At Paris, this is the highest praise for a young girl of a marriageable

age: "There is so much that's sweet in her character, and she's as

gentle as a lamb." Nothing has more effect on the idiots looking out

for wives. But see them two years later, lunching _tête-à-tête_ with

their wives some dull day, hats on and surrounded by three great

lackeys!

We have seen a law carried in the United States, in 1818, which

condemns to thirty-four strokes of the cat anyone teaching a Virginian

negro to read.[1] Nothing could be more consequent and more reasonable

than a law of this kind.

Were the United States of America themselves more useful to the

motherland when they were her slaves or since they have become her

equals? If the work of a

[Pg 223]

free man is worth two or three times that of a man reduced to slavery,

why should not the same be true of that man's thought?

If we dared, we would give girls the education of a slave; and the

proof of this is that if they know anything useful, it is against our

wish we teach it them.

"But they turn against us the little education which unhappily

they get hold of," some husbands might say. No doubt; and Napoleon

was also quite right not to give arms to the National Guard; and

the reactionaries are also quite right to proscribe the monitorial

system(44). Arm a man, and then continue to oppress him, and you will

see that he can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you, as soon

as he can.

Even if it were permissible to bring girls up like idiots, on _Ave

Marias_ and lewd songs, as they did in the convents of 1770, there

would still be several little objections:--

1. In the case of the husband's death, they are called upon to manage

the young family.

2. As mothers, they give their male children, the young tyrants of

the future, their first education, that education which forms the

character, and accustoms the soul to seek happiness by this route

rather than by that--and the choice is always an accomplished fact by

four or five.

3. In spite of all our pride, the advice of the inevitable partner of

our whole life has great influence on those domestic affairs on which

our happiness depends so particularly; for, in the absence of passion,

happiness is based on the absence of small everyday vexations. Not that

we would willingly accord this advice the least influence, but she may

repeat the same thing to us for twenty years together. Whose is the

spirit of such Roman fortitude as to resist the same idea repeated

throughout a whole lifetime? The world is full of husbands who let

themselves be led, but it is from weakness

[Pg 224]

and not from a feeling for justice and equality. As they yield

perforce, the wife is always tempted to abuse her power, and it is

sometimes necessary to abuse power in order to keep it.

4. Finally, in love, and during a period which, in southern countries,

often comprises twelve or fifteen years, and those the fairest of our

life, our happiness is entirely in the hands of the woman we love. One

moment of untimely pride can make us for ever miserable, and how should

a slave raised up to a throne not be tempted to abuse her power? This

is the origin of women's false refinement and pride. Of course, there

is nothing more useless than these pleas: men are despots and we see

what respect other despots show to the wisest counsels. A man who is

all-powerful relishes only one sort of advice, the advice of those that

tell him to increase his power. Where are poor young girls to find

a Quiroga or a Riego(45) to give the despots, who oppress them, and

degrade them the better to oppress them, that salutary advice, whose

just recompense are favours and orders instead of Porlier's(45) gallows?

If a revolution of this kind needs several centuries, it is because,

by a most unlucky chance, all our first experiences must necessarily

contradict the truth. Illuminate a girl's mind, form her character,

give her, in short, a good education in the true sense of the

word--remarking sooner or later her own superiority over other women,

she becomes a pedant, that is to say, the most unpleasant and the most

degraded creature that there is in the world. There isn't one of us who

wouldn't prefer a servant to a _savante_, if we had to pass our life

with her.

Plant a young tree in the midst of a dense forest, deprived of air and

sun by the closeness of the neighbouring trees: its leaves will be

blighted, and it will get an overgrown and ridiculous shape--_not_ its

natural shape. We ought to plant the whole forest at once. What woman

is there who is proud of knowing how to read?

[Pg 225]

Pedants have repeated to us for two thousand years that women were

more quick and men more judicious, women more remarkable for delicacy

of expression and men for stronger powers of concentration. A Parisian

simpleton, who used once upon a time to take his walk in the gardens of

Versailles, similarly concluded from all he saw that trees grow ready

clipped.

I will allow that little girls have less physical strength than little

boys: this must be conclusive as regards intellect; for everyone knows

that Voltaire and d'Alembert were the first boxers of their age!

Everyone agrees, that a little girl of ten is twenty times as refined

as a little boy of the same age. Why, at twenty, is she a great idiot,

awkward, timid, and afraid of a spider, while the little boy is a man

of intellect?

Women only learn the things we do not wish to teach them, and only

read the lessons taught them by experience of life. Hence the extreme

disadvantage it is for them to be born in a very rich family; instead

of coming into contact with beings who behave naturally to them,

they find themselves surrounded by maidservants and governesses, who

are already corrupted and blighted by wealth.[2] There is nothing so

foolish as a prince.

Young girls soon see that they are slaves and begin to look about them

very early; they see everything, but they are too ignorant to see

properly. A woman of thirty in France has not the acquired knowledge

of a small boy of fifteen, a woman of fifty has not the reason of a

man of twenty-five. Look at Madame de Sévigné admiring Louis XIV's

most ridiculous actions. Look at the puerility of Madame d'Épinay's

reasonings.[3]

"Women ought to nurse and look after their children." I deny the first

proposition, I allow the second. "They ought, moreover, to keep their

kitchen accounts."--And

[Pg 226]

so have not time to equal a small boy of fifteen in acquired knowledge!

Men must be judges, bankers, barristers, merchants, doctors, clergymen,

etc., and yet they find time to read Fox's speeches and the _Lusiad_ of

Camoëns.

The Pekin magistrate, who hastens at an early hour to the law courts

in order to find the means of imprisoning and ruining, in perfect

good faith, a poor journalist who has incurred the displeasure of

an Under-Secretary of State, with whom he had the honour of dining

the day before, is surely as busy as his wife, who keeps her kitchen

accounts, gets stockings made for her little daughter, sees her through

her dancing and piano lessons, receives a visit from the vicar of the

parish who brings her the _Quotidienne_, and then goes to choose a hat

in the Rue de Richelieu and take a turn in the Tuileries.

In the midst of his noble occupations this magistrate still finds time

to think of this walk his wife is taking in the Tuileries, and, if he

were in as good odour with the Power that rules the universe as with

that which rules the State, he would pray Heaven to grant women, for

their own good, eight or ten hours more sleep. In the present condition

of society, leisure, which for man is the source of all his happiness

and all his riches, is for women so far from being an advantage as to

rank among those baneful liberties, from which the worthy magistrate

would wish to help deliver us.

[1] I regret to be unable to find in the Italian manuscript the

quotation of an official source for this fact; I hope it may be found

possible to deny it.

[2] Memoirs of Madame de Staël, Collé, Duclos, the Margrave of Bayreuth.

[3] The first volume.

[Pg 227]

CHAPTER LV(43)

OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

"But women are charged with the petty labours of the household." The

Colonel of my regiment, M. S----, has four daughters, brought up on the

best principles, which means that they work all day. When I come, they

sing the music of Rossini, that I brought them from Naples. For the

rest, they read the Bible of Royaumont, they learn what's most foolish

in history, that is to say, chronological tables and the verses of Le

Ragois; they know a great deal of geography, embroider admirably--and I

expect that each of these pretty little girls could earn, by her work,

eight sous a day. Taking three hundred days, that means four hundred

and eighty francs a year, which is less than is given to one of their

masters. It is for four hundred and eighty francs a year that they lose

for ever the time, during which it is granted to the human machine to

acquire ideas.

"If women read with pleasure the ten or twelve good volumes that

appear every year in Europe, they will soon give up the care of their

children."--'Tis as if we feared, by planting the shore of the ocean

with trees, to stop the motion of the waves. It is not in this sense

that education is all-powerful. Besides, for four hundred years the

same objection has been offered to every sort of education. And yet a

Parisian woman has more good qualities in 1820 than she ever had in

1720, the age of Law's system and the Regency, and at that time the

daughter of the richest farmer-general had a less good education

[Pg 228]

than the daughter of the pettiest attorney gets to-day. Are her

household duties less well performed as a result? Certainly not. And

why? Because poverty, illness, shame, instinct, all force her to fulfil

them. It is as if you said of an officer who is becoming too sociable,

that he will forget how to handle his horse; you have to remember that

he'll break his arm the first time he's slack in the saddle.

_Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much

mischief to one sex as to the other_. We shall never lack vanity, even

in the completest absence of any reason for having it--look at the

middle class in a small town. Why not force it at least to repose on

real merit, on merit useful or agreeable to society?

Demi-fools, carried away by the revolution that is changing everything

in France, began twenty years ago to allow that women are capable of

something. But they must give themselves up to occupations becoming

their sex: _educate flowers, make friendships with birds, and pick up

plants_. These are called innocent amusements.

These innocent pleasures are better than idleness. Well! let's leave

them to stupid women; just as we leave to stupid men the glory of

composing verses for the birthday of the master of the house. But

do men in good faith really mean to suggest to Madame Roland or to

Mistress Hutchinson[1] that they should spend their time in tending a

little Bengal rose-bush?

All such reasoning can be reduced to this: a man likes to be able to

say of his slave: "She's too big a fool to be a knave."

But owing to a certain law called _sympathy_--a law of nature which, in

truth, vulgar eyes never perceive--the defects in the companion of your

life are not destructive of your happiness by reason only of the direct

ill they

[Pg 229]

can occasion you. I would almost prefer that my wife should, in a

moment of anger, attempt to stab me once a year, than that she should

welcome me every evening with bad spirits.

Finally, happiness is contagious among people who live together.

Let your mistress have passed the morning, while you were on parade

or at the House of Commons, in painting a rose after a masterpiece of

Redouté, or in reading a volume of Shakespeare, her pleasure therein

will have been equally innocent. Only, with the ideas that she has got

from her rose she will soon bore you on your return, and, indeed, she

will crave to go out in the evening among people to seek sensations a

little more lively. Suppose, on the contrary, she has read Shakespeare,

she is as tired as you are, she has had as much pleasure, and she will

be happier to give you her arm for a solitary walk in the Bois de

Vincennes than to appear at the smartest party. The pleasures of the

fashionable world are not meant for happy women.

Women have, of course, all ignorant men for enemies to their

instruction. To-day they spend their time with them, they make love

to them and are well received by them; what would become of them if

women began to get tired of Boston? When we return from America or the

West Indies with a tanned skin and manners that for six months remain

somewhat coarse, how would these fellows answer our stories, if they

had not this phrase: "As for us, the women are on our side. While you

were at New York the colour of tilburies has changed; it's grey-black

that's fashionable at present." And we listen attentively, for such

knowledge is useful. Such and such a pretty woman will not look at us

if our carriage is in bad taste.

These same fools, who think themselves obliged, in virtue of the

pre-eminence of their sex, to have more knowledge than women, would be

ruined past all hope, if

[Pg 230]

women had the audacity to learn something. A fool of thirty says to

himself, as he looks at some little girls of twelve at the country

house of one of his friends: "It's in their company that I shall spend

my life ten years from now." We can imagine his exclamations and his

terror, if he saw them studying something useful.

Instead of the society and conversation of effeminate men, an educated

woman, if she has acquired ideas without losing the graces of her sex,

can always be sure of finding among the most distinguished men of her

age a consideration verging on enthusiasm.

"Women would become the rivals instead of the companions of man." Yes,

as soon as you have suppressed love by edict. While we are waiting for

this fine law, love will redouble its charms and its ecstasy. These

are the plain facts: the basis on which crystallisation rests will be

widened; man will be able to take pleasure in all his ideas in company

of the woman he loves; nature in all its entirety will in their eyes

receive new charms; and as ideas always reflect some of the refinements

of character, they will understand each other better and will be guilty

of fewer imprudent acts--love will be less blind and will produce less

unhappiness.

