OF QUARRELSOME LOVE
It is of two kinds:
I. In which the originator of the quarrel loves.
2. In which he does not love.
If one of the lovers is too superior in advantages which both value,
the love of the other must die; for sooner or later comes the fear of
contempt, to cut short crystallisation.
Nothing is so odious to the mediocre as mental superiority. There lies
the source of hatred in the world of to-day, and if we do not have to
thank this principle for desperate enmities, it is solely due to the
fact that the people it comes between are not forced to live together.
What then of love? For here, everything being natural, especially on
the part of the superior being, superiority is not masked by any social
precaution.
For the passion to be able to survive, the inferior must ill-treat the
other party; otherwise the latter could not shut a window, without the
other taking offence.
As for the superior party, he deludes himself: the love he feels is
beyond the reach of danger, and, besides, almost all the weaknesses in
that which we love, make it only the dearer to us.
In point of duration, directly after passion-love reciprocated between
people on the same level, one must put quarrelsome love, in which the
quarreller does not love. Examples of this are to be found in the
anecdotes, relative to the Duchesse de Berri (Memoirs of Duclos).
Partaking, as it does, of the nature of set habits, which
[Pg 142]
are rooted in the prosaic and egoistic side of life and follow man
inseparably to the grave, this love can last longer than passion-love
itself. But it is no longer love, it is a habit engendered by love,
which has nothing of that passion but memories and physical pleasure.
This habit necessarily presupposes a less noble kind of being. Each day
a little scene is got ready--"Will he make a fuss?"--which occupies
the imagination, just as, in passion-love, every day a new proof of
affection had to be found. See the anecdotes about Madame d'Houdetot
and Saint-Lambert.[1]
It is possible that pride refuses to get used to this kind of
occupation; in which case, after some stormy months, pride kills love.
But we see the nobler passion make a long resistance before giving in.
The little quarrels of happy love foster a long time the illusion of
a heart that still loves and sees itself badly treated. Some tender
reconciliations may make the transition more bearable. A woman excuses
the man she has deeply loved, on the score of a secret sorrow or a
blow to his prospects. At last she grows used to being scolded. Where,
really, outside passion-love, outside gambling or the possession of
power,[2] can you find any other unfailing entertainment to be compared
with it for liveliness? If the scolder happens to die, the victim who
survives proves inconsolable. This is the principle which forms the
bond of many middle-class marriages; the scolded can listen to his own
voice all day long talking of his favourite subject.
There is a false kind of quarrelsome love. I took from the letters of a
woman of extraordinary brilliance this in Chapter XXXIII:--
"Always a little doubt to allay--that is what whets our
[Pg 143]
appetite in passion-love every moment.... As it is never separated from
fear, so its pleasures can never tire."
With rough and ill-mannered people, or those with a very violent
nature, this little doubt to calm, this faint misgiving shows itself in
the form of a quarrel.
If the loved one has not the extreme susceptibility, which comes of a
careful education, she may find that love of this kind has more life in
it, and consequently is more enjoyable. Even with all the refinement
in the world, it is hard not to love "your savage" all the more, if
you see him the first to suffer for his transports. What Lord Mortimer
thinks back on, perhaps, with most regret for his lost mistress, are
the candlesticks she threw at his head. And, really, if pride forgives
and permits such sensations, it must also be allowed that they do wage
implacable warfare upon boredom--that arch-enemy of the happy!
Saint-Simon, the one historian France has had, says:--
After several passing fancies, the Duchesse de Berri had fallen in
love, in real earnest, with Riom, cadet of the house of d'Aydie, son
of a sister of Madame de Biron. He had neither looks nor sense: a
stout, short youth, with a puffy white face, who with all his spots
looked like one big abscess--though, true, he had fine teeth. He had
no idea of having inspired a passion, which in less than no time went
beyond all limits and lasted ever after, without, indeed, preventing
passing fancies and cross-attachments. He had little property, and
many brothers and sisters who had no more. M. and Madame de Pons,
lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse de Berri, were related to them and
of the same province, and they sent for the young man, who was a
lieutenant in the dragoons, to see what could be made of him. He had
scarcely arrived before the Duchess's weakness for him became public
and Riom was master of the Luxembourg.
M. de Lauzun, whose grand-nephew he was, laughed in his sleeve; he was
delighted to see in Riom a reincarnation at the Luxembourg of himself
from the time of Mademoiselle. He gave Riom instructions which were
listened to by him, as befitted
[Pg 144]
a mild and naturally polite and respectful young fellow, well behaved
and straightforward. But before long Riom began to feel the power
of his own charms, which could only captivate the incomprehensible
humour of this princess. Without abusing his power with others, he
made himself liked by everyone, but he treated his duchess as M. de
Lauzun had treated Mademoiselle. He was soon dressed in the richest
laces, the richest suits, furnished with money, buckles, jewels. He
made himself an object of admiration and took a delight in making the
princess jealous or pretending to be jealous himself--bringing her
often to tears. Little by little he reduced her to the state of doing
nothing without his permission, not even in matters of indifference.
At one time, ready to go out to the Opera, he made her stay at home;
at another he made her go against her will. He forced her to do
favours to ladies she disliked, or of whom she was jealous, and to
injure people she liked, or of whom he pretended to be jealous. Even
as far as dress, she was not allowed the smallest liberty. He used to
amuse himself by making her have her hair done all over again, or have
her dress changed when she was completely ready--and this happened
so often and so publicly, that he had accustomed her to take in the
evening his orders for dress and occupation for the next day. The
next day he would change it all and make the princess cry still more.
At last she came to sending him messages by trusted valets--for he
lived in the Luxembourg almost from the day of his arrival--and the
messages had often to be repeated during her toilet for her to know
what ribbons to wear and about her frock and other details of dress;
and nearly always he made her wear what she disliked. If sometimes she
gave herself some liberty in the smallest matter without leave, he
treated her like a servant, and often her tears lasted several days.
This haughty princess, who was so fond of display and indulging her
boundless pride, could bring herself so low as to partake of obscene
parties with him and unmentionable people--she with whom no one could
dine unless he were prince of the blood. The Jesuit Riglet, whom she
as a child had known, and who had brought her up, was admitted to
these private meals, without feeling ashamed himself or the Duchess
being embarrassed. Madame de Mouchy was admitted into the secret of
all these strange events; she and Riom summoned the company and chose
the days. This lady was the peacemaker between the two lovers,
[Pg 145]
and the whole of this existence was a matter of general knowledge at
the Luxembourg. Riom was there looked to, as the centre of everything,
while on his side he was careful to live on good terms with all,
honouring them with a show of respect, which he refused in public only
to his princess. Before everybody he would give her curt answers,
which would make the whole company lower their eyes and bring blushes
to the cheeks of the Duchess, who put no constraint upon her idolatry
of him."
Riom was a sovereign remedy, for the Duchess, against the monotony of
life.
A famous woman said once off-hand to General Bonaparte, then a young
hero covered with glory and with no crimes against liberty on his
conscience: "General, a woman could only be a wife or a sister to you."
The hero did not understand the compliment, which the world has made up
for with some pretty slanders.
The women, of whom we are speaking, like to be despised by their lover,
whom they only love in his cruelty.
[1] Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, I think, or of Marmontel.
[2] Whatever certain hypocritical ministers may say, power is the
foremost of pleasures. I believe love alone can beat it, and love is a
lucky illness, which cannot be got like a ministry.
[Pg 146]
CHAPTER XXXIX
(Part II)
REMEDIES AGAINST LOVE
The leap of Leucas was a fine image of antiquity. It is true, the
remedy of love is almost impossible. A danger is needed to call man's
attention back sharply to look to his own preservation.[1] But that is
not all. What is harder to realise--a pressing danger must continue,
and one that can only be averted with care, in order that the habit of
thinking of his own preservation may have time to take root. I can see
nothing that will do but a storm of sixteen days, like that in _Don
Juan_[2] or the shipwreck of M. Cochelet among the Moors. Otherwise,
one gets soon used to the peril, and even drops back into thoughts
of the loved one with still more charm--when reconnoitring at twenty
yards' range from the enemy.
We have repeated over and over again that the love of a man, who loves
well, delights in and vibrates to every movement of his imagination,
and that there is nothing in nature which does not speak to him of the
object of his love. Well, this delight and this vibration form a most
interesting occupation, next to which all others pale.
A friend who wants to work the cure of the patient, must, first of all,
be always on the side of the woman
[Pg 147]
the patient is in love with--and all friends, with more zeal than
sense, are sure to do exactly the opposite.
It is attacking with forces too absurdly inferior that combination of
sweet illusions, which earlier we called crystallisation.[3]
The _friend in need_ should not forget this fact, that, if there is
an absurdity to be believed, as the lover has either to swallow it or
renounce everything which holds him to life, he will swallow it. With
all the cleverness in the world, he will deny in his mistress the most
palpable vices and the most villainous infidelities. This is how, in
passion-love, everything is forgiven after a little.
In the case of reasonable and cold characters, for the lover to swallow
the vices of a mistress, he must only find them out after several
months of passion.[4]
Far from trying bluntly and openly to distract the lover, the _friend
in need_ ought to tire him with talking of his love and his mistress,
and at the same time manage that a host of little events force
themselves upon his notice. Even if travel isolates,[5] it is still
no remedy, and in fact nothing recalls so tenderly the object of our
love as change of scene. It was in the midst of the brilliant Paris
_salons_, next to women with the greatest reputation for charm, that I
was most in love with my poor mistress, solitary and sad in her little
room in the depth of the Romagna.[6]
I looked at the superb clock in the brilliant _salon_, where I was
exiled, for the hour she goes out on foot, even in the rain, to call on
her friend. Trying to forget her, I have found that change of scene is
the source of memories of one's love, less vivid but far more heavenly
[Pg 148]
than those one goes in search for in places, where once upon a time one
met her.
In order that absence may prove useful, the _friend in need_ must
be always at hand, and suggest to the lover's mind all possible
reflections on the history of his love, trying to make these
reflections tiresome through their length and importunity. In this
way he gives them the appearance of commonplaces. For example, tender
sentimental talk after a dinner enlivened with good wine.
It is hard to forget a woman, with whom one has been happy; for,
remember, that there are certain moments the imagination can never be
tired of evoking and beautifying.
I leave out all mention of pride, cruel but sovereign remedy, which,
however, is not to be applied to sensitive souls.
The first scenes of Shakespeare's _Romeo_ form an admirable picture;
there is so vast a gap between the man who says sorrowfully to himself:
"She hath forsworn to love," and he who cries out in the height of
happiness: "Come what sorrow can!"
[1] Danger of Henry Morton in the Clyde. (_Old Mortality_, Vol. IV,
Chap. X.)
[2] Of the over-extolled Lord Byron.
[3] Merely in order to abbreviate, and with apologies for the new word.
[4] Madame Dornal and Serigny. _Confessions of le Comte_ ... of Duclos.
See the note to p. 50: death of General Abdallah at Bologna.
[5] I cried almost every day. (Precious words of the 10th of June.)
[6] Salviati.
[Pg 149]
CHAPTER XXXIX
(Part III)
Her passion will die like a lamp for want of what the flame should
feed upon. (_Bride of Lammermoor_, II, Chap. VI.)]
The _friend in need_ must beware of faulty reasoning--for example, of
talking about ingratitude. You are giving new life to crystallisation,
by procuring it a victory and a new enjoyment.
In love there is no such thing as ingratitude; the actual pleasure
always repays, and more than repays, sacrifices that seem the greatest.
In love no other crime but want of honesty seems to me possible: one
should be scrupulous as to the state of one's heart.
The _friend in need_ has only to attack fair and square, for the lover
to answer:--
"To be in love, even while enraged with the loved one, is nothing less,
to bring myself down to your £ s. d. style, than having a ticket in
a lottery, in which the prize is a thousand miles above all that you
can offer me, in your world of indifference and selfish interests. One
must have plenty of vanity--and precious petty vanity--to be happy,
because people receive you well. I do not blame men for going on like
this, in their world, but in the love of Léonore I found a world where
everything was heavenly, tender and generous. The most lofty and almost
incredible virtue of your world counted, between her and me, only as
any ordinary and everyday virtue. Let me at all events dream of the
happiness of passing my life close to such a creature. Although I
understand that
[Pg 150]
slander has ruined me, and that I have nothing to hope for, at least I
shall make her the sacrifice of my vengeance."
It is quite impossible to put a stop to love except in its first
stages. Besides a prompt departure, and the forced distractions of
society (as in the case of the Comtesse Kalember), there are several
other little ruses, which the _friend in need_ can bring into play.
For example, he can bring to your notice, as if by chance, the fact
that the woman you love, quite outside the disputed area, does not
even observe towards you the same amount of politeness and respect,
with which she honours your rival. The smallest details are enough;
for in love everything is a sign. For example, she does not take your
arm to go up to her box. This sort of nonsense, taken tragically by
a passionate heart, couples a pang of humiliation to every judgment
formed by crystallisation, poisons the source of love and may destroy
it.
One way against the woman, who is behaving badly to our friend, is to
bring her under suspicion of some absurd physical defect, impossible
to verify. If it were possible for the lover to verify the calumny,
and even if he found it substantiated, it would be disqualified by
his imagination, and soon have no place with him at all. It is only
imagination itself which can resist imagination: Henry III knew that
very well when he scoffed at the famous Duchesse de Montpensier(22).
Hence it is the imagination you must look to--above all, in a girl
whom you want to keep safe from love. And the less her spirit has of
the common stuff, the more noble and generous her soul, in a word the
worthier she is of our respect, just so much greater the danger through
which she must pass.
It is always perilous, for a girl, to suffer her memories to group
themselves too repeatedly and too agreeably round the same individual.
