The Confessions of an Odd-tempered Man_. Story by Mrs. Opie.
[7] Letters of Madame du Deffant, Memoirs of Lauzun.
[8] Volney, _Tableau des États-Unis d'Amérique_, pp. 491-96.
[9] Anyone accustomed to a spectacle like this, who feels the risk of
being the hero of such another, may possibly be interested only in its
heroic aspect, and, in that case, the spectacle must be the foremost
and most intimate of the non-active pleasures.
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