The _desire of pleasing secures all that delicacy and reserve which are

of such inestimable value to women_ from the influence of any scheme of

education. 'Tis as though you feared teaching the nightingales not to

sing in the spring-time.

The graces of women do not depend on their ignorance; look at the

worthy spouses of our village bourgeois, look at the wives of the

opulent merchants in England. Affectation is a kind of pedantry; for I

call pedantry the affectation of letting myself talk out of season of a

dress by Leroy or a novel by Romagnesi, just as much as the affectation

of quoting Fra Paolo(46) and the Council of Trent _à propos_ of a

discussion on our own mild missionaries. It is the pedantry of dress

and good form, it

[Pg 231]

is the necessity of saying exactly the conventional phrase about

Rossini, which kills the graces of Parisian women. Nevertheless, in

spite of the terrible effects of this contagious malady, is it not

in Paris that exist the most delightful women in France? Would not

the reason be that chance filled their heads with the most just and

interesting ideas? Well, it is these very ideas that I expect from

books. I shall not, of course, suggest that they read Grotius of

Puffendorf, now that we have Tracy's(47) commentary on Montesquieu.

Woman's delicacy depends on the hazardous position in which she finds

herself so early placed, on the necessity of spending her life in the

midst of cruel and fascinating enemies.

_There are, perhaps, fifty thousand females in Great Britain who are

exempted by circumstances from all necessary labour:_ but without work

there is no happiness. Passion forces itself to work, and to work of an

exceedingly rough kind--work that employs the whole activity of one's

being.

A woman with four children and ten thousand francs income works by

making stockings or a frock for her daughter. But it cannot be allowed

that a woman who has her own carriage is working when she does her

embroidery or a piece of tapestry. Apart from some faint glow of

vanity, she cannot possibly have any interest in what she is doing. She

does not work.

And thus her happiness runs a grave risk.

And what is more, so does the happiness of her lord and master, for

a woman whose heart for two months has been enlivened by no other

interest than that of her needlework, may be so insolent as to imagine

that gallant-love, vanity-love, or, in fine, even physical love, is a

very great happiness in comparison with her habitual condition.

"A woman ought not to make people speak about

[Pg 232]

her." To which I answer once more: "Is any woman specially mentioned as

being able to read?"

And what is to prevent women, while awaiting a revolution in their

destiny, from hiding a study which forms their habitual occupation

and furnishes them every day with an honourable share of happiness.

I will reveal a secret to them by the way. When you have given

yourself a task--for example, to get a clear idea about the conspiracy

of Fiescho(48), at Genoa in 1547--the most insipid book becomes

interesting. The same is true, in love, of meeting someone quite

indifferent, who has just seen the person whom you love. This interest

is doubled every month, until you give up the conspiracy of Fiescho.

"_The true theatre for a woman is the sick-chamber._" But you must be

careful to secure that the divine goodness redoubles the frequency of

illnesses, in order to give occupation to our women. This is arguing

from the exceptional.

Moreover, I maintain that a woman ought to spend three or four hours of

leisure every day, just as men of sense spend their hours of leisure.

A young mother, whose little son has the measles, could not, even if

she would, find pleasure in reading Volney's Travels in Syria, any more

than her husband, a rich banker, could get pleasure out of meditating

on Malthus in the midst of bankruptcy.

There is one, and only one, way for rich women to distinguish

themselves from the vulgar: moral superiority. For in this there is a

natural distinction of feeling.[2]

"_We do not wish a lady to write books._" No, but does giving your

daughter a singing-master engage you to make her into an opera-singer?

If you

[Pg 233]

like, I'll say that a woman ought only to write, like Madame de Staël

(de Launay), posthumous works to be published after her death. For a

woman of less than fifty to publish is to risk her happiness in the

most terrible lottery: if she has the good fortune to have a lover, she

will begin by losing him.

I know but one exception: it is that of a woman who writes books in

order to keep or bring up her family. In that case she ought always to

confine herself to their money-value when talking of her own works,

and say, for example, to a cavalry major: "Your rank gives you four

thousand francs a year, and I, with my two translations from the

English, was able last year to devote an extra three thousand five

hundred francs to the education of my two boys."

Otherwise, a woman should publish as Baron d'Holbach or Madame de la

Fayette did; their best friends knew nothing of it. To print a book

can only be without inconvenience for a courtesan; the vulgar, who can

despise her at their will for her condition, will exalt her to the

heavens for her talent, and even make a cult of it.

Many men in France, among those who have an income of six thousand

francs, find their habitual source of happiness in literature, without

thinking of publishing anything; to read a good book is for them one of

the greatest pleasures. At the end of ten years they find that their

mind is enlarged twofold, and no one will deny that, in general, the

larger the mind the fewer will be its passions incompatible with the

happiness of others.[3] I don't suppose anyone will still deny that the

sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will have more genius

than the children of one who tells her beads and reads Madame de Genlis.

A young barrister, a merchant, an engineer can be

[Pg 234]

launched on life without any education; they pick it up themselves

every day by practising their profession. But what resources have

their wives for acquiring estimable or necessary qualities? Hidden

in the solitude of their household, for them the great book of life

necessarily remains shut. They spend always in the same way, after

discussing the accounts with their cook, the three _louis_ they get

every Monday from their husbands.

I say this in the interest of the tyrant: the least of men, if he

is twenty and has nice rosy cheeks, is a danger to a woman with no

knowledge, because she is wholly a creature of instinct. In the eyes

of a woman of intellect he will produce as much effect as a handsome

lackey.

The amusing thing in present-day education is that you teach young

girls nothing that they won't have to forget as soon as they are

married. It needs four hours a day, for six years, to learn to play

the harp well; to paint well in miniature or water-colours needs

half that time. Most young girls do not attain even to a tolerable

mediocrity--hence the very true saying: "Amateur means smatterer."[4]

And even supposing a young girl has some talent; three years after she

is married she won't take up her harp or her brushes once a month.

These objects of so much study now only bore her--unless chance has

given her the soul of an artist, and this is always a rarity and

scarcely helpful in the management of a household.

And thus under the vain pretext of decency you teach young girls

nothing that can give them guidance in the circumstances they will

encounter in their lives. You do more--you hide and deny these

circumstances in order to add to their strength, through the effect (i)

of surprise, and (ii) of mistrust; for education, once

[Pg 235]

found deceitful, must bring mistrust on education as a whole.[5] I

maintain that one ought to talk of love to girls who have been well

brought up. Who will dare suggest in good faith that, in the actual

state of our manners, girls of sixteen do not know of the existence of

love? From whom do they get this idea so important and so difficult

to give properly? Think of Julie d'Étanges deploring the knowledge

that she owes to la Chaillot, one of the maidservants. One must thank

Rousseau for having dared be a true painter in an age of false decency.

The present-day education of women being perhaps the most delightful

absurdity in modern Europe, strictly speaking the less education they

have, the better they are.[6] It is for this reason perhaps that in

Italy and Spain they are so superior to the men, and I will even say so

superior to the women of other countries.

[1] See the Memoirs of these admirable women. I could find other names

to quote, but they are unknown to the public, and moreover one cannot

even point to living merit.

[2] See Mistress Hutchinson refusing to be of use to her family and her

husband, whom she adored, by betraying certain of the regicides to the

ministers of the perjured Charles II. (Vol. II, p. 284.)

[3] It is this that gives me great hopes for the rising generation

among the privileged classes. I also hope that any husbands who read

this chapter will be milder despots for three days.

[4] The contrary of this proverb is true in Italy, where the loveliest

voices are heard among amateurs who have no connection with the theatre.

[5] The education given to Madame d'Épinay. (Memoirs, Vol. I.)

[6] I make an exception as regards education in manners: a woman enters

a drawing-room better in Rue Verte than in Rue St. Martin.

[Pg 236]

CHAPTER LVI(43)

OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

(_continued_)

In France all our ideas about women are got from a twopence-halfpenny

catechism. The delightful part of it is that many people, who would not

allow the authority of this book to regulate a matter of fifty francs,

foolishly follow it word for word in that which bears most nearly on

their happiness. Such is the vanity of nineteenth-century ways!

There must be no divorce because marriage is a mystery--and what

mystery? The emblem of the union of Jesus Christ with the Church. And

what had become of this mystery, if the Church had been given a name of

the masculine gender?[1] But let us pass over prejudices already giving

way,[2] and let us merely observe this singular

[Pg 237]

spectacle: the root of the tree sapped by the axe of ridicule, but the

branches continuing to flower.

Now to return to the observation of facts and their consequences.

In both sexes it is on the manner in which youth has been employed

that depends the fate of extreme old age--this is true for women

earlier than for men. How is a woman of forty-five received in society?

Severely, or more often in a way that is below her dignity. Women are

flattered at twenty and abandoned at forty.

A woman of forty-five is of importance only by reason of her children

or her lover.

A mother who excels in the fine arts can communicate her talent to

her son only in the extremely rare case, where he has received from

nature precisely the soul for this talent. But a mother of intellect

and culture will give her young son a grasp not only of all merely

agreeable talents, but also of all talents that are useful to man in

society; and he will be able to make his own choice. The barbarism

of the Turks depends in great part on the state of moral degradation

among the beautiful Georgians. Two young men born at Paris owe to their

mothers the incontestable superiority that they show at sixteen over

the young provincials of their age. It is from sixteen to twenty-five

that the luck turns.

The men who invented gunpowder, printing, the art of weaving,

contribute every day to our happiness, and the same is true of the

Montesquieus, the Racines and the La Fontaines. Now the number of

geniuses produced by a nation is in proportion to the number of men

receiving sufficient culture,[3] and there is nothing to prove to me

that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like

[Pg 238]

Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and

teach him to communicate them to the public.[4]

Owing to the present system of girls' education, all geniuses who are

born women are lost to the public good. So soon as chance gives them

the means of displaying themselves, you see them attain to talents the

most difficult to acquire. In our own days you see a Catherine II,

who had no other education but danger and ...; a Madame Roland; an

Alessandra Mari, who raised a regiment in Arezzo and sent it against

the French; a Caroline, Queen of Naples, who knew how to put a stop to

the contagion of liberalism better than all our Castlereaghs and our

Pitts. As for what stands in the way of women's superiority in works of

art, see the chapter on Modesty, article 9. What might Miss Edgeworth

not have done, if the circumspection necessary to a young English girl

had not forced her at the outset of her career to carry the pulpit into

her novel?

What man is there, in love or in marriage, who has the good fortune to

be able to communicate his thoughts, just as they occur to him, to the

woman with whom he passes his life? He may find a good heart that will

share his sorrows, but he is always obliged to turn his thoughts into

small change if he wishes to be understood, and it would be ridiculous

to expect reasonable counsel from an intellect that has need of such a

method in order to seize the facts. The most perfect woman, according

to the ideas of present-day education, leaves her partner isolated amid

the dangers of life and soon runs the risk of wearying him.

[Pg 239]

What an excellent counsellor would a man not find in a wife, if only

she could think--a counsellor, after all, whose interests, apart from

one single object, and one which does not last beyond the morning of

life, are exactly identical with his own!

One of the finest prerogatives of the mind is that it provides old age

with consideration. See how the arrival of Voltaire in Paris makes the

Royal majesty pale. But poor women! so soon as they have no longer the

brilliance of youth, their one sad happiness is to be able to delude

themselves on the part they take in society.