Add gratitude, admiration or curiosity to strengthen the bonds of
memory, and she is almost certainly on the edge of the
[Pg 151]
precipice. The greater the monotony of her everyday life, the more
active are those poisons called gratitude, admiration and curiosity.
The only thing, then, is a swift, prompt and vigorous distraction.
Just so, a little roughness and "slap-dash" in the first encounter, is
an almost infallible means of winning the respect of a clever woman, if
only the drug be administered in a natural and simple manner.
[Pg 152]
[Pg 153]
BOOK II
[Pg 154]
[Pg 155]
CHAPTER XL
Every kind of love and every kind of imagination, in the individual,
takes its colour from one of these six temperaments:--
The sanguine, or French,--M. de Francueil (Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay);
The choleric, or Spanish,--Lauzun (the Peguilhen of Saint-Simon's
Memoirs);
The melancholy, or German,--Schiller's Don Carlos;
The phlegmatic, or Dutch;
The nervous--Voltaire;
The athletic--Milo of Croton.[1]
If the influence of temperament makes itself felt in ambition, avarice,
friendship, etc. etc., what must it be in the case of love, in which
the physical also is perforce an ingredient? Let us suppose that all
kinds of love can be referred to the four varieties, which we have
noted:--
Passion-love--Julie d'Étanges;(23)
Gallant-love or gallantry;
Physical love;
Vanity-love--"a duchess is never more than thirty for a bourgeois."
We must submit these four kinds of love to the six different
characters, with which habits, dependent upon the six kinds of
temperament, stamp the imagination. Tiberius did not have the wild
imagination of Henry VIII.
[Pg 156]
Then let us submit all these combinations, thus obtained, to the
differences of habit which depend upon government or national
character:--
1. Asiatic despotism, such as may be seen at Constantinople;
2. Absolute monarchy _à la_ Louis XIV;
3. Aristocracy masked by a charter, or government of a nation for the
profit of the rich, as in England--all according to the rules of a
self-styled biblical morality;
4. A federal republic, or government for the profit of all, as in the
United States of America;
5. Constitutional monarchy, or--
6. A State in revolution, as Spain, Portugal, France(24). This state of
things in a country gives lively passions to everyone, makes manners
more natural, destroys puerilities, the conventional virtues and
senseless proprieties[2]--gives seriousness to youth and causes it to
despise vanity-love and neglect gallantry.
This state can last a long time and form the habits of a generation. In
France it began in 1788, was interrupted in 1802, and began again in
1818--to end God knows when!
After all these general ways of considering love, we have the
differences of age, and come finally to individual peculiarities.
For example, we might say:--
I found at Dresden, in Count Woltstein, vanity-love, a melancholy
temperament, monarchical habits, thirty years, and ... his individual
peculiarities.
For anyone who is to form a judgment on love, this way of viewing
things is conveniently short and cooling to the head--an essential, but
difficult operation.
Now, as in physiology man has learnt scarcely anything about himself,
except by means of comparative anatomy,
[Pg 157]
so in the case of passions, through vanity and many other causes of
illusion, we can only get enlightenment on what goes on in ourselves
from the foibles we have observed in others. If by chance this essay
has any useful effect, it will be by bringing the mind to make
comparisons of this sort. To lead the way, I am going to attempt a
sketch of some general traits in the character of love in different
nations.
I beg for pardon if I often come back to Italy; in the present state
of manners in Europe, it is the only country where the plant, which
I describe, grows in all freedom. In France, vanity; in Germany, a
pretentious and highly comical philosophy; in England, pride, timid,
painful and rancorous, torture and stifle it, or force it into a
crooked channel.[3]
[1] See Cabanis, influence of the physical, etc.
[2] The laces missing from Minister Roland's shoes: "Ah, Monsieur, all
is lost," answers Dumouriez. At the royal sitting, the President of the
Assembly crosses his legs.
[3] The reader will have perceived only too easily that this treatise
is made up of Lisio's Visconti's fragmentary account of events, written
in the order that they were presented to him on his travels. All these
events may be found related at length in the journal of his life;
perhaps I ought to have inserted them--but they might have been found
scarcely suitable. The oldest notes bear the date, Berlin 1807, and the
last are some days before his death, June 1819. Some dates have been
altered expressly to avoid indiscretion; but the changes, which I have
made, go no further than that. I have not thought myself authorised
to recast the style. This book was written in a hundred different
places--so may it be read!
[Pg 158]
CHAPTER XLI
OF NATIONS WITH REGARD TO LOVE.
FRANCE
I mean to put aside my natural affections and be only a cold
philosopher. French women, fashioned by their amiable men, themselves
creatures only of vanity and physical desires, are less active, less
energetic, less feared, and, what's more, less loved and less powerful,
than Spanish and Italian women.
A woman is powerful only according to the degree of unhappiness, which
she can inflict as punishment on her lover. Where men have nothing but
vanity, every woman is useful, but none is indispensable. It is success
in winning a woman's love, not in keeping it, which flatters a man.
When men have only physical desires, they go to prostitutes, and that
is why the prostitutes of France are charming and those of Spain the
very reverse. In France, to a great many men prostitutes can give as
much happiness as virtuous women--happiness, that is to say, without
love. There is always one thing for which a Frenchman has much more
respect than for his mistress--his vanity.
In Paris a young man sees in his mistress a kind of slave, whose
destiny it is, before everything, to please his vanity. If she resist
the orders of this dominating passion, he leaves her--and is only the
better pleased with himself, when he can tell his friends in what a
piquant way, with how smart a gesture, he waved her off.
A Frenchman, who knew his own country well (Meilhan), said: "In France,
great passions are as rare as great men."
[Pg 159]
No language has words to express how impossible it is for a Frenchman
to play the role of a deserted and desperate lover, in full view of a
whole town--yet no sight is commoner at Venice or Bologna.
To find love at Paris, we must descend to those classes, in which the
absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle against real want,
have left more energy.
To let oneself be seen with a great and unsatisfied desire, is
to let oneself be seen in a position of inferiority--and that is
impossible in France, except for people of no position at all.
It means exposing oneself to all kinds of sneers--hence come the
exaggerated praises bestowed on prostitutes by young men who mistrust
their own hearts. A vulgar susceptibility and dread of appearing in
a position of inferiority forms the principle of conversation among
provincial people. Think of the man who only lately, when told of the
assassination of H. R. H. the Duke of Berri(25), answered: "I knew
it."[1]
In the Middle Ages hearts were tempered by the presence of danger, and
therein, unless I am mistaken, lies another cause of the astonishing
superiority of the men of the sixteenth century. Originality, which
among us is rare, comical, dangerous and often affected, was then of
everyday and unadorned. Countries where even to-day danger often shows
its iron hand, such as Corsica,[2]
[Pg 160]
Spain or Italy, can still produce great men. In those climates, where
men's gall cooks for three months under the burning heat, it is
activity's direction that is to seek; at Paris, I fear, it is activity
itself.[3]
Many young men, fine enough to be sure at Montmirail or the Bois de
Boulogne, are afraid of love; and when you see them, at the age of
twenty, fly the sight of a young girl who has struck them as pretty,
you may know that cowardice is the real cause. When they remember what
they have read in novels is expected of a lover, their blood runs cold.
These chilly spirits cannot conceive how the storm of passion, which
lashes the sea to waves, also fills the sails of the ship and gives her
the power of riding over them.
Love is a delicious flower, but one must have the courage to go and
pick it on the edge of a frightful precipice. Besides ridicule, love
has always staring it in the face the desperate plight of being
deserted by the loved one, and in her place only a _dead blank_ for all
the rest of one's life.
Civilisation would be perfect, if it could continue the delicate
pleasures of the nineteenth century with a more frequent presence of
danger.[4]
[Pg 161]
It ought to be possible to augment a thousandfold the pleasures of
private life by exposing it frequently to danger. I do not speak only
of military danger. I would have this danger present at every instant,
in every shape, and threatening all the interests of existence, such
as formed the essence of life in the Middle Ages. Such danger as our
civilisation has trained and refined, goes hand in hand quite naturally
with the most insipid feebleness of character.
I hear the words of a great man in _A Voice from St Helena_ by Mr.
O'Meara:--
Order Murat to attack and destroy four or five thousand men in such
a direction, it was done in a moment; but leave him to himself, he
was an imbecile without judgment. I cannot conceive how so brave
a man could be so "lâche." He was nowhere brave unless before the
enemy. There he was probably the bravest man in the world.... He was
a paladin, in fact a Don Quixote in the field; but take him into the
Cabinet, he was a poltroon without judgment or decision. Murat and Ney
were the bravest men I ever witnessed. (O'Meara, Vol. II, p. 95.)
[1] This is historical. Many people, though very curious, are annoyed
at being told news; they are frightened of appearing inferior to him
who tells them the news.
[2] Memoirs of M. Realier-Dumas. Corsica, which, as regards its
population of one hundred and eighty thousand souls, would not form
a half of most French Departments, has produced in modern times
Salliceti, Pozzo di Borgo, General Sebastiani, Cervioni, Abbatucci,
Lucien and Napoleon Bonaparte and Aréna. The Département du Nord,
with its nine hundred thousand inhabitants, is far from being able
to show a similar list. The reason is that in Corsica anyone, on
leaving his house, may be greeted by a bullet; and the Corsican,
instead of submitting like a good Christian, tries to defend himself
and still more to be revenged. That is the way spirits like Napoleon
are forged. It's a long cry from such surroundings to a palace with
its lords-in-waiting and chamberlains, and a Fénelon obliged to find
reasons for his respect to His Royal Highness, when speaking to H. R.
H. himself, aged twelve years. See the works of that great writer.
[3] At Paris, to get on, you must pay attention to a million little
details. None the less there is this very powerful objection.
Statistics show many more women who commit suicide from love at Paris
than in all the towns of Italy together. This fact gives me great
difficulty; I do not know what to say to it for the moment, but it
doesn't change my opinion. It may be that our ultra-civilised life
is so wearisome, that death seems a small matter to the Frenchman of
to-day--or more likely, overwhelmed by the wreck of his vanity, he
blows out his brains.
[4] I admire the manners of the time of Lewis XIV: many a man might
pass in three days from the salons of Marly to the battlefield of Senet
or Ramillies. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, were all in a continual
state of apprehension. See the Letters of Madame de Sévigné. The
presence of danger had kept in the language an energy and a freshness
that we would not dare to hazard nowadays; and yet M. de Lameth killed
his wife's lover. If a Walter Scott were to write a novel of the times
of Lewis XIV, we should be a good deal surprised.
[Pg 162]
CHAPTER XLII
FRANCE (_continued_)
I beg leave to speak ill of France a little longer. The reader need
have no fear of seeing my satire remain unpunished; if this essay finds
readers, I shall pay for my insults with interest. Our national honour
is wide awake.
France fills an important place in the plan of this book, because
Paris, thanks to the superiority of its conversation and its
literature, is, and will always be, the _salon_ of Europe.
Three-quarters of the _billets_ in Vienna, as in London, are written in
French or are full of French allusions and quotations--Lord knows what
French![1]
As regards great passions, France, in my opinion, is void of
originality from two causes:--
1. True honour--the desire to resemble Bayard(26)--in order to be
honoured in the world and there, every day, to see your vanity
satisfied.
2. The fool's honour, or the desire to resemble the upper classes, the
fashionable world of Paris. The art of entering a drawing-room, of
showing aversion to a rival, of breaking with your mistress, etc.
The fool's honour is much more useful than true honour in ministering
to the pleasures of our vanity,
[Pg 163]
both in itself, as being intelligible to fools, and also as being
applicable to the actions of every day and every hour. We see people,
with only this fool's honour and without true honour, very well
received in society; but the contrary is impossible.
This is the way of the fashionable world:--
1. To treat all great interests ironically. 'Tis natural enough.
Formerly people, really in society, could not be profoundly affected
by anything; they hadn't the time. Residence in the country has
altered all this. Besides, it is contrary to a Frenchman's nature to
let himself be seen in a posture of admiration,[2] that is to say,
in a position of inferiority, not only in relation to the object of
his admiration--that goes without saying--but also in relation to his
neighbour, if his neighbour choose to mock at what he admires.
In Germany, Italy and Spain, on the contrary, admiration is genuine and
happy; there the admirer is proud of his transports and pities the man
who turns up his nose. I don't say the mocker, for that's an impossible
rôle in countries, where it is not in failing in the imitation of
a particular line of conduct, but in failing to strike the road to
happiness, that the only ridicule exists. In the South, mistrust and
horror at being troubled in the midst of pleasures vividly felt, plants
in men an inborn admiration of luxury and pomp. See the Courts of
Madrid and Naples; see a _funzione_ at Cadiz--things are carried to a
point of delirium.[3]
2. A Frenchman thinks himself the most miserable of men, and almost the
most ridiculous, if he is obliged to spend his time alone. But what is
love without solitude?
3. A passionate man thinks only of himself; a man
[Pg 164]
who wants consideration thinks only of others. Nay more: before 1789,
individual security was only found in France by becoming one of a body,
the Robe, for example,[4] and by being protected by the members of
that body. The thoughts of your neighbour were then an integral and
necessary part of your happiness. This was still truer at the Court
than in Paris. It is easy to
[Pg 165]
see how far such manners, which, to say the truth, are every day losing
their force, but which Frenchmen will retain for another century, are
favourable to great passions.
Try to imagine a man throwing himself from a window, and at the same
time trying to reach the pavement in a graceful position.
In France, the passionate man, merely as such, and in no other
light, is the object of general ridicule. Altogether, he offends his
fellow-men, and that gives wings to ridicule.
[1] In England, the gravest writers think they give themselves a smart
tone by quoting French words, which, for the most part, have never been
French, except in English grammars. See the writers for the _Edinburgh
Review_; see the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Lichtnau, mistress of the
last King of Prussia but one.
[2] The fashionable admiration of Hume in 1775, for example, or of
Franklin in 1784, is no objection to what I say.
[3] _Voyage en Espagne_, by M. Semple; he gives a true picture, and the
reader will find a description of the Battle of Trafalgar, heard in the
distance which sticks in the memory.
[4] _Correspondance_ of Grimm, January, 1783. "Comte de N----,
Captain commanding the guards of the Duke of Orleans, being piqued at
finding no place left in the balcony, the day of the opening of the
new hall, was so ill-advised as to dispute his place with an honest
Procureur; the latter, one Maître Pernot, was by no means willing to
give it up.--'You've taken my place.'--'I'm in my own.'--'Who are
you?'--'I'm Mr. Six Francs'... (that is to say, the price of these
places). Then, angrier words, insults, jostling. Comte de N---- pushed
his indiscretion so far as to treat the poor joker as a thief, and
finally took it upon himself to order the sergeant on duty to arrest
the person of the Procureur, and to conduct him to the guard-room.
Maître Pernot surrendered with great dignity, and went out, only to go
and depose his complaint before a Commissary. The redoubtable body, of
which he had the honour to be a member, had no intention of letting the
matter drop. The affair came up before the Parlement. M. de N---- was
condemned to pay all the expenses, to make reparation to the Procureur,
to pay him two thousand crowns damages and interest, which were to
be applied, with the Procureur's consent, to the poor prisoners of
the Conciergerie; further, the said Count was very expressly enjoined
never again, under pretext of the king's orders, to interfere with
a performance, etc. This adventure made a lot of noise, and great
interests were mixed up in it: the whole Robe has considered itself
insulted by an outrage done to a man who wears its livery, etc. M. de
N----, that his affair may be forgotten, has gone to seek his laurels
at the Camp of St. Roch. He couldn't do better, people say, for no one
can doubt of his talent for carrying places by sheer force. Now suppose
an obscure philosopher in the place of Maître Pernot. Use of the Duel.
(Grimm, Part III, Vol. II, p. 102.)
See further on, p. 496, a most sensible letter of Beaumarchais refusing
a closed box (_loge grillée_) for Figaro, which one of his friends had
asked of him. So long as people thought that his answer was addressed
to a Duke, there was great excitement, and they talked about severe
punishment. But it turned to laughter when Beaumarchais declared that
his letter was addressed to Monsieur le Président du Paty. It is a far
cry from 1785 to 1822! We no longer understand these feelings. And yet
people pretend that the same tragedies that touched those generations
are still good for us!
[Pg 166]
CHAPTER XLIII
ITALY(27)
Italy's good fortune is that it has been left to the inspiration of the
moment, a good fortune which it shares, up to a certain point, with
Germany and England.
Furthermore, Italy is a country where Utility, which was the guiding
principle of the mediæval republic,[1] has not been dethroned by Honour
or Virtue, disposed to the advantages of monarchy.[2] True honour leads
the way to the fool's honour. It accustoms men to ask themselves: What
[Pg 167]
will my neighbour think of my happiness? But how can happiness of the
heart be an object of vanity, since no one can see it.?[3] In proof of
all this, France is the country, where there are fewer marriages from
inclination than anywhere else in the world.[4]
And Italy has other advantages. The Italian has undisturbed leisure and
an admirable climate, which makes men sensible to beauty under every
form. He is extremely, yet reasonably, mistrustful, which increases the
aloofness of intimate love and doubles its charms. He reads no novels,
indeed hardly any books, and this leaves still more to the inspiration
of the moment. He has a passion for music, which excites in the soul a
movement very similar to that of love.
In France, towards 1770, there was no mistrust.; on the contrary, it
was good form to live and die before the public. As the Duchess of
Luxemburg was intimate with a hundred friends, there was no intimacy
and no friendship, properly so-called.
In Italy, passion, since it is not a very rare distinction, is not a
subject of ridicule,[5] and you may hear people in the _salons_ openly
quoting general maxims of love. The public knows the symptoms and
periods of this illness, and is very much concerned with it. They say
to a man who has been deserted: "You'll be in despair for six months,
but you'll get over it in the end, like So-and-so, etc."
In Italy, public opinion is the very humble attendant on passion. Real
pleasure there exercises the power, which elsewhere is in the hands of
society. 'Tis quite simple--for society can give scarcely any pleasure
to a people, who has no time to be vain, and can have
[Pg 168]
but little authority over those, who are only trying to escape the
notice of their "pacha"(29). The _blasés_ censure the passionate--but
who cares for them? South of the Alps, society is a despot without a
prison.
As in Paris honour challenges, sword in hand, or, if possible, _bon
mot_ in the mouth, every approach to every recognised great interest,
it is much more convenient to take refuge in irony. Many young men have
taken up a different attitude, and become disciples of J. J. Rousseau
and Madame de Staël. As irony had become vulgar, one had to fall back
on feelings. A. de Pezai in our days writes like M. Darlincourt.
Besides, since 1789, everything tends to favour utility or individual
sensibility, as opposed to honour or the empire of opinion. The sight
of the two Chambers teaches people to discuss everything, even mere
nonsense. The nation is becoming serious, and gallantry is losing
ground.
As a Frenchman, I ought to say that it is not a small number of
colossal fortunes, but the multiplicity of middling ones, that makes
up the riches of a country. In every country passion is rare, and
gallantry is more graceful and refined: in France, as a consequence, it
has better fortune. This great nation, the first in the world,[6] has
the same kind of aptitude for love as for intellectual achievements.
In 1822 we have, to be sure, no Moore, no Walter Scott, no Crabbe,
no Byron, no Monti, no Pellico; but we have among us more men of
intellect, clear-sighted, agreeable and up to the level of the lights
of this century, than England has, or Italy. It is for this reason that
the debates in our Chamber of Deputies in 1822, are so superior to
those in the English Parliament, and that when a Liberal from England
comes to France, we are quite surprised to find in him several opinions
which are distinctly feudal.
[Pg 169]
A Roman artist wrote from Paris:--
I am exceedingly uncomfortable here; I suppose it's because I have no
leisure for falling in love at my ease. Here, sensibility is spent
drop by drop, just as it forms, in such a way, at least so I find it,
as to be a drain on the source. At Rome, owing to the little interest
created by the events of every day and the somnolence of the outside
world, sensibility accumulates to the profit of passion.
[1] G. Pecchio, in his very lively _Letters_ to a beautiful young
English woman, says on the subject of free Spain, where the Middle Ages
are not a revival, but have never ceased to exist (p. 60): "The aim of
the Spaniards was not glory, but independence. If the Spaniards had
only fought for honour, the war had ended with the battle of Tudela.
Honour is a thing of an odd nature--once soiled, it loses all its power
of action. ... The Spanish army of the line, having become imbued in
its turn with prejudices in favour of honour (that means having become
modern-European) disbanded, once beaten, with the thought that, with
honour, all was lost, etc."
[2] In 1620 a man was honoured by saying unceasingly and as servilely
as he could: "The King my Master" (See the Memoirs of Noailles, Torcy
and all Lewis XIV's ambassadors). Quite simple--by this turn of phrase,
he proclaims the rank he occupies among subjects. This rank, dependent
on the King, takes the place, in the eyes and esteem of these subjects,
of the rank which in ancient Rome depended on the good opinion of his
fellow-citizens, who had seen him fighting at Trasimene and speaking
in the Forum. You can batter down absolute monarchy by destroying
vanity and its advance works, which it calls _conventions_. The dispute
between Shakespeare and Racine(28) is only one form of the dispute
between Louis XIV and constitutional government.
[3] It can only be estimated in unpremeditated actions.
[4] Miss O'Neil, Mrs. Couts, and most of the great English actresses,
leave the stage in order to marry rich husbands.
[5] One can allow women gallantry, but love makes them laughed at,
wrote the judicious Abbé Girard in Paris in 1740.
[6] I want no other proof than the world's envy. See the _Edinburgh
Review_ for 1821. See the German and Italian literary journals, and the
_Scimiatigre_ of Alfieri.
[Pg 170]
CHAPTER XLIV
ROME
Only at Rome[1] can a respectable woman, seated in her carriage, say
effusively to another woman, a mere acquaintance, what I heard this
morning: "Ah, my dear, beware of love with Fabio Vitteleschi; better
for you to fall in love with a highwayman! For all his soft and
measured air, he is capable of stabbing you to the heart with a knife,
and of saying with the sweetest smile, while he plunged the knife into
your breast: 'Poor child, does it hurt?'" And this conversation took
place in the presence of a pretty young lady of fifteen, daughter of
the woman who received the advice, and a very wide-awake young lady.
If a man from the North has the misfortune not to be shocked at first
by the candour of this southern capacity for love, which is nothing but
the simple product of a magnificent nature, favoured by the twofold
absence of _good form_ and of all interesting novelty, after a stay of
one year the women of all other countries will become intolerable to
him.
He will find Frenchwomen, perfectly charming, with their little
graces,[2] seductive for the first three days, but boring the
fourth--fatal day, when one discovers that all these graces, studied
beforehand, and learned by
[Pg 171]
rote, are eternally the same, every day and for every lover.
He will see German women, on the contrary, so very natural, and giving
themselves up with so much ardour to their imagination, but often with
nothing to show in the end, for all their naturalness, but barrenness,
insipidity, and blue-stocking tenderness. The phrase of Count
Almaviva(30) seems made for Germany: "And one is quite astonished, one
fine evening, to find satiety, where one went to look for happiness."
At Rome, the foreigner must not forget that, if nothing is tedious in
countries where everything is natural, the bad is there still more
bad than elsewhere. To speak only of the men,[3] we can see appearing
here in society a kind of monster, who elsewhere lies low--a man
passionate, clear-sighted and base, all in an equal degree. Suppose
evil chance has set him near a woman in some capacity or other: madly
in love with her, suppose, he will drink to the very dregs the misery
of seeing her prefer a rival. There he is to oppose her happier lover.
Nothing escapes him, and everyone sees that nothing escapes him; but he
continues none the less, in despite of every honourable sentiment, to
trouble the woman, her lover and himself. No one blames him--"That's
his way of getting pleasure."--"He is doing what gives him pleasure."
One evening, the lover, at the end of his patience, gives him a
kick. The next day the wretch is full of excuses, and begins again
to torment, constantly and imperturbably, the woman, the lover and
himself. One shudders, when one thinks of the amount of unhappiness
that these base spirits have every day to swallow--and doubtless there
is but one grain less of cowardice between them and a poisoner.
It is also only in Italy that you can see young and elegant
millionaires entertaining with magnificence, in
[Pg 172]
full view of a whole town, ballet girls from a big theatre, at a cost
of thirty halfpence a day.[4]
Two brothers X----, fine young fellows, always hunting and on
horseback, are jealous of a foreigner. Instead of going and laying
their complaint before him, they are sullen, and spread abroad
unfavourable reports of this poor foreigner. In France, public opinion
would force such men to prove their words or give satisfaction to
the foreigner. Here public opinion and contempt mean nothing. Riches
are always certain of being well received everywhere. A millionaire,
dishonoured and excluded from every house in Paris, can go quite
securely to Rome; there he will be estimated just according to the
value of his dollars.
[1] September 30th, 1819.
[2] Not only had the author the misfortune not to be born at Paris, but
he had also lived there very little. (Editor's note.)
[3] Heu! male nunc artes miseras haec secula tractant;
Jam tener assuevit munera velle puer. (Tibull., I, iv.)
[4] See in the manners of the age of Lewis XV how Honour and
Aristocracy load with profusion such ladies as Duthé, La Guerre
and others. Eighty or a hundred thousand francs a year was nothing
extraordinary; with less, a man of fashion would have lowered himself.
[Pg 173]
CHAPTER XLV
ENGLAND(31)
I have lived a good deal of late with the ballet-girls of the Teatro
Del Sol, at Valencia. People assure me that many of them are very
chaste; the reason being that their profession is too fatiguing. Vigano
makes them rehearse his ballet, the _Jewess of Toledo_, every day, from
ten in the morning to four, and from midnight to three in the morning.
Besides this, they have to dance every evening in both ballets.
This reminds me that Rousseau prescribes a great deal of walking for
Émile. This evening I was strolling at midnight with these little
ballet girls out along the seashore, and I was thinking especially how
unknown to us, in our sad lands of mist, is this superhuman delight
in the freshness of a sea breeze under this Valencian sky, under the
eyes of these resplendent stars that seem close above us. This alone
repays the journey of four hundred leagues; this it is that banishes
thought, for feeling is too strong. I thought that the chastity of my
little ballet girls gives the explanation of the course adopted by
English pride, in order, little by little, to bring back the morals of
the harem into the midst of a civilised nation. One sees how it is that
some of these young English girls, otherwise so beautiful and with so
touching an expression, leave something to be desired as regards ideas.
In spite of liberty, which has only just been banished from their
island, and the admirable originality of their national character, they
lack interesting ideas and originality. Often there is nothing
[Pg 174]
remarkable in them but the extravagance of their refinements. It's
simple enough--in England the modesty of the women is the pride of
their husbands. But, however submissive a slave may be, her society
becomes sooner or later a burden. Hence, for the men, the necessity
of getting drunk solemnly every evening,[1] instead of as in Italy,
passing the evening with their mistresses. In England, rich people,
bored with their homes and under the pretext of necessary exercise,
walk four or five leagues a day, as if man were created and put into
the world to trot up and down it. They use up their nervous fluid by
means of their legs, not their hearts; after which, they may well talk
of female refinement and look down on Spain and Italy.