The ruins of youthful talents become merely ridiculous, and it were a

happiness for our women, such as they actually are, to die at fifty. As

for a higher morality--the clearer the mind, the surer the conviction

that justice is the only road to happiness. Genius is a power; but

still more is it a torch, to light the way to the great art of being

happy.

Most men have a moment in their life when they are capable of great

things--that moment when nothing seems impossible to them. The

ignorance of women causes this magnificent chance to be lost to the

human race. Love, nowadays, at the very most will make a man a good

horseman or teach him to choose his tailor.

I have no time to defend myself against the advances of criticism. If

my word could set up systems, I should give girls, as far as possible,

exactly the same education as boys. As I have no intention of writing a

book about everything and nothing, I shall be excused from explaining

in what regards the present education of men is absurd. But taking it

such as it is (they are not taught the two premier sciences, logic and

ethics), it is better, I say, to give this education to girls than

merely to teach them to play the piano, to paint in water-colours and

to do needlework.

Teach girls, therefore, reading, writing and arithmetic by the

monitorial(44) system in the central convent

[Pg 240]

schools, in which the presence of any man, except the masters, should

be severely punished. The great advantage of bringing children together

is that, however narrow the masters may be, in spite of them the

children learn from their little comrades the art of living in the

world and of managing conflicting interests. A sensible master would

explain their little quarrels and friendships to the children, and

begin his course of ethics in this way rather than with the story of

the Golden Calf.[5]

No doubt some years hence the monitorial system will be applied to

everything that is learnt; but, taking things as they actually are,

I would have girls learn Latin like boys. Latin is a good subject

because it accustoms one to be bored; with Latin should go history,

mathematics, a knowledge of the plants useful as nourishment or

medicine; then logic and the moral sciences, etc. Dancing, music and

drawing ought to begin at five.

At sixteen a girl ought to think about finding a husband, and get from

her mother right ideas on love, marriage, and the want of honesty that

exists among men.[6]

[1] Tu es Petrus, and super hanc petram

Ædificabo Ecclesiam meam.

(See M. de Potter, _Histoire de l'Église_.)

[2] Religion is a matter between each man and the Divinity. By what

right do you come and place yourself between my God and me? I accept a

proctor appointed by the social contract only in those matters which I

cannot do myself.

Why should not a Frenchman pay his priest like his baker? If we have

good bread in Paris, the reason is that the State has not yet ventured

to declare the provision of bread gratuitous and put all the bakers at

the charge of the Treasury.

In the United States every man pays his own priest. These gentry are

compelled to have some merit, and my neighbour does not see good to

make his happiness depend on submitting me to his priest. (Letters of

Birkbeck.)

What will happen if I have the conviction, as our fathers did, that my

priest is the intimate ally of my bishop? Without a Luther, there will

be no more Catholicism in France in 1850. That religion could only be

saved in 1820 by M. Grégoire(49): see how he is treated.

[3] See the Generals of 1795.

[4] As regards the arts, here we have the great defect of a reasonable

government as well as the sole reasonable eulogy of monarchy _à la_

Louis XIV. Look at the literary sterility of America. Not a single

romance like those of Robert Burns or the Spaniards of the thirteenth

century. See the admirable romances of the modern Greeks, those of the

Spaniards and Danes of the thirteenth century, and still better, the

Arabic poetry of the seventh century.

[5] My dear pupil, your father loves you; this makes him give me forty

francs a month to teach you mathematics, drawing--in a word, how to

earn your living. If you were cold, because your overcoat was too

small, your father would be unhappy. He would be unhappy because he

would sympathise, etc., etc. But when you are eighteen, you yourself

will have to earn the money needed to buy your overcoat. Your father,

I have heard, has an income of twenty-five thousand francs, but there

are four of you children; therefore you will have to accustom yourself

to do without the carriage you enjoy while you live with your father,

etc., etc.

[6] Yesterday evening I listened to two charming little girls of four

years old singing very gay love-songs in a swing which I was pushing.

The maidservants teach them these songs and their mother tells them

that "love" and "lover" are words without any meaning.

[Pg 241]

CHAPTER LVI

(Part II)

ON MARRIAGE

The fidelity of married women, where love is absent, is probably

something contrary to nature.[1]

Men have attempted to obtain this unnatural result by the fear of hell

and sentiments of religion; the example of Spain and Italy shows how

far they have succeeded.

In France they have attempted to obtain it by public opinion--the one

dyke capable of resistance, yet it has been badly built. It is absurd

to tell a young girl: "You must be faithful to the husband of your

choice," and then to marry her by force to a boring old dotard.[2]

[Pg 242]

"But girls are pleased to get married." Because, under the narrow

system of present-day education, the slavery that they undergo in

their mother's house is intolerably tedious; further, they lack

enlightenment; and, lastly, there are the demands of nature. There is

but one way to obtain more fidelity among married women: it is to give

freedom to girls and divorce to married people.

A woman always loses the fairest days of her youth in her first

marriage, and by divorce she gives fools the chance of talking against

her.

Young women who have plenty of lovers have nothing to get from divorce,

and women of a certain age, who have already had them, hope to repair

their reputation--in France they always succeed in doing so--by

showing themselves extremely severe against the errors which have

left them behind. It is generally some wretched young woman, virtuous

and desperately in love, who seeks a divorce, and gets her good name

blackened at the hands of women who have had fifty different men.

[1] Not probably--but certainly. With love there, one has no taste for

any water but that of the beloved fount. So far fidelity is natural.

In the case of marriage without love, in less than two years the water

of this fountain becomes bitter. Now the desire for water always exists

in nature. Habits may conquer nature, but only when it can be conquered

in an instant: the Indian wife who burns herself (October 21st, 1821),

after the death of the old husband whom she hated; the European girl

who barbarously murders the innocent child to whom she has just given

life. But for a very high wall the monks would soon leave the monastery.

[2] Even down to details, with us everything that regards the education

of women is comic. For example, in 1820, under the rule of these very

nobles who have proscribed divorce, the Home Office sends to the town

of Lâon a bust and a statue of Gabrielle d'Estrées. The statue is to be

set up in the public square, apparently to spread love of the Bourbons

among the young girls and to exhort them, in case of need, not to be

cruel to amorous kings and to give scions to this illustrious family.

But, in return, the same office refuses the town of Lâon a bust of

Marshal Serrurier, a brave man who was no gallant, and moreover had

been so vulgar as to begin his career by the trade of private soldier.

(Speech of General Foy, _Courrier_ of 17th June, 1820. Dulaure, in his

curious _History of Paris_, Amours of Henry IV.)

[Pg 243]

CHAPTER LVII

OF VIRTUE, SO CALLED

Myself, I honour with the name of virtue the habit of doing painful

actions which are of use to others.

St. Simon Stylites, who sits twenty-two years on the top of a column

beating himself with a strap, is in my eyes, I confess, not at all

virtuous; and it is this that gives this essay a tone only too

unprincipled.

I esteem not a bit more the Chartreux monk who eats nothing but fish

and allows himself to talk only on Thursday. I own I prefer General

Carnot, who, at an advanced age, puts up with the rigours of exile in a

little northern town rather than do a base action.

I have some hope that this extremely vulgar declaration will lead the

reader to skip the rest of this chapter.

This morning, a holiday, at Pesaro (May 7th, 1819), being obliged to go

to Mass, I got hold of a Missal and fell upon these words:--

Joanna, Alphonsi quinti Lusitaniae regis filia, tanta divini amoris

flamma praeventa fuit, ut ab ipsa pueritia rerum caducarum pertaesa,

solo coelestis patriae desiderio flagraret.

The virtue so touchingly preached by the very beautiful words of the

_Génie du Christianisme_(50) is thus reduced to not eating truffles

for fear of a stomach-ache. It is quite a reasonable calculation, if

you believe in hell; but it is a self-interested calculation, the most

personal and prosaic possible. That philosophic virtue, which so well

explains the return of Regulus to Carthage, and which was responsible

for some similar incidents in our

[Pg 244]

own Revolution,[1] proves, on the contrary, generosity of soul.

It is merely in order not to be burned in the next world, in a great

caldron of boiling oil, that Madame de Tourvel resists Valmont. I

cannot imagine how the idea, with all its ignominy, of being the rival

of a caldron of boiling oil does not drive Valmont away.

How much more touching is Julie d'Étanges, respecting her vows and the

happiness of M. de Wolmar.

What I say of Madame de Tourvel, I find applicable to the lofty virtue

of Mistress Hutchinson. What a soul did Puritanism steal away from love!

One of the oddest peculiarities of this world is that men always think

they know whatever it is clearly necessary for them to know. Hear them

talk about politics, that very complicated science; hear them talk of

marriage and morals.

[1] Memoirs of Madame Roland. M. Grangeneuve, who goes out for a walk

at eight o'clock in a certain street, in order to be killed by the

Capuchin Chabot. A death was thought expedient in the cause of liberty.

[Pg 245]

CHAPTER LVIII

STATE OF EUROPE WITH REGARD TO MARRIAGE

So far we have only treated the question of marriage according to

theory;[1] we are now to treat it according to the facts.

Which of all countries is that in which there are the most happy

marriages? Without dispute, Protestant Germany(52).

I extract the following fragment from the diary of Captain Salviati,

without changing a single word in it:--

"Halberstadt, _June 23rd_, 1807.... Nevertheless, M. de Bülow is

absolutely and openly in love with Mademoiselle de Feltheim; he follows

her about everywhere, always, talks to her unceasingly, and very often

keeps her yards away from us. Such open marks of affection shock

society, break it up--and on the banks of the Seine would pass for the

height of indecency. The Germans think much less than we do about what

breaks up society; indecency is little more than a conventional evil.

For five years M. de Bülow has been paying court in this way to Mina,

whom he has been unable to marry owing to the war. All the young ladies

in society have their lover, and he is known to everyone. Among all

the German acquaintances of my friend M. de Mermann(53) there is not a

single one who has not married for love.

"Mermann, his brother George, M. de Voigt, M. de

[Pg 246]

Lazing, etc. He has just given me the names of a dozen of them.

"The open and passionate way in which these lovers pay their court to

their mistresses would be the height of indecency, absurdity and shame

in France.

"Mermann told me this evening, as we were returning from the _Chasseur

Vert_, that, among all the women of his very numerous family, he did

not suppose there was a single one who had deceived her husband.

Allowing that he is wrong about half of them, it is still a singular

country.

"His shady proposal to his sister-in-law, Madame de Munichow, whose

family is about to die out for want of male heirs and its very

considerable possessions revert to the crown, coldly received, but

merely with: 'Let's hear no more of that.'

"He tells the divine Philippine (who has just obtained a divorce from

her husband, who only wanted to sell her to his Sovereign) something

about it in very covert terms. Unfeigned indignation, toned down in its

expression instead of being exaggerated: 'Have you, then, no longer any

respect for our sex? I prefer to think, for the sake of your honour,

that you're joking.'

"During a journey to the Brocken with this really beautiful woman,

she reclined on his shoulder while asleep or pretending to sleep; a

jolt threw her somewhat on to the top of him, and he put his arm round

her waist; she threw herself into the other corner of the carriage.

He doesn't think that she is incorruptible, but he believes that she

would kill herself the day after her mistake. What is certain is that

he loved her passionately and that he was similarly loved by her, that

they saw each other continually and that she is without reproach. But

the sun is very pale at Halberstadt, the Government very meddling, and

these two persons very cold. In their most passionate interviews Kant

and Klopstock were always of the party.