No life, on the other hand, could be less busy than that of young
Italians; to them all action is importunate, if it take away their
sensibility. From time to time they take a walk of half a league for
health's sake, as an unpleasant medicine. As for the women, a Roman
woman in a whole year does not walk as far as a young Miss in a week.
It seems to me that the pride of an English husband exalts very
adroitly the vanity of his wretched wife. He persuades her, first of
all, that one must not be vulgar, and the mothers, who are getting
their daughters ready to find husbands, are quick enough to seize upon
this idea. Hence fashion is far more absurd and despotic in reasonable
England than in the midst of light-hearted France: in Bond Street was
invented the idea of the "carefully careless." In England fashion is
a duty, at Paris it is a pleasure. In London fashion raises a wall of
bronze between New Bond Street and Fenchurch Street far different from
that between the Chaussée d'Antin and the rue Saint-Martin at Paris.
Husbands are quite
[Pg 175]
willing to allow their wives this aristocratic nonsense, to make up
for the enormous amount of unhappiness, which they impose on them. I
recognise a perfect picture of women's society in England, such as the
taciturn pride of its men produces, in the once celebrated novels of
Miss Burney. Since it is vulgar to ask for a glass of water, when one
is thirsty, Miss Burney's heroines do not fail to let themselves die of
thirst. While flying from vulgarity, they fall into the most abominable
affectation.
Compare the prudence of a young Englishman of twenty-two with the
profound mistrust of a young Italian of the same age. The Italian must
be mistrustful to be safe, but this mistrust he puts aside, or at least
forgets, as soon as he becomes intimate, while it is apparently just
in his most tender relationships that you see the young Englishman
redouble his prudence and aloofness. I once heard this:--
"In the last seven months I haven't spoken to her of the trip to
Brighton." This was a question of a necessary economy of twenty-four
pounds, and a lover of twenty-two years speaking of a mistress, a
married woman, whom he adored. In the transports of his passion
prudence had not left him: far less had he let himself go enough to say
to his mistress: "I shan't go to Brighton, because I should feel the
pinch."
Note that the fate of Gianone de Pellico, and of a hundred others,
forces the Italian to be mistrustful, while the young English _beau_ is
only forced to be prudent by the excessive and morbid sensibility of
his vanity. A Frenchman, charming enough with his inspirations of the
minute, tells everything to her he loves. It is habit. Without it he
would lack ease, and he knows that without ease there is no grace.
It is with difficulty and with tears in my eyes that I have plucked up
courage to write all this; but, since I would not, I'm sure, flatter a
king, why should I say of a country anything but what seems to me the
[Pg 176]
truth? Of course it may be all very absurd, for the simple reason that
this country gave birth to the most lovable woman that I have known.
It would be another form of cringing before a monarch. I will
content myself with adding that in the midst of all this variety of
manners, among so many Englishwomen, who are the spiritual victims
of Englishmen's pride, a perfect form of originality does exist, and
that a family, brought up aloof from these distressing restrictions
(invented to reproduce the morals of the harem) may be responsible
for charming characters. And how insufficient, in spite of its
etymology,--and how common--is this word "charming" to render what I
would express. The gentle Imogen, the tender Ophelia might find plenty
of living models in England; but these models are far from enjoying the
high veneration that is unanimously accorded to the true accomplished
Englishwoman, whose destiny is to show complete obedience to every
convention and to afford a husband full enjoyment of the most morbid
aristocratic pride and a happiness that makes him die of boredom.[2]
In the great suites of fifteen or twenty rooms, so fresh and so dark,
in which Italian women pass their lives softly propped on low divans,
they hear people speak of love and of music for six hours in the day.
At night, at the theatre, hidden in their boxes for four hours, they
hear people speak of music and love.
Then, besides the climate, the whole way of living is in Spain or Italy
as favourable to music and love, as it is the contrary in England.
I neither blame nor approve; I observe.
[1] This custom begins to give way a little in very good society,
which is becoming French, as everywhere; but I'm speaking of the vast
generality.
[2] See Richardson: the manners of the Harlowe family, translated into
modern manners, are frequent in England. Their servants are worth more
than they.
[Pg 177]
CHAPTER XLVI
ENGLAND--(_continued_)
I love England too much and I have seen of her too little to be able to
speak on the subject. I shall make use of the observations of a friend.
In the actual state of Ireland (1822) is realised, for the twentieth
time in two centuries,[1] that curious state of society which is so
fruitful of courageous resolutions, and so opposed to a monotonous
existence, and in which people, who breakfast gaily together, may
meet in two hours' time on the field of battle. Nothing makes a
more energetic and direct appeal to that disposition of the spirit,
which is most favourable to the tender passions--to naturalness.
Nothing is further removed from the two great English vices--cant and
bashfulness,--moral hypocrisy and haughty, painful timidity. (See the
Travels of Mr. Eustace(32) in Italy.) If this traveller gives a poor
picture of the country, in return he gives a very exact idea of his own
character, and this character, as that of Mr. Beattie(32), the poet
(see his Life written by an intimate friend), is unhappily but too
common in England. For the priest, honest in spite of his cloth, refer
to the letters of the Bishop of Landaff.[2](32).
One would have thought Ireland already unfortunate enough, bled as
it has been for two centuries by the cowardly and cruel tyranny of
England; but now there
[Pg 178]
enters into the moral state of Ireland a terrible personage: the
PRIEST....
For two centuries Ireland has been almost as badly governed as Sicily.
A thorough comparison between these two islands, in a volume of five
hundred pages, would offend many people and overwhelm many established
theories with ridicule. What is evident is that the happiest of these
two countries--both of them governed by fools, only for the profit of
a minority--is Sicily. Its governors have at least left it its love of
pleasure; they would willingly have robbed it of this as of the rest,
but, thanks to its climate, Sicily knows little of that moral evil
called Law and Government.[3]
It is old men and priests who make the laws and have them executed,
and this seems quite in keeping with the comic jealousy, with which
pleasure is hunted down in the British Isles. The people there might
say to its governors as Diogenes said to Alexander: "Be content with
your sinecures, but please don't step between me and my daylight."[4]
By means of laws, rules, counter-rules and punishments, the Government
in Ireland has created the potato, and the population of Ireland
exceeds by far that of Sicily. This is to say, they have produced
several millions of degenerate and half-witted peasants, broken down by
[Pg 179]
work and misery, dragging out a wretched life of some forty or fifty
years among the marshes of old Erin--and, you may be sure, paying their
taxes! A real miracle! With the pagan religion these poor wretches
would at least have enjoyed some happiness--but not a bit of it, they
must adore St. Patrick.
Everywhere in Ireland one sees none but peasants more miserable than
savages. Only, instead of there being a hundred thousand, as there
would be in a state of nature, there are eight millions,[5] who allow
five hundred "absentees" to live in prosperity at London or Paris.
Society is infinitely more advanced in Scotland,[6] where, in very many
respects, government is good (the rarity of crime, the diffusion of
reading, the non-existence of bishops, etc.). There the tender passions
can develop much more freely, and it is possible to leave these sombre
thoughts and approach the humorous.
One cannot fail to notice a foundation of melancholy in Scottish women.
This melancholy is particularly seductive at dances, where it gives
a singular piquancy to the extreme ardour and energy with which they
perform their national dances. Edinburgh has another advantage, that
of being withdrawn from the vile empire of money. In this, as well
as in the singular and savage beauty of its site, this city forms
a complete contrast with London. Like Rome, fair Edinburgh seems
rather the sojourn of the contemplative life. At London you have the
ceaseless whirlwind and restless interests of active life, with all its
advantages and inconveniences. Edinburgh seems to me to pay its tribute
to the devil by a slight disposition to pedantry. Those days when Mary
Stuart lived at old Holyrood, and Riccio was assassinated in her arms,
were worth more to Love (and here all
[Pg 180]
women will agree with me) than to-day, when one discusses at such
length, and even in their presence, the preference to be accorded
to the neptunian system over the vulcanian system of ... I prefer a
discussion on the new uniform given by the king to the Guards, or on
the peerage which Sir B. Bloomfield(35) failed to get--the topic of
London in my day--to a learned discussion as to who has best explored
the nature of rocks, de Werner or de....
I say nothing about the terrible Scottish Sunday, after which a Sunday
in London looks like a beanfeast. That day, set aside for the honour
of Heaven, is the best image of Hell that I have ever seen on earth.
"Don't let's walk so fast," said a Scotchman returning from church to a
Frenchman, his friend; "people might think we were going for a walk."[7]
Of the three countries, Ireland is the one in which there is the least
hypocrisy. See the _New Monthly Magazine_ thundering against Mozart and
the _Nozze di Figaro_.[8]
In every country it is the aristocrats, who try to judge a literary
magazine and literature; and for the last four years in England these
have been hand in glove with the bishops. As I say, that of the three
countries where, it seems to me, there is the least hypocrisy, is
Ireland: on the contrary, you find there a reckless, a most fascinating
vivacity. In Scotland there is the strict observance of Sunday, but on
Monday they dance with a joy and an abandon unknown to London. There is
plenty of love among the peasant class in Scotland. The omnipotence of
imagination gallicised the country in the sixteenth century.
The terrible fault of English society, that which in a single day
creates a greater amount of sadness than the national debt and its
consequences, and even than the
[Pg 181]
war to the death waged by the rich against the poor, is this sentence
which I heard last autumn at Croydon, before the beautiful statue of
the bishop: "In society no one wants to put himself forward, for fear
of being deceived in his expectations."
Judge what laws, under the name of modesty, such men must impose on
their wives and mistresses.
[1] The young child of Spenser was burnt alive in Ireland.
[2] To refute otherwise than by insults the portraiture of a certain
class of Englishmen presented in these three works seems to me an
impossible task. Satanic school.
[3] I call moral evil, in 1822, every government which has not got two
chambers; the only exception can be when the head of the government is
great by reason of his probity, a miracle to be seen in Saxony and at
Naples.
[4] See in the trial of the late Queen of England(33), a curious list
of the peers with the sums which they and their families receive from
the State. For example, Lord Lauderdale and his family, £36,000.
The half-pint of beer that is necessary to the miserable existence
of the poorest Englishman, is taxed a halfpenny for the profit of
the noble peer. And, what is very much to the point, both of them
know it. As a result, neither the lord nor the peasant have leisure
enough to think of love; they are sharpening their arms, the one
publicly and haughtily, the other secretly and enraged. (Yeomanry and
Whiteboys.)(34).
[5] Plunkett Craig, _Life of Curran_.
[6] Degree of civilisation to be seen in the peasant Robert Burns and
his family; a peasants' club with a penny subscription each meeting;
the questions discussed there. (See the Letters of Burns.)
[7] The same in America. In Scotland, display of titles.
[8] January, 1822, _Cant_.
[Pg 182]
CHAPTER XLVII
SPAIN(36)
Andalusia is one of the most charming sojourns that Pleasure has chosen
for itself on earth. I had three or four anecdotes to show how my ideas
about the three or four different acts of madness, which together
constitute Love, hold good for Spain: I have been advised to sacrifice
them to French refinement. In vain I protested that I wrote in French,
but emphatically not French literature. God preserve me from having
anything in common with the French writers esteemed to-day!
The Moors, when they abandoned Andalusia, left it their architecture
and much of their manners. Since it is impossible for me to speak
of the latter in the language of Madame de Sévigné, I'll at least
say this of Moorish architecture:--its principal trait consists in
providing every house with a little garden surrounded by an elegant and
graceful portico. There, during the unbearable heat of summer, when
for whole weeks together the Réaumur thermometer never falls below
a constant level of thirty degrees, a delicious obscurity pervades
these porticoes. In the middle of the little garden there is always
a fountain, monotonous and voluptuous, whose sound is all that stirs
this charming retreat. The marble basin is surrounded by a dozen
orange-trees and laurels. A thick canvas, like a tent, covers in the
whole of the little garden, and, while it protects it from the rays of
the sun and from the light, lets in the gentle
[Pg 183]
breezes which, at midday, come down from the mountains.
There live and receive their guests the fair ladies of Andalusia: a
simple black silk robe, ornamented with fringes of the same colour,
and giving glimpses of a charming ankle; a pale complexion and eyes
that mirror all the most fugitive shades of the most tender and ardent
passion--such are the celestial beings, whom I am forbidden to bring
upon the scene.
I look upon the Spanish people as the living representatives of the
Middle Age.
It is ignorant of a mass of little truths (the puerile vanity of its
neighbours); but it has a profound knowledge of great truths and
enough character and wit to follow their consequences down to their
most remote effects. The Spanish character offers a fine contrast to
French intellect--hard, brusque, inelegant, full of savage pride, and
unconcerned with others. It is just the contrast of the fifteenth with
the eighteenth century.
Spain provides me with a good contrast; the only people, that was able
to withstand Napoleon, seems to me to be absolutely lacking in the
fool's honour and in all that is foolish in honour.
Instead of making fine military ordinances, of changing uniforms
every six months and of wearing large spurs, Spain has general _No
importa_.[1]
[1] See the charming Letters of M. Pecchio. Italy is full of people of
this wonderful type; but, instead of letting themselves be seen, they
try to keep quiet--_paese della virtù scunosciuta_--"Land of mute,
inglorious virtue.
[Pg 184]
CHAPTER XLVIII
GERMAN LOVE(37)
If the Italian, always agitated between love and hate, is a creature of
passion, and the Frenchman of vanity, the good and simple descendants
of the ancient Germans are assuredly creatures of imagination. Scarcely
raised above social interests, the most directly necessary to their
subsistence, one is amazed to see them soar into what they call their
philosophy, which is a sort of gentle, lovable, quite harmless folly.
I am going to cite, not altogether from memory, but from hurriedly
taken notes, a work whose author, though writing in a tone of
opposition, illustrates clearly, even in his admirations, the military
spirit in all its excesses--I speak of the Travels in Austria of M.
Cadet-Gassicourt, in 1809. What would the noble and generous Desaix
have said, if he had seen the pure heroism of '95 lead on to this
execrable egoism?
Two friends find themselves side by side with a battery at the battle
of Talavera, one as Captain in command, the other as lieutenant. A
passing bullet lays the Captain low. "Good," says the lieutenant,
quite beside himself with joy, "that's done for Francis--now I shall
be Captain." "Not so quick," cries Francis, as he gets up. He had only
been stunned by the bullet. The lieutenant, as well as the Captain,
were the best fellows in the world, not a bit ill-natured, and only
a little stupid; the excitement of the chase and the furious egoism
which the Emperor had succeeded in awakening, by decorating it with the
name of glory, made these enthusiastic worshippers of him forget their
humanity.
After the harsh spectacle offered by men like this, who
[Pg 185]
dispute on parade at Schoenbrunn for a look from their master and a
barony--see how the Emperor's apothecary describes German love, page
188:
"Nothing can be more sweet, more gentle, than an Austrian woman. With
her, love is a cult, and when she is attached to a Frenchman, she
adores him--in the full force of the word.
"There are light, capricious women everywhere, but in general the
Viennese are faithful and in no way coquettes; when I say that they are
faithful, I mean to the lover of their own choice, for husbands are the
same at Vienna as everywhere else" (June 7, 1809).
The most beautiful woman of Vienna accepts the homage of one of my
friends, M. M----, a captain attached to the Emperor's headquarters.
He's a young man, gentle and witty, but certainly neither his figure
nor face are in any way remarkable.
For some days past his young mistress has made a very great sensation
among our brilliant staff officers, who pass their life ferreting about
in every corner of Vienna. It has become a contest of daring. Every
possible manœuvre has been employed. The fair one's house has been
put in a state of siege by all the best-looking and richest. Pages,
brilliant colonels, generals of the guard, even princes, have gone
to waste their time under her windows, and their money on the fair
lady's servants. All have been turned away. These princes were little
accustomed to find a deaf ear at Paris or Milan. When I laughed at
their discomfiture before this charming creature: "But good Heavens,"
she said, "don't they know that I'm in love with M. M....?"
A singular remark and certainly a most improper one!
Page 290: "While we were at Schoenbrunn I noticed that two young men,
who were attached to the Emperor, never received anyone in their
lodgings at Vienna. We used to chaff them a lot on their discretion.
One of them said to me one day: 'I'll keep no secrets from
[Pg 186]
you: a young woman of the place has given herself to me, on condition
that she need never leave my apartment, and that I never receive anyone
at all without her leave.' I was curious," says the traveller, "to know
this voluntary recluse, and my position as doctor giving me, as in the
East, an honourable pretext, I accepted a breakfast offered me by my
friend. The woman I found was very much in love, took the greatest care
of the household, never wanted to go out, though it was just a pleasant
time of the year for walking--and for the rest, was quite certain that
her lover would take her back with him to France.
"The other young man, who was also never to be found in his rooms, soon
after made me a similar confession. I also saw his mistress. Like the
first, she was fair, very pretty, and an excellent figure.
"The one, eighteen years of age, was the daughter of a well-to-do
upholsterer; the other, who was about twenty-four, was the wife of
an Austrian officer, on service with the army of the Archduke John.
This latter pushed her love to the verge of what we, in our land of
vanity, would call heroism. Not only was her lover faithless to her,
he also found himself under the necessity of making a confession of
a most unpleasant nature. She nursed him with complete devotion; the
seriousness of his illness attached her to her lover; and perhaps she
only cherished him the more for it, when soon after his life was in
danger.
"It will be understood that I, a stranger and a conqueror, have had
no chance of observing love in the highest circles, seeing that the
whole of the aristocracy of Vienna had retired at our approach to their
estates in Hungary. But I have seen enough of it to be convinced that
it is not the same love as at Paris.
"The feeling of love is considered by the Germans as a virtue, as an
emanation of the Divinity, as something mystical. It is riot quick,
impetuous, jealous, tyrannical,
[Pg 187]
as it is in the heart of an Italian woman: it is profound and something
like illuminism; in this Germany is a thousand miles away from England.
"Some years ago a Leipsic tailor, in a fit of jealousy, waited for his
rival in the public garden and stabbed him. He was condemned to lose
his head. The moralists of the town, faithful to the German traditions
of kindness and unhampered emotion (which makes for feebleness of
character) discussed the sentence, decided that it was severe and,
making a comparison between the tailor and Orosmanes, were moved to
pity for his fate. Nevertheless they were unable to have his sentence
mitigated. But the day of the execution, all the young girls of
Leipsic, dressed in white, met together and accompanied the tailor to
the scaffold, throwing flowers in his path.
"No one thought this ceremony odd; yet, in a country which considers
itself logical, it might be said that it was honouring a species of
murder. But it was a ceremony--and everything which is a ceremony,
is always safe from ridicule in Germany. See the ceremonies at the
Courts of the small princes, which would make us Frenchmen die with
laughter, but appear quite imposing at Meiningen or Koethen. In the six
gamekeepers who file past their little prince, adorned with his star,
they see the soldiers of Arminius marching out to meet the legions of
Varus.
"A point of difference between the Germans and all other peoples: they
are exalted, instead of calming themselves, by meditation. A second
subtle point: they are all eaten up with the desire to have character.
"Life at Court, ordinarily so favourable to love, in Germany deadens
it. You have no idea of the mass of incomprehensible _minutiæ_ and the
pettinesses that constitute what is called a German Court,[1]--even the
Court of the best princes. (Munich, 1820).
[Pg 188]
"When we used to arrive with the staff in a German town, at the end
of the first fortnight the ladies of the district had made their
choice. But that choice was constant; and I have heard it said that
the French were a shoal, on which foundered many a virtue till then
irreproachable."
* * * * *
The young Germans whom I have met at Gottingen, Dresden, Koenigsberg,
etc., are brought up among pseudo-systems of philosophy, which are
merely obscure and badly written poetry, but, as regards their ethics,
of the highest and holiest sublimity. They seem to me to have inherited
from their Middle Age, not like the Italians, republicanism, mistrust
and the dagger, but a strong disposition to enthusiasm and good faith.
Thus it is that every ten years they have a new great man who's going
to efface all the others. (Kant, Steding, Fichte, etc. etc.[2])
Formerly Luther made a powerful appeal to the moral sense, and the
Germans fought thirty years on end, in order to obey their conscience.
It's a fine word and one quite worthy of respect, however absurd
the belief; I say worthy of respect even from an artist. See the
struggle in the soul of S---- between the third [sixth] commandment of
God--"Thou shalt not kill"--and what he believed to be the interest of
his country.
Already in Tacitus we find a mystical enthusiasm for women and love, at
least if that writer was not merely aiming his satire at Rome.[3]
One has not been five hundred miles in Germany,
[Pg 189]
before one can distinguish in this people, disunited and scattered,
a foundation of enthusiasm, soft and tender, rather than ardent and
impetuous.
If this disposition were not so apparent, it would be enough to reread
three or four of the novels of Auguste La Fontaine, whom the pretty
Louise, Queen of Prussia, made Canon of Magdeburg, as a reward for
having so well painted the Peaceful Life.[4]
I see a new proof of this disposition, which is common to all the
Germans, in the Austrian code, which demands the confession of the
guilty for the punishment of almost all crimes. This code is calculated
to fit a people, among whom crime is a rare phenomenon, and sooner
an excess of madness in a feeble being than the effect of interests,
daring, reasoned and for ever in conflict with society. It is precisely
the contrary of what is wanted in Italy, where they are trying to
introduce it--a mistake of well-meaning people.
I have seen German judges in Italy in despair over sentences of death
or, what's the equivalent, the irons, if they were obliged to pronounce
it without the confession of the guilty.
[1] See the Memoirs of the Margrave de Bayreuth and _Vingt ans de
séjour à Berlin_, by M. Thiébaut.
[2] See in 1821 their enthusiasm for the tragedy, the _Triumph of the
Cross_,(38) which has caused _Wilhelm Tell_ to be forgotten.
[3] I have had the good fortune to meet a man of the liveliest wit,
and at the same time as learned as ten German professors, and one who
discloses his discoveries in terms clear and precise. If ever M. F.(39)
publishes, we shall see the Middle Age revealed to our eyes in a full
light, and we shall love it.
[4] The title of one of the novels of Auguste La Fontaine. The peaceful
life, another great trait of German manners--it is the "farniente" of
the Italian, and also the physiological commentary on a Russian droski
and on the English "horseback."
[Pg 190]
CHAPTER XLIX
A DAY IN FLORENCE
FLORENCE, _February_ 12, 1819.
This evening, in a box at the theatre, I met a man who had some
favour to ask of a magistrate, aged fifty. His first question was:
"Who is his mistress? _Chi avvicina adesso?_" Here everyone's
affairs are absolutely public; they have their own laws; there is
an approved manner of acting, which is based on justice without any
conventionality--if you act otherwise, you are a _porco_.
"What's the news?" one of my friends asked yesterday, on his arrival
from Volterra. After a word of vehement lamentation about Napoleon
and the English, someone adds, in a tone of the liveliest interest:
"La Vitteleschi has changed her lover: poor Gherardesca is in
despair."--"Whom has she taken?"--"Montegalli, the good-looking officer
with a moustache, who had Princess Colonna; there he is down in the
stalls, nailed to her box; he's there the whole evening, because her
husband won't have him in the house, and there near the door you can
see poor Gherardesca, walking about so sadly and counting afar the
glances, which his faithless mistress throws his successor. He's very
changed and in the depths of despair; it's quite useless for his
friends to try to send him to Paris or London. He is ready to die, he
says, at the very idea of leaving Florence."
Every year there are twenty such cases of despair in high circles; some
of them I have seen last three or four
[Pg 191]
years. These poor devils are without any shame and take the whole world
into their confidence. For the rest, there's little society here, and
besides, when one's in love, one hardly mixes with it. It must not be
thought that great passions and great hearts are at all common, even in
Italy; only, in Italy, hearts which are more inflamed and less stunted
by the thousand little cares of our vanity, find delicious pleasures
even in the subaltern species of love. In Italy I have seen love from
caprice, for example, cause transports and moments of madness, such as
the most violent passion has never brought with it under the meridian
of Paris.[1]
I noticed this evening that there are proper names in Italian for a
million particular circumstances in love, which, in French, would need
endless paraphrases; for example, the action of turning sharply away,
when from the floor of the house you are quizzing a woman you are in
love with, and the husband or a servant come towards the front of her
box.
The following are the principal traits in the character of this
people:--
1. The attention, habitually at the service of deep passions, cannot
move rapidly. This is the most marked difference between a Frenchman
and an Italian. You have only to see an Italian get into a diligence or
make a payment, to understand "la furia francese." It's for this reason
that the most vulgar Frenchman, provided that he is not a witty fool,
like Démasure, always seems a superior being to an Italian woman. (The
lover of Princess D---- at Rome.)
2. Everyone is in love, and not under cover, as in France; the husband
is the best friend of the lover.
3. No one reads.
4. There is no society. A man does not reckon, in
[Pg 192]
order to fill up and occupy his life, on the happiness which he derives
from two hours' conversation and the play of vanity in this or that
house. The word _causerie_ cannot be translated into Italian. People
speak when they have something to say, to forward a passion, but they
rarely talk just in order to talk on any given subject.
5. Ridicule does not exist in Italy.
In France, both of us are trying to imitate the same model, and I am a
competent judge of the way in which you copy it.[2] In Italy I cannot
say whether the peculiar action, which I see this man perform, does not
give pleasure to the performer and might not, perhaps, give pleasure to
me.
What is affectation of language or manner at Rome, is good form or
unintelligible at Florence, which is only fifty leagues away. The same
French is spoken at Lyons as at Nantes. Venetian, Neapolitan Genoese,
Piedmontese are almost entirely different languages, and only spoken
by people who are agreed never to print except in a common language,
namely that spoken at Rome. Nothing is so absurd as a comedy, with
the scene laid at Milan and the characters speaking Roman. It is only
by music that the Italian language, which is far more fit to be sung
than spoken, will hold its own against the clearness of French, which
threatens it.
In Italy, fear of the "pacha"(29) and his spies causes the useful to be
held in esteem; the fool's honour simply doesn't exist.[3] Its place
is taken by a kind of petty hatred of society, called "petegolismo."
Finally, to make fun of a person is to make a mortal enemy, a
very dangerous thing in a country where the power and activity of
governments is limited to exacting taxes and punishing everything above
the common level.
[Pg 193]
6. The patriotism of the antechamber.
That pride which leads a man to seek the esteem of his fellow-citizens
and to make himself one of them, but which in Italy was cut off, about
the year 1550, from any noble enterprise by the jealous despotism of
the small Italian princes, has given birth to a barbarous product,
to a sort of Caliban, to a monster full of fury and sottishness, the
patriotism of the antechamber, as M. Turgot called it, _à propos_ of
the siege of Calais (the _Soldat laboureur_(40) of those times.) I have
seen this monster blunt the sharpest spirits. For example, a stranger
will make himself unpopular, even with pretty women, if he thinks fit
to find anything wrong with the painter or poet of the town; he will
be soon told, and that very seriously, that he ought not to come among
people to laugh at them, and they will quote to him on this topic a
saying of Lewis XIV about Versailles.
At Florence people say: "our Benvenuti," as at Brescia--"our Arrici":
they put on the word "our" a certain emphasis, restrained yet very
comical, not unlike the _Miroir_ talking with unction about national
music and of M. Monsigny, the musician of Europe.