[Pg 247]

"Mermann told me that a married man, convicted of adultery, could be

condemned by the courts of Brunswick to ten years' imprisonment; the

law has fallen into disuse, but at least ensures that people do not

joke about this sort of affair. The distinction of being a man with a

past is very far from being such an advantage here as it is in France,

where you can scarcely refuse it a married man in his presence without

insulting him.

"Anyone who told my Colonel or Ch... that they no longer have women

since their marriage would get a very poor reception.

"Some years ago a woman of this country, in a fit of religious fervour,

told her husband, a gentleman of the Court of Brunswick, that she had

deceived him for six years together. The husband, as big a fool as

his wife, went to tell the news to the Duke; the gallant was obliged

to resign all his employments and to leave the country in twenty-four

hours, under a threat from the Duke to put the laws in motion. "

"HALBERSTADT, _July 7th_, 1807.

"Husbands are not deceived here, 'tis true--but ye gods, what women!

Statues, masses scarcely organic! Before marriage they are exceedingly

attractive, graceful as gazelles, with quick tender eyes that always

understand the least hint of love. The reason is that they are on the

look out for a husband. So soon as the husband is found, they become

absolutely nothing but getters of children, in a state of perpetual

adoration before the begetter. In a family of four or five children

there must always be one of them ill, since half the children die

before seven, and in this country, immediately one of the babies

is ill, the mother goes out no more. I can see that they find an

indescribable pleasure in being caressed by their children. Little by

little they lose all their ideas. It is the same at Philadelphia. There

girls of the wildest and most innocent gaiety become, in less

[Pg 248]

than a year, the most boring of women. To have done with the marriages

of Protestant Germany--a wife's dowry is almost nil because of the

fiefs. Mademoiselle de Diesdorff, daughter of a man with an income of

forty thousand francs, will have a dowry of perhaps two thousand crowns

(seven thousand five hundred francs).

"M. de Mermann got four thousand crowns with his wife.

"The rest of the dowry is payable in vanity at the Court. 'One could

find among the middle class,' Mermann told me, 'matches with a hundred

or a hundred and fifty thousand crowns (six hundred thousand francs

instead of fifteen). But one could no longer be presented at Court; one

would be barred all society in which a prince or princess appeared:

_it's terrible._' These were his words, and they came from the heart.

"A German woman with the soul of Phi..., her intellect, her noble and

sensitive face, the fire she must have had at eighteen (she is now

twenty-seven), a woman such as this country produces, with her virtue,

naturalness and no more than a useful little dose of religion--such

a woman would no doubt make her husband very happy. But how flatter

oneself that one would remain true to such insipid matrons?

"'But he was married,' she answered me this morning when I blamed the

four years'silence of Corinne's lover, Lord Oswald. She sat up till

three o'clock to read _Corinne_. The novel gave her profound emotion,

and now she answers me with touching candour: 'But he was married.'

"Phi... is so natural, with so naive a sensibility, that even in this

land of the natural, she seems a prude to the petty heads that govern

petty hearts; their witticisms make her sick, and she in no way hides

it.

"When she is in good company, she laughs like mad at the most lively

jokes. It was she who told me the story of the young princess of

sixteen, later on so well known.

[Pg 249]

who often managed to make the officer on guard at her door come up into

her rooms. "

SWITZERLAND

I know few families happier than those of the Oberland, the part of

Switzerland that lies round Berne; and it is a fact of public notoriety

(1816) that the girls there spend Saturday to Sunday nights with their

lovers.

The fools who know the world, after a voyage from Paris to Saint Cloud,

will cry out; happily I find in a Swiss writer confirmation of what I

myself[2] saw during four months.

"An honest peasant complained of certain losses he had sustained in

his orchard; I asked him why he didn't keep a dog: 'My daughters would

never get married.' I did not understand his answer; he told me he had

had such a bad-tempered dog that none of the young men dared climb up

to the windows any longer.

"Another peasant, mayor of his village, told me in praise of his

wife, that when she was a girl no one had had more _Kilter_ or

_Wächterer_--that is, had had more young men come to spend the night

with her.

"A Colonel, widely esteemed, was forced, while crossing the mountains,

to spend the night at the bottom of one of the most lonely and

picturesque valleys in the country. He lodged with the first magistrate

in the valley, a man rich and of good repute. On entering, the stranger

noticed a young girl of sixteen, a model of gracefulness, freshness

and simplicity: she was the daughter of the master of the house. That

night there was a village ball; the stranger paid court to the girl,

who was really strikingly beautiful. At last, screwing up courage, he

ventured to ask her whether he couldn't 'keep watch' with her. 'No,'

answered the girl, 'I share a room with my cousin, but I'll come myself

to yours.' You can judge

[Pg 250]

of the confusion this answer gave him. They had supper, the stranger

got up, the girl took a torch and followed him into his room; he

imagined the moment was at hand. 'Oh no,' she said simply, 'I must

first ask Mamma's permission.' He would have been less staggered by a

thunderbolt! She went out; his courage revived; he slipped into these

good folks' parlour, and listened to the girl begging her mother in a

caressing tone to grant her the desired permission; in the end she got

it. 'Eh, old man,' said the mother to her husband who was already in

bed, 'd'you allow Trineli to spend the night with the Colonel?' 'With

all my heart,' answers the father, 'I think I'd lend even my wife

to such a man.' 'Right then, go,' says the mother to Trineli; 'but

be a good girl, and don't take off your petticoat...' At day-break,

Trineli, respected by the stranger, rose still virgin. She arranged

the bedclothes, prepared coffee and cream for her partner and, after

she had breakfasted with him, seated on his bed, cut off a little

piece of her _broustpletz_ (a piece of velvet going over the breast).

'Here,' she said, 'keep this souvenir of a happy night; I shall never

forget it.--Why are you a Colonel?' And giving him a last kiss, she ran

away; he didn't manage to see her again.[3] Here you have the absolute

opposite of French morals, and I am far from approving them."

Were I a legislator, I would have people adopt in France, as in

Germany, the custom of evening dances. Three times a week girls would

go with their mothers to a ball, beginning at seven and ending at

midnight, and demanding no other outlay but a violin and a few glasses

of water. In a neighbouring room the mothers, maybe a little jealous of

their daughters' happy education,

[Pg 251]

would play boston; in a third, the fathers would find papers and could

talk politics. Between midnight and one o'clock all the families

would collect together and return to the paternal roof. Girls would

get to know young men; they would soon come to loathe fatuity and

the indiscretions it is responsible for--in fact they would choose

themselves husbands. Some girls would have unhappy love-affairs, but

the number of deceived husbands and unhappy matches would diminish to

an immense degree. It would then be less absurd to attempt to punish

infidelity with dishonour. The law could say to young women: "You have

chosen your husband--be faithful to him." In those circumstances I

would allow the indictment and punishment by the courts of what the

English call criminal conversation. The courts could impose, to the

profit of prisons and hospitals, a fine equal to two-thirds of the

seducer's fortune and imprisonment for several years.

A woman could be indicted for adultery before a jury. The jury should

first declare that the husband's conduct had been irreproachable.

A woman, if convicted, could be condemned to imprisonment for life. If

the husband had been absent more than two years, the woman could not be

condemned to more than some years' imprisonment. Public morals would

soon model themselves on these laws and would perfect them.[4]

[Pg 252]

And then the nobles and the priests, still regretting bitterly the

proper times of Madame de Montespan or Madame du Barry, would be forced

to allow divorce.[5]

There would be in a village within sight of Paris an asylum for

unfortunate women, a house of refuge into which, under pain of the

galleys, no man besides the doctor and the almoner should enter. A

woman who wished to get a divorce would be bound, first of all, to go

and place herself as prisoner in this asylum; there she would spend two

years without going out once. She could write, but never receive an

answer.

A council composed of peers of France and certain magistrates of repute

would direct, in the woman's name, the proceedings for a divorce

and would regulate the pension to be paid to the institution by the

husband. A woman who failed in her plea before the courts would be

allowed to spend the rest of her life in the asylum. The Government

would compensate the administration of the asylum with a sum of two

thousand francs for each woman who sought its refuge. To be received

in the asylum, a woman must have had a dowry of over twenty thousand

francs. The moral _régime_ would be one of extreme severity.

After two years of complete seclusion from the world, a divorced woman

could marry again.

Once arrived at this point, Parliament could consider

[Pg 253]

whether, in order to infuse in girls a spirit of emulation, it would

not be advisable to allow the sons a share of the paternal heritage

double that of their sisters. The daughters who did not find husbands

would have a share equal to that of the male children. It may be

remarked, by the way, that this system would, little by little, destroy

the only too inconvenient custom of marriages of convenience. The

possibility of divorce would render useless such outrageous meanness.

At various points in France, and in certain poor villages, thirty

abbeys for old maids should be established. The Government should

endeavour to surround these establishments with consideration, in order

to console a little the sorrows of the poor women who were to end their

lives there. They should be given all the toys of dignity.

But enough of such chimeras!

[1] The author had read a chapter called "Dell' amore," in the Italian

translation of the _Idéologie_ of M. de Tracy(51). In that chapter the

reader will find ideas incomparable, in philosophical importance, with

anything he can find here.

[2] _Principes philosophiques du Colonel Weiss_, 7 ed.,Vol. II. p. 245.

[3] I am fortunate to be able to describe in the words of another some

extraordinary facts that I have had occasion to observe. Certainly,

but for M. de Weiss, I shouldn't have related this glimpse of foreign

customs. I have omitted others equally characteristic of Valencia and

Vienna.

[4] _The Examiner_, an English paper, when giving a report of the

Queen's case (No. 662, September 3rd, 1820), adds:--

"We have a system of sexual morality, under which thousands of women

become mercenary prostitutes whom virtuous women are taught to scorn,

while virtuous men retain the privilege of frequenting these very

women, without its being regarded as anything more than a venial

offence."

In the land of Cant there is something noble in the courage that dares

speak the truth on this subject, however trivial and obvious it be; it

is all the more meritorious in a poor paper, which can only hope for

success if bought by the rich--and they look on the bishops and the

Bible as the one safeguard of their fine feathers.

[5] Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter, December 23rd, 1671: "I

don't know if you have heard that Villarceaux, when talking to the

king of a post for his son, adroitly took the occasion to tell him,

that there were people busy telling his niece (Mademoiselle de Rouxel)

that his Majesty had designs on her; that if it were so, he begged his

Majesty to make use of him; said that the affair would be better in his

hands than in others, and that he would discharge it with success. The

King began to laugh and said: 'Villarceaux, we are too old, you and I,

to attack young ladies of fifteen.' And like a gallant man, he laughed

at him and told the ladies what he had said." See Memoirs of Lauzun,

Bezenval, Madame d'Épinay, etc., etc, I beg my readers not to condemn

me altogether without re-reading these Memoirs.

[Pg 254]

CHAPTER LIX

WERTHER AND DON JUAN

Among young people, when they have done with mocking at some poor

lover, and he has left the room, the conversation generally ends by

discussing the question, whether it is better to deal with women like

Mozart's Don Juan or like Werther. The contrast would be more exact, if

I had said Saint-Preux, but he is so dull a personage, that in making

him their representative, I should be wronging feeling hearts.

Don Juan's character requires the greater number of useful and

generally esteemed virtues--admirable daring, resourcefulness,

vivacity, a cool head, a witty mind, etc.

The Don Juans have great moments of bitterness and a very miserable old

age--but then most men do not reach old age.

The lover plays a poor rôle in the drawing-room in the evening, because

to be a success and a power among women a man must show just as much

keenness on winning them as on a game of billiards. As everybody knows

that the lover has a great interest in life, he exposes himself, for

all his cleverness, to mockery. Only, next morning he wakes, not to be

in a bad temper until something piquant or something nasty turns up to

revive him, but to dream of her he loves and build castles in the air

for love to dwell in.