In order not to laugh in the face of these fine patriots one must
remember that, owing to the dissensions of the Middle Age, envenomed by
the vile policy of the Popes,[4] each city has a mortal hatred for its
neighbour, and the name of the inhabitants in the one always stands in
the other as a synonym for some gross fault. The Popes have succeeded
in making this beautiful land into the kingdom of hate.
This patriotism of the antechamber is the greatest moral sore in
Italy, a corrupting germ that will still show its disastrous effects
long after Italy has thrown off the yoke of its ridiculous little
priests.[5] The form of this patriotism is an inexorable hatred for
everything foreign.
[Pg 194]
Thus they look on the Germans as fools, and get angry when someone
says: "What has Italy in the eighteenth century produced the equal of
Catherine II or Frederick the Great? Where have you an English garden
comparable to the smallest German garden, you who, with your climate,
have a real need of shade?"
7. Unlike the English or French, the Italians have no political
prejudices; they all know by heart the line of La Fontaine:--
Notre ennemi c'est notre M.[6]
Aristocracy, supported by the priest and a biblical state of society,
is a worn-out illusion which only makes them smile. In return, an
Italian needs a stay of three months in France to realise that a draper
may be a conservative.
8. As a last trait of character I would mention intolerance in
discussion, and anger as soon as they do not find an argument ready
to hand, to throw out against that of their adversary. At that point
they visibly turn pale. It is one form of their extreme sensibility,
but it is not one of its most amiable forms: consequently it is one
of those that I am most willing to admit as proof of the existence of
sensibility.
I wanted to see love without end, and, after considerable difficulty, I
succeeded in being introduced this evening to Chevalier C---- and his
mistress, with whom he has lived for fifty-four years. I left the box
of these charming old people, my heart melted; there I saw the art of
being happy, an art ignored by so many young people.
Two months ago I saw Monsignor R----, by whom I was well received,
because I brought him some copies of the _Minerve_. He was at his
country house with Madame D----, whom he is still pleased, after
thirty-four years, "_avvicinare_," as they say. She is still beautiful,
but there is a touch of melancholy in this household. People
[Pg 195]
attribute it to the loss of a son, who was poisoned long ago by her
husband.
Here, to be in love does not mean, as at Paris, to see one's mistress
for a quarter of an hour every week, and for the rest of the time to
obtain a look or a shake of the hand: the lover, the happy lover,
passes four or five hours every day with the woman he loves. He talks
to her about his actions at law, his English garden, his hunting
parties, his prospects, etc. There is the completest, the most tender
intimacy. He speaks to her with the familiar "_tu_," even in the
presence of her husband and everywhere.
A young man of this country, one very ambitious as he believed, was
called to a high position at Vienna (nothing less than ambassador). But
he could not get used to his stay abroad. At the end of six months he
said good-bye to his job, and returned to be happy in his mistress's
box at the opera.
Such continual intercourse would be inconvenient in France, where one
must display a certain degree of affectation, and where your mistress
can quite well say to you: "Monsieur So-and-so, you're glum this
evening; you don't say a word." In Italy it is only a matter of telling
the woman you love everything that passes through your head--you must
actually think aloud. There is a certain nervous state which results
from intimacy; freedom provokes freedom, and is only to be got in this
way. But there is one great inconvenience; you find that love in this
way paralyses all your tastes and renders all the other occupations of
your life insipid. Such love is the best substitute for passion.
Our friends at Paris, who are still at the stage of trying to conceive
that it's possible to be a Persian(71), not knowing what to say, will
cry out that such manners are indecent. To begin with, I am only an
historian; and secondly, I reserve to myself the right to show one day,
by dint of solid reasoning, that as regards
[Pg 196]
manners and fundamentally, Paris is not superior to Bologna.
Quite unconsciously these poor people are still repeating their
twopence-halfpenny catechism.
12 _July_, 1821. There is nothing odious in the society of Bologna. At
Paris the role of a deceived husband is execrable; here (at Bologna) it
is nothing--there are no deceived husbands. Manners are the same, it is
only hate that is missing; the recognised lover is always the husband's
friend, and this friendship, which has been cemented by reciprocal
services, quite often survives other interests. Most love-affairs last
five or six years, many for ever. People part at last, when they no
longer find it sweet to tell each other everything, and when the first
month of the rupture is over, there is no bitterness.
_January_, 1822. The ancient mode of the _cavaliere servente_, imported
into Italy by Philip II, along with Spanish pride and manners, has
entirely fallen into disuse in the large towns. I know of only one
exception, and that's Calabria, where the eldest brother always takes
orders, marries his younger brother, sets up in the service of his
sister-in-law and becomes at the same time her lover.
Napoleon banished libertinism from upper Italy, and even from here
(Naples).
The morals of the present generation of pretty women shame their
mothers; they are more favourable to passion-love, but physical love
has lost a great deal.[7]
[1] Of that Paris which has given the world Voltaire, Molière and so
many men of distinguished wit--but one can't have everything, and it
would show little wit to be annoyed at it.
[2] This French habit, growing weaker every day, will increase the
distance between us and Molière's heroes.
[3] Every infraction of this honour is a subject of ridicule in
bourgeois circles in France. (See M. Picard's _Petite Ville_.)
[4] See the excellent and curious _Histoire de l'Église_, by M. de
Potter.
[5] 1822.
[6] [Our enemy is our Master.--_Fables_, VI, 8.--Tr.]
[7] Towards 1780 the maxim ran:
Molti averne,
Un goderne,
E cambiar spesso
Travels of Shylock [Sherlock?--Tr.].
[Pg 197]
CHAPTER L
LOVE IN THE UNITED STATES(41)
A free government is a government which does no harm to its citizens,
but which, on the contrary, gives them security and tranquillity.
But 'tis a long cry from this to happiness. That a man must find for
himself; for he must be a gross creature who thinks himself perfectly
happy, because he enjoys security and tranquillity. We mix these things
up in Europe, especially in Italy. Accustomed as we are to governments,
which do us harm, it seems to us that to be delivered from them would
be supreme happiness; in this we are like invalids, worn out with
the pain of our sufferings. The example of America shows us just the
contrary. There government discharges its office quite well, and does
harm to no one. But we have been far removed, for very many centuries,
thanks to the unhappy state of Europe, from any actual experience of
the kind, and now destiny, as if to disconcert and give the lie to
all our philosophy, or rather to accuse it of not knowing all the
elements of human nature, shows us, that just when the unhappiness of
bad government is wanting to America, the Americans are wanting to
themselves.
One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is dried up
in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, but they are
essentially not happy.
Is the Bible, that is to say, the ridiculous consequences and rules of
conduct which certain fantastic wits deduce from that collection of
poems and songs, sufficient to cause all this unhappiness? To me it
seems a very considerable effect for such a cause.
[Pg 198]
M. de Volney related that, being at table in the country at the house
of an honest American, a man in easy circumstances, and surrounded by
children already grown up, there entered into the dining-room a young
man. "Good day, William," said the father of the family; "sit down."
The traveller enquired who this young man was. "He's my second son."
"Where does he come from?"--"From Canton."
The arrival of one of his sons from the end of the world caused no more
sensation than that.
All their attention seems employed on finding a reasonable arrangement
of life, and on avoiding all inconveniences. When finally they arrive
at the moment of reaping the fruit of so much care and of the spirit of
order so long maintained, there is no life left for enjoyment.
One might say that the descendants of Penn never read that line, which
looks like their history:--
Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
The young people of both sexes, when winter comes, which in this
country, as in Russia, is the gay season, go sleighing together day and
night over the snow, often going quite gaily distances of fifteen or
twenty miles, and without anyone to look after them. No inconvenience
ever results from it.
They have the physical gaiety of youth, which soon passes away with
the warmth of their blood, and is over at twenty-five. But I find no
passions which give pleasure. In America there is such a reasonable
habit of mind that crystallisation has been rendered impossible.
I admire such happiness, but I do not envy it; it is like the happiness
of human beings of a different and lower species. I augur much better
things from Florida and Southern America.[1]
[Pg 199]
What strengthens my conjecture about the North is the absolute lack of
artists and writers. The United States have not yet(42) sent us over
one scene of a tragedy, one picture, or one life of Washington.
[1] See the manners of the Azores: there, love of God and the
other sort of love occupy every moment. The Christian religion, as
interpreted by the Jesuits, is much less of an enemy to man, in this
sense, than English protestantism; it permits him at least to dance on
Sunday; and one day of pleasure in the seven is a great thing for the
agricultural labourer, who works hard for the other six.
[Pg 200]
CHAPTER LI
LOVE IN PROVENCE UP TO THE CONQUEST OF TOULOUSE, IN 1328, BY THE
BARBARIANS FROM THE NORTH
Love took a singular form in Provence, from the year 1100 up to 1328.
It had an established legislation for the relations of the two sexes in
love, as severe and as exactly followed as the laws of Honour could be
to-day. The laws of Love began by putting completely aside the sacred
rights of husbands. They presuppose no hypocrisy. These laws, taking
human nature such as it is, were of the kind to produce a great deal of
happiness.
There was an official manner of declaring oneself a woman's lover,
and another of being accepted by her as lover. After so many months
of making one's court in a certain fashion, one obtained her leave to
kiss her hand. Society, still young, took pleasure in formalities and
ceremonies, which were then a sign of civilisation, but which to-day
would bore us to death. The same trait is to be found in the language
of Provence, in the difficulty and interlacing of its rhymes, in its
masculine and feminine words to express the same object, and indeed in
the infinite number of its poets. Everything formal in society, which
is so insipid to-day, then had all the freshness and savour of novelty.
After having kissed a woman's hand, one was promoted from grade to
grade by force of merit, and without extraordinary promotion.
It should be remarked, however, that if the husbands
[Pg 201]
were always left out of the question, on the other hand the official
promotion of the lover stopped at what we should call the sweetness of
a most tender friendship between persons of a different sex.[1] But
after several months or several years of probation, in which a woman
might become perfectly sure of the character and discretion of a man,
and he enjoy at her hand all the prerogatives and outward signs which
the tenderest friendship can give, her virtue must surely have had to
thank his friendship for many a violent alarm.
I have spoken of extraordinary promotion, because a woman could have
more than one lover, but one only in the higher grades. It seems that
the rest could not be promoted much beyond that degree of friendship
which consisted in kissing her hand and seeing her every day. All that
is left to us of this singular civilisation is in verse, and in a verse
that is rhymed in a very fantastic and difficult way; and it need not
surprise us if the notions, which we draw from the ballads of the
troubadours, are vague and not at all precise. Even a marriage contract
in verse has been found. After the conquest in 1328, as a result of
its heresy, the Pope, on several occasions, ordered everything written
in the vulgar tongue to be burnt. Italian cunning proclaimed Latin the
only language worthy of such clever people. 'Twere a most advantageous
measure could we renew it in 1822.
Such publicity and such official ordering of love seem at first sight
to ill-accord with real passion. But if a lady said to her lover: "Go
for your love of me and visit the tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ at
Jerusalem; there you will pass three years and then return"--the lover
was gone immediately: to hesitate a moment would have covered him with
the same ignominy as would nowadays a sign of wavering on a point of
honour. The language of this people has an extreme fineness in
[Pg 202]
expressing the most fugitive shades of feeling. Another sign that their
manners were well advanced on the road of real civilisation is that,
scarcely out of the horrors of the Middle Ages and of Feudalism, when
force was everything, we see the feebler sex less tyrannised over than
it is to-day with the approval of the law; we see the poor and feeble
creatures, who have the most to lose in love and whose charms disappear
the quickest, mistresses over the destiny of the men who approach them.
An exile of three years in Palestine, the passage from a civilisation
full of gaiety to the fanaticism and boredom of the Crusaders' camp,
must have been a painful duty for any other than an inspired Christian.
What can a woman do to her lover who has basely deserted her at Paris?
I can only see one answer to be made here: at Paris no self-respecting
woman has a lover. Certainly prudence has much more right to counsel
the woman of to-day not to abandon herself to passion-love. But does
not another prudence, which, of course, I am far from approving,
counsel her to make up for it with physical love? Our hypocrisy and
asceticism[2] imply no homage to virtue; for you can never oppose
nature with impunity: there is only less happiness on earth and
infinitely less generous inspiration.
A lover who, after ten years of intimate intercourse, deserted his poor
mistress, because he began to notice her two-and-thirty years, was lost
to honour in this lovable Provence; he had no resource left but to bury
himself in the solitude of a cloister. In those days it was to the
interest of a man, not only of generosity but even of prudence, to make
display of no more passion than he really had. We conjecture all this;
for very few remains are left to give us any exact notions....
We must judge manners as a whole, by certain particular facts. You know
the anecdote of the poet who
[Pg 203]
had offended his lady: after two years of despair she deigned at last
to answer his many messages and let him know that if he had one of his
nails torn off and had this nail presented to her by fifty loving and
faithful knights, she might perhaps pardon him. The poet made all haste
to submit to the painful operation. Fifty knights, who stood in their
ladies' good graces, went to present this nail with all imaginable pomp
to the offended beauty. It was as imposing a ceremony as the entry of
a prince of the blood into one of the royal towns. The lover, dressed
in the garb of a penitent, followed his nail from afar. The lady, after
having watched the ceremony, which was of great length, right through,
deigned to pardon him; he was restored to all the sweets of his former
happiness. History tells that they spent long and happy years together.
Sure it is that two such years of unhappiness prove a real passion and
would have given birth to it, had it not existed before in that high
degree.
I could cite twenty anecdotes which show us everywhere gallantry,
pleasing, polished and conducted between the two sexes on principles
of justice. I say gallantry, because in all ages passion-love is an
exception, rather curious than frequent, a something we cannot reduce
to rules. In Provence every calculation, everything within the domain
of reason, was founded on justice and the equality of rights between
the two sexes; and I admire it for this reason especially, that it
eliminates unhappiness as far as possible. The absolute monarchy under
Lewis XV, on the contrary, had come to make baseness and perfidy the
fashion in these relations.[3]
Although this charming Provencal language, so full of delicacy and so
laboured in its rhymes,[4] was probably not
[Pg 204]
the language of the people, the manners of the upper classes had
permeated the lower classes, which in Provence were at that time far
from coarse, for they enjoyed a great deal of comfort. They were in
the first enjoyment of a very prosperous and very valuable trade. The
inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean had just realised (in
the ninth century) that to engage in commerce, by risking a few ships
on this sea, was less troublesome and almost as amusing as following
some little feudal lord and robbing the passers-by on the neighbouring
high-road. Soon after, the Provencals of the tenth century learnt from
the Arabs that there are sweeter pleasures than pillage, violence and
war.
One must think of the Mediterranean as the home of European
civilisation. The happy shores of this lovely sea, so favoured in
its climate, were still more favoured in the prosperous state of
their inhabitants and in the absence of all religion or miserable
legislation. The eminently gay genius of the Provencals had by then
passed through the Christian religion, without being altered by it.
We see a lively image of a like effect from a like cause in the cities
of Italy, whose history has come down to us more distinctly and which
have had the good fortune besides of bequeathing to us Dante, Petrarch
and the art of painting.
The Provencals have not left us a great poem like the _Divine Comedy_,
in which are reflected all the peculiarities of the manners of the
time. They had, it seems to me, less passion and much more gaiety than
the Italians. They learnt this pleasant way of taking life from their
neighbours, the Moors of Spain. Love reigned with joy, festivity and
pleasure in the castles of happy Provence.
Have you seen at the opera the finale of one of Rossini's beautiful
operettas? On the stage all is gaiety, beauty, ideal magnificence. We
are miles away from all the
[Pg 205]
mean side of human nature. The opera is over, the curtain falls, the
spectators go out, the great chandelier is drawn up, the lights are
extinguished. The house is filled with the smell of lamps hastily put
out; the curtain is pulled up half-way, and you see dirty, ill-dressed
roughs tumble on to the stage; they bustle about it in a hideous way,
occupying the place of the young women who filled it with their graces
only a moment ago.
Such for the kingdom of Provence was the effect of the conquest of
Toulouse by the army of Crusaders. Instead of love, of grace, of
gaiety, we have the Barbarians from the North and Saint Dominic. I
shall not darken these pages with a blood-curdling account of the
horrors of the Inquisition in all the zeal of its early days. As for
the Barbarians, they were our fathers; they killed and plundered
everywhere; they destroyed, for the pleasure of destroying, whatever
they could not carry off; a savage madness animated them against
everything that showed the least trace of civilisation; above all, they
understood not a word of that beautiful southern language; and that
redoubled their fury. Highly superstitious and guided by the terrible
S. Dominic, they thought to gain Heaven by killing the Provencals. For
the latter all was over; no more love, no more gaiety, no more poetry.
Less than twenty years after the conquest (1335), they were almost as
barbarous and as coarse as the French, as our fathers.[5]
Whence had lighted on this corner of the world that charming form of
civilisation, which for two centuries was the happiness of the upper
classes of society? Apparently from the Moors of Spain.
[1] Memoirs of the life of Chabanon, written by himself. The rapping of
a cane on the ceiling.
[2] The ascetic principle of Jeremy Bentham.
[3] The reader should have heard charming General Laclos talk at Naples
in 1802. If he has not had the luck he can open the _Vie privée du
maréchal de Richelieu_, nine volumes very pleasantly put together.
[4] It originated at Narbonne--a mixture of Latin and Arabic.
[5] See _The State of the Military Power of Russia_, a truthful work by
General Sir Robert Wilson.
[Pg 206]
CHAPTER LII(39)
PROVENCE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY
I am going to translate an anecdote from the Provençal manuscripts. The
facts, of which you are going to read, happened about the year 1180 and
the history was written about 1250.[1] The anecdote, to be sure, is
very well known: the style especially gives the colour of the society
which produced it.
I beg that I be allowed to translate it word for word, and without
seeking in any way after the elegance of the language of to-day.
"My Lord Raymond of Roussillon was a valiant baron, as you know, and
he took to wife my Lady Marguerite, the most beautiful woman of all
her time and one of the most endowed with all good qualities, with all
worth and with all courtesy. Now it happened that William of Cabstaing
came to the Court of my Lord Raymond of Roussillon, presented himself
to him and begged, if it so pleased him, that he might be a page in his
Court. My Lord Raymond, who saw that he was fair and of good grace,
told him that he was welcome and that he might dwell at his Court. Thus
William dwelt with him, and succeeded in bearing himself so gently
that great and small loved him; and he succeeded in placing himself in
so good a light that my Lord Raymond wished him to be page to my Lady
Marguerite, his wife; and
[Pg 207]
so it was. Then William set himself to merit yet more both in word and
deed. But now, as is wont to happen in love, it happened that Love
wished to take hold of my Lady Marguerite and to inflame her thoughts.
So much did the person of William please her, both his word and his
air, that one day she could not restrain herself from saying to him:
'Now listen, William, if a woman showed you likelihood of love, tell me
would you dare love her well?' 'Yes, that I would, madam, provided only
that the likelihood were the truth.'--'By S. John,' said the lady, 'you
have answered well, like a man of valour; but at present I wish to try
you, whether you can understand and distinguish in matter of likelihood
the difference between what is true and what is not.'
"When William heard these words he answered: 'My lady, it is as it
shall please you.'
"He began to be pensive, and at once Love sought war with him; and
the thoughts that love mingled with his entered into the depth of his
heart, and straightway he was of the servants of Love and began to
'find'[2] little couplets, gracious and gay, and tunes for the dance
and tunes with sweet words,[3] by which he was well received, and the
more so by reason of her for whom he sang. Now Love, that grants to
his servants their reward, when he pleases, wished to grant William
the price of his; and behold, he began to take hold of the lady with
such keen thoughts and meditations on love that neither night nor day
could she rest, thinking of the valour and prowess that had been so
beautifully disposed and set in William.
"One day it happened that the lady took William and said to him:
'William, come now, tell me, have you up to this hour taken note of our
likelihood, whether it truly is or lies?' William answered: 'My lady,
so help me God, from that moment onward that I have been your
[Pg 208]
servant, no thought has been able to enter my heart but that you were
the best woman that was ever born, and the truest in the world and the
most likely. So I think, and shall think, all my life.' And the lady
answered: 'William, I tell you that, if God help me, you shall never
be deceived by me, and that what you think shall not prove vain or
nothing.' And she opened her arms and kissed him softly in the room
where they two sat together, and they began their "_druerie_";[4]
and straightway there wanted not those, whom God holds in wrath, who
set themselves to talk and gossip of their love, by reason of the
songs that William made, saying that he had set his love on my Lady
Marguerite, and so indiscriminately did they talk that the matter
came to the ears of my Lord Raymond. Then he was sorely pained and
grievously sad, first that he must lose his familiar squire, whom he
loved so well, and more still for his wife's shame.
"One day it happened that William went out to hunt with his hawks and
a single squire; and my Lord Raymond made enquiry where he was; and
a groom answered him that he had gone out to hawk, and one who knew
added that it was in such-and-such a spot. Immediately Raymond took
arms, which he hid, and had his horse brought to him, and all alone
took his way towards the spot whither William had gone: by dint of
hard riding he found him. When William saw him approach he was greatly
astonished, and at once evil thoughts came to him, and he advanced to
meet him and said: 'My lord, welcome. Why are you thus alone?' My Lord
Raymond answered: 'William, because I have come to find you to enjoy
myself with you. Have you caught anything?'--'I have caught nothing, my
lord, because I have found nothing; and he who finds little will not
catch much, as the saying goes.'--'Enough of this talk,' said my Lord
Raymond, 'and by the faith
[Pg 209]
you owe me, tell me the truth on all the questions that I may wish to
ask.'--'By God, my lord,' said William, 'if there is ought to say,
certainly to you shall I say it.' Then said my Lord Raymond: 'I wish
for no subtleties here, but you must answer me in all fullness on
everything that I shall ask you.'--'My lord, as it shall please you
to ask,' said William, 'so shall I tell you the truth.' And my Lord
Raymond asked: 'William, as you value God and the holy faith, have
you a mistress for whom you sing and for whom Love constrains you?'
William answered: 'My lord, and how else should I be singing, if Love
did not urge me on? Know the truth, my lord, that Love has me wholly
in his power.' Raymond answered: 'I can well believe it, for otherwise
you could not sing so well; but I wish to know, if you please, who is
your lady.'--'Ah, my lord, in God's name,' said William, 'see what you
ask me. You know too well that a man must not name his lady, and that
Bernard of Ventadour says:--
"'In one thing my reason serves me,[5]
That never man has asked me of my joy,
But I have lied to him thereof willingly.
For this does not seem to me good doctrine,
But rather folly or a child's act,
That whoever is well treated in love
Should wish to open his heart thereon to another man,
Unless he can serve him or help him.'
"My Lord Raymond answered: 'And I give you my word that I will serve
you according to my power.' So said Raymond, and William answered him:
'My lord, you must know that I love the sister of my Lady Marguerite,
your wife, and that I believe I have exchange with her of love. Now
that you know it, I beg you to come to my aid and at least not to
prejudice me.'--'Take my word,' said Raymond, 'for I swear to you and
engage
[Pg 210]
myself to you that I will use all my power for you.' And then he gave
his word, and when he had given it to him Raymond said to him: 'I wish
us to go to her castle, for it is near by.'--'And I beg we may do so,
in God's name,' said William. And so they took their road towards
the castle of Liet. And when they came to the castle they were well
received by _En_[6] Robert of Tarascon, who was the husband of my Lady
Agnes, the sister of my Lady Marguerite, and by my Lady Agnes herself.
And my Lord Raymond took my Lady Agnes by the hand and led her into her
chamber, and they sat down on the bed. And my Lord Raymond said: 'Now
tell me, my sister-in-law, by the faith that you owe me, are you in
love with Love?' And she said: 'Yes, my lord.'--'And whose?' said he.
'Oh, that I do not tell you,' answered she; 'what means this parleying?'
"In the end, so insistently did he demand that she said that she loved
William of Cabstaing; this she said because she saw William sad and
pensive and she knew well that he loved her sister; and so she feared
that Raymond might have had evil thoughts of William. Such a reply
gave great joy to Raymond. Agnes related it all to her husband, and
her husband answered her that she had done well and gave her his word
that she was at liberty to do and say anything that could save William.
Agnes was not wanting to him. She called William all alone into her
chamber, and remained so long with him that Raymond thought he must
have had the pleasures of love with her; and all this pleased him, and
he began to think that what he had been told of William was untrue and
random talk. Agnes and William came out of her chamber, supper was
prepared and they supped with great gaiety. And after supper Agnes had
the bed of her two neighbours prepared by the door of her chamber,
[Pg 211]
and so well did the Lady and William act their parts that Raymond
believed he was with her.
"And the next day they dined in the castle with great joy, and after
dinner they set out with all the honours of a noble leave-taking,
and came to Roussillon. And as soon as Raymond could, he separated
from William and went away to his wife, and related to her all that
he had seen of William and her sister, for which his wife was sorely
grieved all night. And the next day she had William summoned to her and
received him ill, and called him false friend and traitor. And William
cried to her for pity, as a man who had done nought of that with which
she charged him, and related to her all that had passed, word for word.
And the lady sent for her sister and from her she learnt that William
had done no wrong. And therefore she called him and bade him make a
song by which he should show that he loved no woman but her, and then
he made the song which says:--
"The sweet thoughts
That Love often gives me.
"And when Raymond of Roussillon heard the song that William had made
for his wife, he made him come to speak with him some way from the
castle, and cut off his head, which he put in a bag; he drew out the
heart from the body and put it with the head. He went back to the
castle; he had the heart roasted and brought to his wife at table and
made her eat it without her knowing. When she had eaten it, Raymond
rose up and told his wife that what she had just eaten was the heart
of Lord William of Cabstaing, and showed her his head and asked her if
the heart had been good to eat. And she heard what he said, and saw and
recognised the head of Lord William. She answered him and said that
the heart had been so good and savoury, that never other meat or other
drink could take away from her mouth the taste that the heart of Lord
William had left there. And
[Pg 212]
Raymond ran at her with a sword. She took to flight, threw herself down
from a balcony and broke her head.
"This became known through all Catalonia and through all the lands of
the King of Aragon. King Alphonse and all the barons of these countries
had great grief and sorrow for the death of Lord William and of the
woman whom Raymond had so basely done to death. They made war on him
with fire and sword. King Alphonse of Aragon having taken Raymond's
castle, had William and his lady laid in a monument before the door of
a church in a borough named Perpignac. All perfect lovers of either sex
prayed God for their souls. The King of Aragon took Raymond and let him
die in prison, and gave all his goods to the relatives of William and
to the relatives of the woman who died for him."
[1] The manuscript is in the Laurentian Library. M. Raynouard gives it
in Vol. V of his _Troubadours_, p. 187. There are a good many faults in
his text; he has praised the Troubadours too much and understood them
too little.
[2] i. e. to compose.
[3] He made up both the airs and the words.
[4] A far all' amore.
[5] Word for word translation of the Provençal verses quoted by William.
[6] _En_, a form of speech among the Provençals, which we would
translate by _Sir_.
[Pg 213]
CHAPTER LIII
ARABIA
'Tis beneath the dusky tent of the Bedouin Arab that we seek the model
and the home of true love. There, as elsewhere, solitude and a fine
climate have kindled the noblest passion of the human heart--that
passion which must give as much happiness as it feels, in order to be
happy itself.