Love _à la_ Werther opens the soul to all the arts, to all sweet and

romantic impressions, to the moonlight, to the beauty of the forest, to

the beauty of pictures--in a word, to the feeling and enjoyment of the

beautiful,

[Pg 255]

under whatever form it be found, even under the coarsest cloak. It

causes man to find happiness even without riches.[1] Such souls,

instead of growing weary like Mielhan, Bezenval, etc., go mad, like

Rousseau, from an excess of sensibility. Women endowed with a certain

elevation of soul, who, after their first youth, know how to recognise

love, both where it is and what it is, generally escape the Don

Juan--he is remarkable in their eyes rather by the number than the

quality of his conquests. Observe, to the prejudice of tender hearts,

that publicity is as necessary to Don Juan's triumph as secrecy is to

Werther's. Most of the men who make women the business of their life

are born in the lap of luxury; that is to say, they are, as a result of

their education and the example set by everything that surrounded them

in youth, hardened egoists.[2]

The real Don Juan even ends by looking on women as the enemy, and

rejoicing in their misfortunes of every sort.

On the other hand, the charming Duke delle Pignatelle showed us the

proper way to find happiness in pleasures,

[Pg 256]

even without passion. "I know that I like a woman," he told me one

evening, "when I find myself completely confused in her company, and

don't know what to say to her." So far from letting his self-esteem

be put to shame or take its revenge for these embarrassing moments,

he cultivated them lovingly as the source of his happiness. With this

charming young man gallant-love was quite free from the corroding

influence of vanity; his was a shade of true love, pale, but innocent

and unmixed; and he respected all women, as charming beings, towards

whom we are far from just. (February 20, 1820.)

As a man does not choose himself a temperament, that is to say, a

soul, he cannot play a part above him. J. J. Rousseau and the Duc de

Richelieu might have tried in vain; for all their cleverness, they

could never have exchanged their fortunes with respect to women. I

could well believe that the Duke never had moments such as those

that Rousseau experienced in the park de la Chevrette with Madame

d'Houdetot; at Venice, when listening to the music of the _Scuole_; and

at Turin at the feet of Madame Bazile. But then he never had to blush

at the ridicule that overwhelmed Rousseau in his affair with Madame de

Larnage, remorse for which pursued him during the rest of his life.

A Saint-Preux's part is sweeter and fills up every moment of existence,

but it must be owned that that of a Don Juan is far more brilliant.

Saint-Preux's tastes may change at middle age: solitary and retired,

and of pensive habits, he takes a back place on the stage of life,

while Don Juan realises the magnificence of his reputation among men,

and could yet perhaps please a woman of feeling by making sincerely the

sacrifice of his libertine's tastes.

After all the reasons offered so far, on both sides of the question,

the balance still seems to be even. What makes me think that the

Werthers are the happier, is

[Pg 257]

that Don Juan reduces love to the level of an ordinary affair. Instead

of being able, like Werther, to shape realities to his desires, he

finds, in love, desires which are imperfectly satisfied by cold

reality, just as in ambition, avarice or other passions. Instead of

losing himself in the enchanting reveries of crystallisation, he

thinks, like a general, of the success of his manoeuvres[3] and, in a

word, he kills love, instead of enjoying it more keenly than other men,

as ordinary people imagine.

This seems to me unanswerable. And there is another reason, which is

no less so in my eyes, though, thanks to the malignity of Providence,

we must pardon men for not recognising it. The habit of justice is, to

my thinking, apart from accidents, the most assured way of arriving at

happiness--and a Werther is no villain.[4]

To be happy in crime, it is absolutely necessary to have no remorse.

I do not know whether such a creature can exist;[5] I have never seen

him. I would bet that the affair of Madame Michelin disturbed the Duc

de Richelieu's nights.

One ought either to have absolutely no sympathy or be able to put the

human race to death--which is impossible.[6]

People who only know love from novels will experience

[Pg 258]

a natural repugnance in reading these words in favour of virtue in

love. The reason is that, by the laws of the novel, the portraiture of

a virtuous love is essentially tiresome and uninteresting. Thus the

sentiment of virtue seems from a distance to neutralise that of love,

and the words "a virtuous love" seem synonymous with a feeble love. But

all this comes from weakness in the art of painting, and has nothing to

do with passion such as it exists in nature.[7]

I beg to be allowed to draw a picture of my most intimate friend.

Don Juan renounces all the duties which bind him to the rest of men.

In the great market of life he is a dishonest merchant, who is always

buying and never paying. The idea of equality inspires the same rage

in him as water in a man with hydrophobia; it is for this reason that

pride of birth goes so well with the character of Don Juan. With

the idea of the equality of rights disappears that of justice, or,

rather, if Don Juan is sprung from an illustrious family, such common

ideas have never come to him. I could easily believe that a man with

an historic name is sooner disposed than another to set fire to the

town in order to get his egg cooked.[8] We must excuse him; he is so

possessed with

[Pg 259]

self-love that he comes to the point of losing all idea of the evil he

causes, and of seeing no longer anything in the universe capable of joy

or sorrow except himself. In the fire of youth, when passion fills our

own hearts with the pulse of life and keeps us from mistrust of others,

Don Juan, all senses and apparent happiness, applauds himself for

thinking only of himself, while he sees other men pay their sacrifices

to duty. He imagines that he has found out the great art of living.

But, in the midst of his triumph, while still scarcely thirty years of

age, he perceives to his astonishment that life is wanting, and feels

a growing disgust for what were all his pleasures. Don Juan told me

at Thorn, in an access of melancholy: "There are not twenty different

sorts of women, and once you have had two or three of each sort,

satiety sets in." I answered: "It is only imagination that can for ever

escape satiety. Each woman inspires a different interest, and, what is

more, if chance throws the same woman in your way two or three years

earlier or later in the course of life, and if chance means you to

love, you can love the same woman in different manners. But a woman of

gentle heart, even when she loved you, would produce in you, because of

her pretensions to equality, only irritation to your pride. Your way of

having women kills all the other pleasures of life; Werther's increases

them a hundredfold."

This sad tragedy reaches the last act. You see Don Juan in old age,

turning on this and that, never on himself, as the cause of his own

satiety. You see him, tormented by a consuming poison, flying from

this to that in a continual change of purpose. But, however brilliant

the appearances may be, in the end he only changes one misery for

another. He tries the boredom of inaction, he tries the boredom of

excitement--there is nothing else for him to choose.

At last he discovers the fatal truth and confesses it to himself;

henceforward he is reduced for all his enjoyment

[Pg 260]

to making display of his power, and openly doing evil for evil's sake.

In short, 'tis the last degree of settled gloom; no poet has dared give

us a faithful picture of it--the picture, if true, would strike horror.

But one may hope that a man, above the ordinary, will retrace his steps

along this fatal path; for at the bottom of Don Juan's character there

is a contradiction. I have supposed him a man of great intellect, and

great intellect leads us to the discovery of virtue by the road that

runs to the temple of glory.[9]

La Rochefoucauld, who, however, was a master of self-love, and who in

real life was nothing but a silly man of letters,[10] says(267): "The

pleasure of love consists in loving, and a man gets more happiness from

the passion he feels than from the passion he inspires."

Don Juan's happiness consists in vanity, based, it is true, on

circumstances brought about by great intelligence and activity; but he

must feel that the most inconsiderable general who wins a battle, the

most inconsiderable prefect who keeps his department in order, realises

a more signal enjoyment than his own. The Duc de Nemours' happiness

when Madame de Clèves tells him that she loves him, is, I imagine,

above Napoleon's happiness at Marengo.

Love _à la_ Don Juan is a sentiment of the same kind as a taste for

hunting. It is a desire for activity which must be kept alive by divers

objects and by putting a man's talents continually to the test.

Love _à la_ Werther is like the feeling of a schoolboy writing a

tragedy--and a thousand times better; it is a new goal, to which

everything in life is referred and which changes the face of

everything. Passion-love casts all nature in its sublimer aspects

before the eyes of a

[Pg 261]

man, as a novelty invented but yesterday. He is amazed that he has

never seen the singular spectacle that is now discovered to his soul.

Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most

passionate interest.[11] A lover sees the woman he loves on the horizon

of every landscape he comes across, and, while he travels a hundred

miles to go and catch a glimpse of her for an instant, each tree, each

rock speaks to him of her in a different manner and tells him something

new about her. Instead of the tumult of this magic spectacle, Don Juan

finds that external objects have for him no value apart from their

degree of utility, and must be made amusing by some new intrigue.

Love _à la_ Werther has strange pleasures; after a year or two, the

lover has now, so to speak, but one heart with her he loves; and this,

strange to say, even independent of his success in love--even under a

cruel mistress. Whatever he does, whatever he sees, he asks himself:

"What would she say if she were with me? What would I say to her about

this view of Casa-Lecchio?" He speaks to her, he hears her answer, he

smiles at her fun. A hundred miles from her, and under the weight of

her anger, he surprises himself, reflecting: "Léonore was very gay that

night." Then he wakes up: "Good God!" he says to himself with a sigh,

"there are madmen in Bedlam less mad than I."

"You make me quite impatient," said a friend of mine, to whom I read

out this remark: "you are continually opposing the passionate man to

the Don Juan, and that is not the point in dispute. You would be right,

if a man could provide himself with passion at will. But what about

indifference--what is to be done then?"--Gallant-love without horrors.

Its horrors always come from a little soul, that needs to be reassured

as to its own merit.

To continue.--The Don Juans must find great difficulty

[Pg 262]

in agreeing with what I was saying just now of this state of the soul.

Besides the fact that they can neither see nor feel this state, it

gives too great a blow to their vanity. The error of their life is

expecting to win in a fortnight what a timid lover can scarcely obtain

in six months. They base their reckoning on experience got at the

expense of those poor devils, who have neither the soul to please a

woman of feeling by revealing its ingenuous workings, nor the necessary

wit for the part of a Don Juan. They refuse to see that the same prize,

though granted by the same woman, is not the same thing.

L'homme prudent sans cesse se méfie.

C'est pour cela que des amants trompeurs

Le nombre est grand. Les dames que l'on prie

Font soupirer longtemps des serviteurs

Qui n'ont jamais été faux de leur vie.

Mais du trésor qu'elles donnent enfin

Le prix n'est su que du cœur qui le goûte;

Plus on l'achète et plus il est divin:

Le los d'amour ne vaut pas ce qu'il coûte.[12]

(Nivernais, _Le Troubadour Guillaume de la Tour_, III, 342.)

Passion-love in the eyes of a Don Juan may be compared to a strange

road, steep and toilsome, that begins, 'tis true, amidst delicious

copses, but is soon lost among sheer rocks, whose aspect is anything

but inviting to the eyes of the vulgar. Little by little the road

penetrates into the mountain-heights, in the midst of a dark forest,

where the huge trees, intercepting the daylight with their shaggy

tops that seem to touch the sky, throw a kind of horror into souls

untempered by dangers.

[Pg 263]

After wandering with difficulty, as in an endless maze, whose multiple

turnings try the patience of our self-love, on a sudden we turn a

corner and find ourselves in a new world, in the delicious valley of

Cashmire of Lalla Rookh. How can the Don Juans, who never venture along

this road, or at most take but a few steps along it, judge of the views

that it offers at the end of the journey?...

* * * * *

So you see inconstancy is good:

"Il me faut du nouveau, n'en fût-il plus au monde."[13]

Very well, I reply, you make light of oaths and justice, and what can

you look for in inconstancy? Pleasure apparently.