In order that love may be seen in all the fullness of its power over
the human heart, equality must be established as far as possible
between the mistress and her lover. It does not exist, this equality,
in our poor West; a woman deserted is unhappy or dishonoured. Under the
Arab's tent faith once plighted cannot be broken. Contempt and death
immediately follow that crime.
Generosity is held so sacred by this people, that you may steal, in
order to give. For the rest, every day danger stares them in the face,
and life flows on ever, so to speak, in a passionate solitude. Even in
company the Arabs speak little.
Nothing changes for the inhabitant of the desert; there everything is
eternal and motionless. This singular mode of life, of which, owing to
my ignorance, I can give but a poor sketch, has probably existed since
the time of Homer.[1] It is described for the first time about the year
600 of our era, two centuries before Charlemagne.
Clearly it is we who were the barbarians in the eyes of the East, when
we went to trouble them with our crusades.[2] Also we owe all that is
in our manner to these
[Pg 214]
crusades and to the Moors of Spain. If we compare ourselves with the
Arabs, the proud, prosaic man will smile with pity. Our arts are very
much superior to theirs, our systems of law to all appearance still
more superior. But I doubt if we beat them in the art of domestic
happiness--we have always lacked loyalty and simplicity. In family
relations the deceiver is the first to suffer. For him the feeling of
safety is departed; always unjust, he is always afraid.
In the earliest of their oldest historical monuments we can see the
Arabs divided from all antiquity into a large number of independent
tribes, wandering about the desert. As soon as these tribes were able
to supply, with more or less ease, the simplest human wants, their way
of life was already more or less refined. Generosity was the same on
every side; only according to the tribe's degree of wealth it found
expression, now in the quarter of goat's flesh necessary for the
support of life, now in the gift of a hundred camels, occasioned by
some family connexion or reasons of hospitality.
The heroic age of the Arabs, that in which these generous hearts burnt
unsullied by any affectation of fine wit or refined sentiment, was that
which preceded Mohammed; it corresponds to the fifth century of our
era, to the foundations of Venice and to the reign of Clovis. I beg
European pride to compare the Arab love-songs, which have come down
to us, and the noble system of life revealed in the _Thousand and One
Nights_, with the disgusting horrors that stain every page of Gregory
of Tours, the historian of Clovis, and of Eginhard, the historian of
Charlemagne.
Mohammed was a puritan; he wished to prescribe pleasures which do no
one any harm; he has killed love in those countries which have accepted
Islamism.[3] It is for this reason that his religion has always been
less
[Pg 215]
observed in Arabia, its cradle, than in all the other Mohammedan
countries.
The French brought away from Egypt four folio volumes, entitled _The
Book of Songs_. These volumes contain:--
1. Biographies of the poets who composed the songs.
2. The songs themselves. In them the poet sings of everything that
interests him; when he has spoken of his mistress he praises his
swiftcoursers and his bow. These songs were often love-letters from
their author, giving the object of his love a faithful picture of all
that passed in his heart. Sometimes they tell of cold nights when he
has been obliged to burn his bow and arrows. The Arabs are a nation
without houses.
3. Biographies of the musicians who have composed the music for these
songs.
4. Finally, the notation of the musical setting; for us these settings
are hieroglyphics. The music will be for ever unknown, and anyhow, it
would not please us.
There is another collection entitled _The History of those Arabs who
have died for Love_.
In order to feel at home in the midst of remains which owe so much
of their interest to their antiquity, and to appreciate the singular
beauty of the manners of which they let us catch a glimpse, we must go
to history for enlightenment on certain points.
From all time, and especially before Mohammed, the Arabs betook
themselves to Mecca in order to make the tour of the Caaba or house of
Abraham. I have seen at London a very exact model of the Holy City.
There are seven or eight hundred houses with terraces on the roofs, set
in the midst of a sandy desert devoured by the sun. At one extremity
of the city is found an immense building, in form almost a square;
this building surrounds the Caaba. It is composed of a long course of
colonnades, necessary under an Arabian sun for the performance of the
sacred procession, This colonnade is very
[Pg 216]
important in the history of the manners and poetry of the Arabs;
it was apparently for centuries the one place where men and women
met together. Pell-mell, with slow steps, and reciting in chorus
their sacred songs, they walked round the Caaba--it is a walk of
three-quarters of an hour. The procession was repeated many times in
the same day; this was the sacred rite for which men and women came
forth from all parts of the desert. It is under the colonnade of the
Caaba that Arab manners became polished. A contest between the father
and the lover soon came to be established--in love-lyrics the lover
discovered his passion to the girl, jealously guarded by brothers and
father, as at her side he walked in the sacred procession. The generous
and sentimental habits of this people existed already in the camp;
but Arab gallantry seems to me to have been born in the shadow of the
Caaba, which is also the home of their literature. At first, passion
was expressed with simplicity and vehemence, just as the poet felt it;
later the poet, instead of seeking to touch his mistress, aimed at fine
writing; then followed that affectation which the Moors introduced into
Spain and which still to-day spoils the books of that people.[4]
I find a touching proof of the Arab's respect for the weaker sex in his
ceremony of divorce. The woman, during the absence of her husband from
whom she wished to separate, opened the tent and drew it up, taking
care to place the opening on the opposite side to that which she had
formerly occupied. This simple ceremony separated husband and wife for
ever.
[Pg 217]
FRAGMENTS
Gathered and translated from an Arabic Collection entitled: _The Divan
of Love_(39)
Compiled by Ebn-Abi-Hadglat. (Manuscripts of the King's Library, Nos.
1461 and 1462.)
Mohammed, son of Djaafar Elahouazadi, relates that Djamil being sick of
the illness of which he died, Elabas, son of Sohail, visited him and
found him ready to give up the ghost. "O son of Sohail," said Djamil
to him, "what do you think of a man who has never drunk wine, who has
never made illicit gain, who has never unrighteously given death to any
living creature that God has forbidden us to kill, and who confesses
that there is no other God but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet?"
"I think," answered Ben Sohail, "that such a man will be saved and
will gain Paradise; but who is he, this man of whom you talk?" "'Tis
I," answered Djamil. "I did not think that you professed the faith,"
returned Ben Sohail, "and moreover, for twenty years now you have been
making love to Bothaina, and celebrating her in your verses." "Here I
am," answered Djamil, "at my first day in the other world and at my
last in this, and I pray that the mercy of our Master Mohammed may not
be extended to me at the day of judgment, if ever I have laid hands on
Bothaina for anything reprehensible."
This Djamil and Bothaina, his mistress, both belonged to the
Benou-Azra, who are a tribe famous in love among all the tribes of the
Arabs. Also their manner of loving has passed into a proverb, and God
has made no other creatures as tender in love as they.
Sahid, son of Agba, one day asked an Arab: "Of what people are you?" "I
am of the people that die when they love," replied the Arab. "Then you
are of the
[Pg 218]
tribe of Azra," added Sahid. "Yes, by the Master of the Caaba," replied
the Arab. "Whence comes it that you love in this manner?" Sahid asked
next. "Our women are beautiful and our young men are chaste," answered
the Arab.
One day someone asked Aroua-Ben-Hezam:[5] "Is it really true what
people tell of you, that you of all mankind have the heart most tender
in love?" "Yes, by Allah, it is true," answered Aroua, "and I have
known in my tribe thirty young men whom death has carried oil and who
had no other sickness but love."
An Arab of the Benou-Fazarat said one day to an Arab of the Benou-Azra:
"You, Benou-Azra, you think it a sweet and noble death to die of love;
but therein is a manifest weakness and stupidity; and those whom you
take for men of great heart are only madmen and soft creatures." "You
would not talk like that," the Arab of the tribe of Azra answered him,
"if you had seen the great black eyes of our women darting fire from
beneath the veil of their long lashes, if you had seen them smile and
their teeth gleaming between their brown lips!"
Abou-el-Hassan, Ali, son of Abdalla, Elzagouni, relates the following
story: A Mussulman loved to distraction the daughter of a Christian. He
was obliged to make a journey to a foreign country with a friend, to
whom he had confided his love. His business prolonged his stay in this
country, and being attacked there by a mortal sickness, he said to his
friend: "Behold, my time approaches; no more in the world shall I meet
her whom I love, and I fear, if I die a Mussulman, that I shall not
meet her again in the other life." He turned Christian and died. His
friend betook himself to the young Christian woman, whom he found sick.
She said to him:
[Pg 219]
"I shall not see my friend any more in this world, but I want to be
with him in the other; therefore I confess that there is no other God
but Allah, and that Mohammed is the prophet of God." Thereupon she
died, and may God's mercy be upon her.*
Eltemimi relates that there was in the tribe of the Arabs of Tagleb a
Christian girl of great riches who was in love with a young Mussulman.
She offered him her fortune and all her treasures without succeeding
in making him love her. When she had lost all hope she gave an artist
a hundred dinars, to make her a statue of the young man she loved. The
artist made the statue, and when the girl got it, she placed it in a
certain spot where she went every day. There she would begin by kissing
this statue, and then sat down beside it and spent the rest of the
day in weeping. When the evening came she would bow to the statue and
retire. This she did for a long time. The young man chanced to die; she
desired to see him and to embrace him dead, after which she returned to
her statue, bowed to it, kissed it as usual, and lay down beside it.
When day came, they found her dead, stretching out her hand towards
some lines of writing, which she had written before she died.*
Oueddah, of the land of Yamen, was renowned among the Arabs for his
beauty. He and Om-el-Bonain, daughter of Abd-el-Aziz, son of Merouan,
while still only children, were even then so much in love that they
could not bear to be parted from each other for a moment. When
Om-el-Bonain became the wife of Oualid-Ben-Abd-el-Malek, Oueddah became
mad for grief. After remaining a long time in a state of distraction
and suffering, he betook himself to Syria and began every day to prowl
around the house of Oualid, son of Malek, without at first finding
the means to attain his desire. In the end, he made the acquaintance
of a girl, whom he succeeded in attaching to himself by dint of his
perseverance and his pains. When he thought he could rely on her, he
[Pg 220]
asked her if she knew Om-el-Bonain. "To be sure I do," answered the
girl, "seeing she is my mistress." "Listen," continued Oueddah, "your
mistress is my cousin, and if you care to tell her about me, you will
certainly give her pleasure." "I'll tell her willingly," answered
the girl. And thereupon she ran straight to Om-el-Bonain to tell her
about Oueddah. "Take care what you say," cried Om-el-Bonain. "What?
Oueddah is alive?" "Certainly he is," said the girl. "Go and tell him,"
Om-el-Bonain went on, "on no account to depart until a messenger comes
to him from me." Then she took measures to get Oueddah brought to her,
where she kept him hidden in a coffer. She let him come out to be with
her when she thought it safe; but if someone arrived who might have
seen him, she made him get inside the coffer again.
It happened one day that a pearl was brought to Oualid and he said to
one of his attendants: "Take this pearl and give it to Om-el-Bonain."
The attendant took the pearl and gave it to Om-el-Bonain. As he was
not announced, he entered where she dwelt at a time when she was with
Oueddah, and thus he was able to throw a glance into Om-el-Bonain's
apartment without her noticing him. Oualid's attendant fulfilled his
mission and asked something of Om-el-Bonain for the jewel he had
brought her. She refused him with severity and reprimanded him. The
attendant went out incensed against her, and went to tell Oualid what
he had seen, describing the coffer into which he had seen Oueddah
enter. "You lie, bastard slave! You lie," said Oualid. And he ran in
haste to Om-el-Bonain. There were several coffers in her apartment; he
sat down on the one in which Oueddah was hid and which the slave had
described, saying: "Give me one of these coffers." "They are all yours,
as much as I myself," answered Om-el-Bonain. "Then," continued Oualid,
"I would like to have the one on which I am seated." "There are
[Pg 221]
some things in it that only a woman needs," said Om-el-Bonain. "It is
not them, it is the coffer I desire," added Oualid. "It is yours," she
answered. Oualid had the coffer taken away at once, and summoned two
slaves, whom he ordered to dig a pit in the earth down to the depth
where they would find water. Then placing his mouth against the coffer:
"I have heard something of you," he cried. "If I have heard the truth,
may all trace of you be lost, may all memory of you be buried. If they
have told me false I do no harm by entombing a coffer: it is only the
funeral of a box." Then he had the coffer pushed into the pit and
covered with the stones and the earth which had been dug up. From that
time Om-el-Bonain never ceased to frequent this spot and to weep, until
one day they found her there lifeless, her face pressed towards the
earth.*[6]
[1] Nine hundred years before Jesus Christ.
[2] 1095.
[3] Morals of Constantinople. The one way of killing passion-love is to
prevent all crystallisation by facility.
[4] There are a large number of Arabic manuscripts at Paris. Those of
a later date show some affectation, but no imitation of the Greeks or
Romans; it is this that makes scholars despise them.
[5] This Aroua-Ben-Hezam was of the tribe of Azra, of which mention has
just been made. He is celebrated as a poet, and still more celebrated
as one of the numerous martyrs to love whom the Arabs enumerate.
[6] These fragments are taken from different chapters of the collection
which I have mentioned. The three marked by an * are taken from the
last chapter, which is a very summary biography of a considerable
number of Arab martyrs to love.
[Pg 222]
CHAPTER LIV(43)
OF THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN
In the actual education of girls, which is the fruit of chance and the
most idiotic pride, we allow their most shining faculties, and those
most fertile in happiness for themselves and for us, to lie fallow. But
what man is there, who at least once in his life has not exclaimed:--
... a woman always knows enough
If but her range of understanding reaches
To telling one from t'other, coat and breeches.
(_Les Femmes Savantes_, Act II, Scene VII.)
[Translation of C. H. Page, New York, 1908. ]