But the pleasure to be got from a pretty woman, desired a fortnight and

loved three months, is different from the pleasure to be found in a

mistress, desired three years and loved ten.

If I do not insert the word "always" the reason is that I have been

told old age, by altering our organs, renders us incapable of loving;

myself, I don't believe it. When your mistress has become your intimate

friend, she can give you new pleasures, the pleasures of old age. 'Tis

a flower that, after it has been a rose in the morning--the season of

flowers--becomes a delicious fruit in the evening, when the roses are

no longer in season.[14]

A mistress desired three years is really a mistress in every sense of

the word; you cannot approach her without trembling; and let me tell

the Don Juans that a man who trembles is not bored. The pleasures of

love are always in proportion to our fear.

The evil of inconstancy is weariness; the evil of passion is despair

and death. The cases of despair are noted and become legend. No one

pays attention to the

[Pg 264]

weary old libertines dying of boredom, with whom the streets of Paris

are lined.

"Love blows out more brains than boredom." I have no doubt of it:

boredom robs a man of everything, even the courage to kill himself.

There is a certain type of character which can find pleasure only in

variety. A man who cries up Champagne at the expense of Bordeaux is

only saying, with more or less eloquence: "I prefer Champagne."

Each of these wines has its partisans, and they are all right, so

long as they quite understand themselves, and run after the kind of

happiness best suited to their organs[15] and their habits. What ruins

the case for inconstancy is that all fools range themselves on that

side from lack of courage.

But after all, everyone, if he will take the trouble to look into

himself, has his ideal, and there always seems to me something a little

ridiculous in wanting to convert your neighbour.

[1] See the first volume of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_. I should say every

volume, if Saint-Preux had happened to have the ghost of a character,

but he was a real poet, a babbler without resolution, who had no

courage until he had made a peroration--yes, a very dull man. Such men

have an immense advantage, in not upsetting feminine pride, and in

never giving their mistress a fright. Weigh the word well; it contains

perhaps the whole secret of the success of dull men with distinguished

women. Nevertheless love is only a passion in so far as it makes one

forget one's self-love. Thus they do not completely know love, these

women, who, like L., ask of it the pleasures of pride. Unconsciously,

they are on the same level as the prosaic man, the object of their

contempt, who in love seeks love plus vanity. And they too, they want

love and pride; but love goes out with flaming cheeks; he is the

proudest of despots; he will be all, or nothing.

[2] See a certain page of André Chénier (Works, p. 370); or rather look

at life, though that's much harder. "In general, those whom we call

patricians are much further than other men from loving anything," says

the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (_Meditations_.)

[3] Compare Lovelace and Tom Jones.

[4] See the _Vie privée du duc de Richelieu_, nine volumes in 8vo.

Why, at the moment that an assassin kills a man, does he not fall dead

at his victim's feet? Why is there illness? And, if there is illness,

why does not a Troistaillons die of the colic? Why does Henry IV reign

twenty-one years and Lewis XV fifty-nine? Why is not the length of

life in exact proportion to the degree of virtue in each man? These

and other "infamous questions," English philosophers will say there

is certainly no merit in posing; but there would be some merit in

answering them otherwise than with insults and "cant."

[5] Note Nero after the murder of his mother, in Suetonius, and yet

with what a fine lot of flattery was he surrounded.

[6] Cruelty is only a morbid kind of sympathy. Power is, after love,

the first source of happiness, only because one believes oneself to be

in a position to command sympathy.

[7] If you offer the spectator a picture of the sentiment of virtue

side by side with the sentiment of love, you will find that you have

represented a heart divided between two sentiments. In novels the only

good of virtue is to be sacrificed; _vide_ Julie d'Étanges.

[8] _Vide_ Saint-Simon, _fausse couche_ of the Duchesse de Bourgoyne;

and Madame de Motteville, _passim_: That princess, who was surprised

to find that other women had five fingers on their hands like herself;

that Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of Lewis XIII, who found it

quite easy to understand why his favourites went to the scaffold just

to please him. Note, in 1820, these fine gentlemen putting forward an

electoral law that may bring back your Robespierres into France, etc.,

etc. And observe Naples in 1799. (I leave this note written in 1820. A

list of the great nobles in 1778, with notes on their morals, compiled

by General Laclos, seen at Naples in the library of the Marchese

Berio--a very scandalous manuscript of more than three hundred pages.)

[9] The character of the young man of the privileged classes in 1820 is

pretty correctly represented by the brave Bothwell of _Old Mortality_.

[10] See Memoirs of de Retz and the unpleasant minute he gave the

coadjutor at the Parliament between two doors.

[11] Vol. 1819. Honeysuckle on the slopes.

[12] [A prudent man continually mistrusts himself. 'Tis the reason why

the number of false lovers is great. The women whom men worship, make

their servants, who have never been false in their life, sigh a long

time. But the value of the prize that they give them in the end, can

only be known to the heart that tastes it; the greater the cost, the

more divine it is. The praises of love are not worth its pains.--Tr.]

[13] [I must have novelty, even if there were none left in the

world.--Tr. ]

[14] See the Memoirs of Collé--his wife.

[15] Physiologists, who understand our organs, tell you: "Injustice,

in the relations of social life, produces harshness, diffidence and

misery."

[Pg 265]

BOOK III

[Pg 266]

[Pg 267]

SCATTERED FRAGMENTS

Under this title, which I would willingly have made still more modest,

I have brought together, without excessive severity, a selection made

from three or four hundred playing cards, on which I found a few lines

scrawled in pencil. That which, I suppose, must be called the original

manuscript, for want of a simpler name, was in many places made up

of pieces of paper of all sizes, written on in pencil, and joined

together by Lisio with sealing-wax, to save him the trouble of copying

them afresh. He told me once that nothing he ever noted down seemed

to him worth the trouble of recopying an hour later. I have entered

so fully into all this in the hope that it may serve as an excuse for

repetitions.

I

Everything can be acquired in solitude, except character.

II

1821. Hatred, love and avarice, the three ruling passions at Rome, and

with gambling added, almost the only ones.

At first sight the Romans seem ill-natured, but they are only very much

on their guard and blessed with an imagination which flares up at the

least suggestion.

If they give a gratuitous proof of ill-nature, it is the case of a man,

gnawed by fear, and testing his gun to reassure himself.

[Pg 268]

III

If I were to say, as I believe, that good-nature is the keynote of the

Parisian's character, I should be very frightened of having offended

him.--"I won't be good!"

IV

A proof of love comes to light, when all the pleasures and all the

pains, which all the other passions and wants of man can produce, in a

moment cease working.

V

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

VI

To have a solid character is to have a long and tried experience of

life's disillusions and misfortunes. Then it is a question of desiring

constantly or not at all.

VII

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

love of gambling.

VIII

Nothing kills gallant love like gusts of passion-love from the other

side. (Contessina L. Forlì--1819).

IX

A great fault in women, and the most offensive of all to a man a

little worthy of that name: The public, in matters of feeling, never

soars above mean ideas, and women make the public the supreme judge

of their lives--even the most distinguished women, I maintain, often

unconsciously, and even while believing and saying the contrary.

(Brescia, 1819).

[Pg 269]

X

Prosaic is a new word, which once I thought absurd, for nothing could

be colder than our poetry. If there has been any warmth in France for

the last fifty years, it is assuredly to be found in its prose.

But anyhow, the little Countess L---- used the word and I like writing

it.

The definition of prosaic is to be got from _Don Quixote_, and "the

complete contrast of Knight and Squire." The Knight tall and pale; the

Squire fat and fresh. The former all heroism and courtesy; the latter

all selfishness and servility. The former always full of romantic and

touching fancies; the latter a model of worldly wisdom, a compendium

of wise saws. The one always feeding his soul on dreams of heroism and

daring; the other ruminating some really sensible scheme in which,

never fear, he will take into strict account all the shameful, selfish

little movements the human heart is prone to.

At the very moment when the former should be brought to his senses

by the non-success of yesterday's dreams, he is already busy on his

castles in Spain for to-day.

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

Marlborough had a prosaic soul: Henry IV, in love at fifty-five with a

young princess, who could not forget his age, a romantic heart.[1]

There are fewer prosaic beings among the nobility than in the

middle-class.

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

[1] Dulaure, _History of Paris_.

Silent episode in the queen's apartment the evening of the flight of

the Princesse de Condé: the ministers transfixed to the wall and mute,

the King striding up and down.

[Pg 270]

XI

Nothing so interesting as passion: for there everything is unforeseen,

and the principal is the victim. Nothing so flat as gallantry, where

everything is a matter of calculation, as in all the prosaic affairs of

life.

XII

At the end of a visit you always finish by treating a lover better than

you meant to. (L., _November 2nd_, 1818).

XIII

In spite of genius in an upstart, the influence of rank always makes

itself felt. Think of Rousseau losing his heart to all the "ladies" he

met, and weeping tears of rapture because the Duke of L----, one of the

dullest courtiers of the period, deigns to take the right side rather

than the left in a walk with a certain M. Coindet, friend of Rousseau!

(L., _May 3rd_, 1820.)

XIV

Women's only educator is the world. A mother in love does not hesitate

to appear in the seventh heaven of delight, or in the depth of

despair, before her daughters aged fourteen or fifteen. Remember that,

under these happy skies, plenty of women are quite nice-looking till

forty-five, and the majority are married at eighteen.

Think of La Valchiusa saying yesterday of Lampugnani: "Ah, that man was

made for me, he could love, ... etc., etc," and so on in this strain

to a friend--all before her daughter, a little thing of fourteen or

fifteen, very much on the alert, and whom she also took with her on the

more than friendly walks with the lover in question.

Sometimes girls get hold of sound rules of conduct, For examples take

Madame Guarnacci, addressing her two daughters and two men, who have

never called on

[Pg 271]

her before. For an hour and a half she treats them to profound maxims,

based on examples within their own knowledge (that of La Cercara in

Hungary), on the precise point at which it is right to punish with

infidelity a lover who misbehaves himself. (Ravenna, _January 23rd_,

1820.)

XV

The sanguine man, the true Frenchman (Colonel M----) instead of being

tormented by excess of feeling, like Rousseau, if he has a rendezvous

for the next evening at seven, sees everything, right up to the

blessed moment, through rosy spectacles. People of this kind are not

in the least susceptible to passion-love; it would upset their sweet

tranquillity. I will go so far as to say that perhaps they would find

its transports a nuisance, or at all events be humiliated by the

timidity it produces.

XVI

Most men of the world, through vanity, caution or disaster, let

themselves love a woman freely only after intimate intercourse.

XVII

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

encourage crystallisation.

XVIII

A woman imagines that the voice of the public is speaking through the

mouth of the first fool or the first treacherous friend who claims to

be its faithful interpreter to her.

XIX

There is a delicious pleasure in clasping in your arms a woman who has

wronged you grievously, who has been

[Pg 272]

your bitter enemy for many a day, and is ready to be so again. Good

fortune of the French officers in Spain, 1812.

XX

Solitude is what one wants, to relish one's own heart and to love; but

to succeed one must go amongst men, here, there and everywhere.

XXI

"All the observations of the French on love are well written, carefully

and without exaggeration, but they bear only on light affections," said

that delightful person, Cardinal Lante.

XXII

In Goldoni's comedy, the _Innamorati_, all the workings of passion are

excellent; it is the very repulsive meanness of style and thought which

revolts one. The contrary is true of a French comedy.

XXIII

The youth of 1822: To say "serious turn of mind, active disposition"

means "sacrifice of the present to the future." Nothing develops the

soul like the power and the habit of making such sacrifices. I foresee

the probability of more great passions in 1832 than in 1772.

XXIV

The choleric temperament, when it does not display itself in too

repulsive a form, is one perhaps most apt of all to strike and keep

alive the imagination of women. If the choleric temperament does not

fall among propitious surroundings, as Lauzun in Saint-Simon (Memoirs),

the difficulty is to grow used to it. But

[Pg 273]

once grasped by a woman, this character must fascinate her: yes, even

the savage and fanatic Balfour (_Old Mortality_). For women it is the

antithesis of the prosaic.

XXV

In love one often doubts what one believes most strongly (La R., 355).

In every other passion, what once we have proved, we no longer doubt.

XXVI

Verse was invented to assist the memory. Later it was kept to increase

the pleasure of reading by the sight of the difficulty overcome. Its

survival nowadays in dramatic art is a relic of barbarity. Example: the

Cavalry Regulations put into verse by M. de Bonnay.

XXVII

While this jealous slave feeds his soul on boredom, avarice, hatred

and other such poisonous, cold passions, I spend a night of happiness

dreaming of her--of her who, through mistrust, treats me badly.

XXVIII

It needs a great soul to dare have a simple style. That is why Rousseau

put so much rhetoric into the _Nouvelle Héloïse_--which makes it

unreadable for anyone over thirty.

XXIX

"The greatest reproach we could possibly make against ourselves is,

certainly, to have let fade, like the shadowy phantoms produced by

sleep, the ideas of honour and justice, which from time to time well up

in our hearts." (_Letter from Jena, March_, 1819.)

[Pg 274]

XXX

A respectable woman is in the country and passes an hour in the

hot-house with her gardener. Certain people, whose views she has upset,

accuse her of having found a lover in this gardener. What answer is

there?

Speaking absolutely, the thing is possible. She could say: "My

character speaks for me, look at my behaviour throughout life"--only

all this is equally invisible to the eyes of the ill-natured who won't

see, and the fools who can't. (Salviati, Rome, _July 23rd_, 1819.)

XXXI

I have known a man find out that his rival's love was returned, and yet

the rival himself remain blinded to the fact by his passion.

XXXII

The more desperately he is in love, the more violent the pressure a man

is forced to put upon himself, in order to risk annoying the woman he

loves by taking her hand.

XXXIII

Ludicrous rhetoric but, unlike that of Rousseau, inspired by true

passion. (Memoirs of M. de Mau..., _Letter of S----_.)

XXXIV

NATURALNESS

I saw, or I thought I saw, this evening the triumph of naturalness in

a young woman, who certainly seems to me to possess a great character.

She adores, obviously, I think, one of her cousins and must have

confessed to herself the state of her heart. The cousin is in love with

her, but as she is very serious with him, thinks she does not like him,

and lets himself be fascinated by the marks

[Pg 275]

of preference shown him by Clara, a young widow and friend of Mélanie.

I think he will marry her. Mélanie sees it and suffers all that a proud

heart, struggling involuntarily with a violent passion, is capable of

suffering. She has only to alter her ways a little; but she would look

upon it as a piece of meanness, the consequences of which would affect

her whole life, to depart one instant from her natural self.

XXXV

Sappho saw in love only sensual intoxication or physical pleasure

made sublime by crystallisation. Anacreon looked for sensual and

intellectual amusement. There was too little security in Antiquity for

people to find leisure for passion-love.

XXXVI

The foregoing fact fully justifies me in rather laughing at people who

think Homer superior to Tasso. Passion-love did exist in the time of

Homer, and at no great distance from Greece.

XXXVII

Woman with a heart, if you wish to know whether the man you adore

loves you with passion-love, study your lover's early youth. Every man

of distinction in the early days of his life is either a ridiculous

enthusiast or an unfortunate. A man easy to please, of gay and cheerful

humour, can never love with the passion your heart requires.

Passion I call only that which has gone through long misfortunes,

misfortunes which novels take good care not to depict--what's more they

can't!

[Pg 276]

XXXVIII

A bold resolution can change in an instant the most extreme misfortune

into quite a tolerable state of things. The evening of a defeat, a man

is retreating in hot haste, his charger already spent. He can hear

distinctly the troop of cavalry galloping in pursuit. Suddenly he

stops, dismounts, recharges his carbine and pistols, and makes up his

mind to defend himself. Straightway, instead of having death, he has a

cross of the Legion of Honour before his eyes.

XXXIX

Basis of English habits. About 1730, while we already had Voltaire and

Fontenelle, a machine was invented in England to separate the grain,

after threshing, from the chaff. It worked by means of a wheel, which

gave the air enough movement to blow away the bits of chaff. But in

that biblical country the peasants pretended that it was wicked to go

against the will of Divine Providence, and to produce an artificial

wind like this, instead of begging Heaven with an ardent prayer for

enough wind to thresh the corn and waiting for the moment appointed by

the God of Israel. Compare this with French peasants.[1]

[1] For the actual state of English habits, see the Life of Mr.

Beattie, written by an intimate friend. The reader will be edified by

the profound humility of Mr. Beattie, when he receives ten guineas from

an old Marchioness in order to slander Hume. The trembling aristocracy

relies on the bishops with incomes of £200,000, and pays in money and

honour so-called liberal writers to throw mud at Chénier. (_Edinburgh

Review_, 1821.)

The most disgusting cant leaks through on all sides. Everything except

the portrayal of primitive and energetic feelings is stifled by it:

impossible to write a joyous page in English.

XL

No doubt about it--'tis a form of madness to expose oneself to

passion-love. In some cases, however, the cure

[Pg 277]

works too energetically. American girls in the United States are so

saturated and fortified with reasonable ideas, that in that country

love, the flower of life, has deserted youth. At Boston a girl can

be left perfectly safely alone with a handsome stranger--in all

probability she's thinking of nothing but her marriage settlement.

XLI

In France men who have lost their wives are melancholy; widows, on the

contrary, merry and light-hearted. There is a proverb current among

women on the felicity of this state. So there must be some inequality

in the articles of union.

XLII

People who are happy in their love have an air of profound

preoccupation, which, for a Frenchman, is the same as saying an air of

profound gloom. (Dresden, 1818.)

XLIII

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

XLIV

As a result of imitation in the early years of life, we contract the

passions of our parents, even when these very passions poison our life.

(L.'s pride.)

XLV

The most honourable source of feminine pride is a woman's fear of

degrading herself in her lover's eyes by some hasty step or some action

that he may think unwomanly.

[Pg 278]

XLVI

Real love renders the thought of death frequent, agreeable,

unterrifying, a mere subject of comparison, the price we are willing to

pay for many a thing.

XLVII

How often have I exclaimed for all my bravery: "If anyone would blow

out my brains, I'd thank him before I expired, if there were time." A

man can only be brave, with the woman he loves, by loving her a little

less. (S., _February_, 1820.)

XLVIII

"I could never love!" a young woman said to me. "Mirabeau and his

letters to Sophie have given me a disgust for great souls. Those fatal

letters impressed me like a personal experience."

Try a plan which you never read of in novels; let two years' constancy

assure you, before intimate intercourse, of your lover's heart.

XLIX

Ridicule scares love. Ridicule is impossible in Italy: what's good

form in Venice is odd at Naples--consequently nothing's odd in Italy.

Besides, nothing that gives pleasure is found fault with. 'Tis this

that does away with the fool's honour and half the farce.

L

Children command by tears, and if people do not attend to their wishes,

they hurt themselves on purpose. Young women are piqued from a sense of

honour.

[Pg 279]

LI

'Tis a common reflection, but one for that reason easily forgotten,

that every day sensitive souls become rarer, cultured minds commoner.

LII

FEMININE PRIDE

I have just witnessed a striking example--but on mature consideration

I should need fifteen pages to give a proper idea of it. If I dared,

I would much rather note the consequences; my eyes have convinced me

beyond the possibility of doubt. But, no, it is a conviction I must

give up all idea of communicating, there are too many little details.

Such pride is the opposite of French vanity. So far as I can remember,

the only work, in which I have seen a sketch of it, is that part of

Madame Roland's Memoirs, where she recounts the petty reasonings she

made as a girl. (Bologna, _April 18th_, 2 a.m.)

LIII

In France, most women make no account of a young man until they have

turned him into a coxcomb. It is only then that he can flatter their

vanity. (Duclos.)

LIV

Zilietti said to me at midnight (at the charming Marchesina R...'s):

"I'm not going to dine at San Michele (an inn). Yesterday I said some

smart things--I was joking with Cl...; it might make me conspicuous."

Don't go and think that Zilietti is either a fool or a coward. He is a

prudent and very rich man in this happy land. (Modena, 1820.)

[Pg 280]

LV

What is admirable in America is the government, not society. Elsewhere

government does the harm. At Boston they have changed parts, and

government plays the hypocrite, in order not to shock society.

LVI

Italian girls, if they love, are entirely given over to natural

inspiration. At the very most all that can aid them is a handful

of excellent maxims, which they have picked up by listening at the

keyhole. As if fate had decreed that everything here should combine to

preserve naturalness, they read no novels--and for this reason, that

there are none. At Geneva or in France, on the contrary, a girls falls

in love at sixteen in order to be a heroine, and at each step, almost

at each tear, she asks herself: "Am I not just like Julie d'Étanges? "

LVII

The husband of a young woman adored by a lover, whom she treats

unkindly and scarcely allows to kiss her hand, has, at the very most,

only the grossest physical pleasure, where the lover would find the

charms and transports of the keenest happiness that exists on earth.

LVIII

The laws of the imagination are still so little understood, that I

include the following estimate, though perhaps it is all quite wrong.

I seem to distinguish two sorts of imagination:--

1. Imagination like Fabio's, ardent, impetuous, inconsiderate, leading

straight to action, consuming itself, and already languishing at a

delay of twenty-four hours. Impatience is its prime characteristic; it

becomes enraged against that which it cannot obtain. It sees all

[Pg 281]

exterior objects, but they only serve to inflame it. It assimilates

them to its own substance, and converts them straight away to the

profit of passion.

2. Imagination which takes fire slowly and little by little, but which

loses in time the perception of exterior objects, and comes to find

occupation and nourishment in nothing but its own passion. This last

sort of imagination goes quite easily with slowness, or even scarcity,

of ideas. It is favourable to constancy. It is the imagination of the

greater part of those poor German girls, who are dying of love and

consumption. That sad spectacle, so frequent beyond the Rhine, is never

met with in Italy.

LIX

Imaginative habits. A Frenchman is really shocked by eight changes of

scenery in one act of a tragedy. Such a man is incapable of pleasure in

seeing Macbeth. He consoles himself by damning Shakespeare.

LX

In France the provinces are forty years behind Paris in all that

regards women. A. C., a married woman, tells me that she only liked to

read certain parts of Lanzi's Memoirs. Such stupidity is too much for

me; I can no longer find a word to say to her. As if that were a book

one _could_ put down!

Want of naturalness--the great failing in provincial women.

Their effusive and gracious gestures; those who play the first fiddle

in the town are worse than the others.

LXI

Goethe, or any other German genius, esteems money at what it's worth.

Until he has got an income of six thousand francs, he must think of

nothing but his

[Pg 282]

banking-account. After that he must never think of it again. The fool,

on his side, does not understand the advantage there is of feeling

and thinking like Goethe. All his life he feels in terms of money and

thinks of sums of money. It is owing to this support from both sides,

that the prosaic in this world seem to come off so much better than the

high-minded.

LXII

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

liberty.

LXIII

A mania for discussion has got hold of the younger generation and

stolen it from love. While they are considering whether Napoleon was

of service to France, they let the age of love speed past. Even with

those who mean to be young, it is all affectation--a tie, a spur, their

martial swagger, their all-absorbing self--and they forget to cast a

glance at the girl who passes by so modestly and cannot go out more

than once a week through want of means.

LXIV

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

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

_The Two Elizabeths_. Let us compare the daughters of two ferocious

men, and see which was sovereign of a civilised nation, which of a

barbarous one. Both were Elizabeths. The daughter of Peter (of Russia)

was absolute, yet spared a competitor and a rival; and thought the

person of an empress had sufficient allurements for as many of her

subjects as she chose to honour with the

[Pg 283]

communication. Elizabeth of England could neither forgive the claim

of Mary Stuart nor her charms, but ungenerously imprisoned her (as

George IV did Napoleon[1]) when imploring protection, and, without the

sanction of either despotism or law, sacrificed many to her great and

little jealousy. Yet this Elizabeth piqued herself on chastity; and

while she practised every ridiculous art of coquetry to be admired

at an unseemly age, kept off lovers whom she encouraged, and neither

gratified her own desires nor their ambition. Who can help preferring

the honest, open-hearted barbarian empress? (Lord Orford's Memoirs.)

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

LXV

Extreme familiarity may destroy crystallisation. A charming girl of

sixteen fell in love with a handsome youth of the same age, who never

failed one evening to pass under her window at nightfall. Her mother

invites him to spend a week with them in the country--a desperate

remedy, I agree. But the girl was romantic, and the youth rather dull:

after three days she despised him.

LXVI

Ave Maria--twilight in Italy, the hour of tenderness, of the soul's

pleasures and of melancholy--sensation intensified by the sound of

those lovely bells.

Hours of pleasure, which only in memory touch the senses.... (Bologna,

_April 17th_, 1817.)

LXVII

A young man's first love-affair on entering society is ordinarily one

of ambition. He rarely declares his love for a sweet, amiable and

innocent young girl. How tremble before her, adore her, feel oneself

in the presence of a divinity? Youth must love a being whose qualities

lift him up in his own eyes. It is in the decline of life

[Pg 284]

that we sadly come back to love the simple and the innocent, despairing

of the sublime. Between the two comes true love, which thinks of

nothing but itself.

LXVIII

The existence of great souls is not suspected. They hide away; all that

is seen is a little originality. There are more great souls than one

would think.

LXIX

The first clasp of the beloved's hand--what a moment that is! The

only joy to be compared to it is the ravishing joy of power--which

statesmen and kings make pretence of despising. This joy also has

its crystallisation, though it demands a colder and more reasonable

imagination. Think of a man whom, a quarter of an hour ago, Napoleon

has called to be a minister.

LXX

The celebrated Johannes von Müller(54) said to me at Cassel in

1808--Nature has given strength to the North and wit to the South.

LXXI

Nothing more untrue than the maxim: No man is a hero before his valet.

Or, rather, nothing truer in the monarchic sense of the word hero--the

affected hero, like Hippolytus in _Phèdre_. Desaix, for example, would

have been a hero even before his valet (it's true I don't know if he

had one), and a still greater hero for his valet than for anyone else.

Turenne and Fénelon might each have been a Desaix, but for "good form"

and the necessary amount of force.

[Pg 285]

LXXII

Here is blasphemy. I, a Dutchman, dare say this: the French possess

neither the true pleasures of conversation nor the true pleasures of

the theatre; instead of relaxation and complete unrestraint, they mean

hard labour. Among the sources of fatigue which hastened on the death

of Mme. de Staël I have heard counted the strain of conversation during

her last winter.[1]

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

LXXIII

The degree of tension of the nerves in the ear, necessary to hear each

note, explains well enough the physical part of one's pleasure in music.

LXXIV

What degrades rakish women is the opinion, which they share with the

public, that they are guilty of a great sin.

LXXV

In an army in retreat, warn an Italian soldier of a danger which it is

no use running--he'll almost thank you and he'll carefully avoid it.

If, from kindness, you point out the same danger to a French soldier,

he'll think you're defying him--his sense of honour is piqued, and he

runs his head straight against it. If he dared, he'd like to jeer at

you. (Gyat, 1812.)

LXXVI

In France, any idea that can be explained only in the very simplest

terms is sure to be despised, even the most useful. The Monitorial

system(43), invented by a Frenchman, could never catch on. It is

exactly the opposite in Italy.

[Pg 286]

LXXVII

Suppose you are passionately in love with a woman and that your

imagination has not run dry. One evening she is tactless enough to

say, looking at you tenderly and abashed: "Er--yes--come to-morrow at

midday; I shall be in to no one but you." You cannot sleep; you cannot

think of anything; the morning is torture. At last twelve o'clock

strikes, and every stroke of the clock seems to clash and clang on your

heart.

LXXVIII

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

You are putting off the present difficulty, and the odious fear of want

in the future; or rather you are sowing the seeds of policy, of the

feeling of being two.--You destroy sympathy.

LXXIX

Court ceremonies involuntarily call to mind scenes from Aretine--the

way the women display their bare shoulders, like officers their

uniform, and, for all their charms, make no more sensation!

There you see what in a mercenary way all will do to win a man's

approval; there you see a whole world acting without morality and,

what's more, without passion. All this added to the presence of the

women with their very low dresses and their expression of malice,

greeting with a sardonic smile everything but selfish advantage payable

in the hard cash of solid pleasures--why! it gives the idea of scenes

from the Bagno. It drives far away all doubts suggested by virtue or

the conscious satisfaction of a heart at peace with itself. Yet I have

seen the feeling of isolation amidst all this dispose gentle hearts to

love. (_Mars at the Tuileries_, 1811.)

[Pg 287]

LXXX

A soul taken up with bashfulness and the effort to suppress it, is

incapable of pleasure. Pleasure is a luxury--to enjoy it, security is

essential and must run no risks.

LXXXI

A test of love in which mercenary women cannot disguise their

feelings.--"Do you feel real delight in reconciliation or is it only

the thought of what you'll gain by it?"

LXXXII

The poor things who fill La Trappe(55) are wretches who have not had

quite enough courage to kill themselves. I except, of course, the

heads, who find pleasure in being heads.

LXXXIII

It is a misfortune to have known Italian beauty: you lose your

sensibility. Out of Italy, you prefer the conversation of men.

LXXXIV

Italian prudence looks to the preservation of life, and this allows

free play to the imagination. (Cf. a version of the death of Pertica

the famous comic actor, December 24th, 1821.) On the other hand,

English prudence, wholly relative to the gain and safe-keeping of

just enough money to cover expenses, demands detailed and everyday

exactitude, and this habit paralyses the imagination. Notice also how

enormously it strengthens the conception of duty.

LXXXV

The immense respect for money, which is the first and foremost vice of

Englishmen and Italians, is less felt

[Pg 288]

in France and reduced to perfectly rational limits in Germany.

LXXXVI

French women, having never known the happiness of true passion, are

anything but exacting over internal domestic happiness and the everyday

side of life. (_Compiègne_.)

LXXXVII

"You talk to me of ambition for driving away boredom," said Kamensky:

"but all the time I used to gallop a couple of leagues every evening,

for the pleasure of seeing the Princess at Kolich, I was on terms of

intimacy with a despot whom I respected, who had my whole good fortune

in his power and the satisfaction of all my possible desires."

LXXXVIII

Pretty contrast! On the one hand--perfection in the little niceties of

worldly wisdom and of dress, great kindliness, want of genius, daily

cult of a thousand and one petty observances, and incapacity for three

days' attention to the same event: on the other--puritan severity,

biblical cruelty, strict probity, timid, morbid self-love and universal

cant! And yet these are the two foremost nations of the world.

LXXXIX

As among princesses there has been an Empress Catherine II, why should

a female Samuel Bernard(56), or a Lagrange(57) not appear among the

middle-class?

XC

Alviza calls this an unpardonable want of refinement--to dare to make

love by letter to a woman you adore and who looks at you tenderly, but

declares that she can never love you.

[Pg 289]

XCI

It was a mistake of the greatest philosopher that France has had, not

to have stayed in some Alpine solitude, in some remote abode, thence

to launch his book on Paris without ever coming there himself(58).

Seeing Helvétius so simple and straightforward, unnatural, hot-house

people like Suard, Marmontel or Diderot could never imagine they had

a great philosopher before them. They were perfectly honest in their

contempt for his profound reason. First of all, it was simple--a fault

unpardonable in France; secondly, the author, not, of course, his

book, was lowered in value by this weakness--the extreme importance

he attached to getting what in France is called glory, to being, like

Balzac, Voiture or Fontenelle, the fashion among his contemporaries.

Rousseau had too much feeling and too little logic, Buffon, in his

Botanical Garden, was too hypocritical, and Voltaire too paltry to be

able to judge the principle of Helvétius.

Helvétius was guilty of a little slip in calling this principle

_interest_, instead of giving it a pretty name like _pleasure_;[1] but

what are we to think of a nation's literature, which shows its sense by

letting itself be led astray by a fault so slight?

The ordinary clever man, Prince Eugene of Savoy for example, finding

himself in the position of Regulus, would have stayed quietly at Rome,

and even laughed at the stupidity of the Carthaginian Senate. Regulus

goes back to Carthage. Prince Eugene would have been prosecuting his

own interest, and in exactly the same way Regulus was prosecuting his.

All through life a noble spirit is seeing possibilities

[Pg 290]

of action, of which a common spirit can form no idea. The very second

the possibility of that action becomes visible to the noble spirit, it

is its interest thus to act.

If this noble spirit did not perform the action, which it has just

perceived, it would despise itself--it would be unhappy. Man's duties

are in the ratio of his moral range. The principle of Helvétius holds

good, even in the wildest exaltations of love, even in suicide. It is

contrary to his nature, it is an impossibility for a man not to do,

always and at any moment you choose to take, that which is possible and

which gives him most pleasure at that moment to do.

[1] Torva leoena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam;

Florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella.

.... Trahit sua quemque voluptas. (Virgil, Eclogue II.)

XCII

To have firmness of character means to have experienced the influence

of others on oneself. Therefore others are necessary.

XCIII

ANCIENT LOVE

No posthumous love-letters of Roman ladies have been printed. Petronius

has written a charming book, but it is only debauch that he has painted.

For love at Rome, apart from Virgil's story of Dido[1] and his second

Eclogue, we have no evidence more precise than the writings of the

three great poets, Ovid, Tibullus and Propertius.

Now, Parny's _Elegies_ or Colardeau's _Letter of Héloïse to Abelard_

are pictures of a very imperfect and vague kind, if you compare them

to some of the letters in the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, to those of the

Portuguese Nun, of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, of Mirabeau's Sophie, of

Werther, etc., etc.

[Pg 291]

Poetry, with its obligatory comparisons, its mythology in which the

poet doesn't believe, its dignity of style _à la_ Louis XIV, and all

its superfluous stock of ornaments called poetical, is very inferior to

prose when it comes to a question of giving a clear and precise idea

of the working of the heart. And, in this class of writing, clearness

alone is effective.

Tibullus, Ovid and Propertius had better taste than our poets; they

have painted love such as it was to be found among the proud citizens

of Rome: moreover, they lived under Augustus, who, having shut the

temple of Janus, sought to debase these citizens to the condition of

the loyal subjects of a monarchy.

The mistresses of these three great poets were coquettes, faithless

and venal women; in their company the poets only sought physical

pleasure, and never, I should think, caught a glimpse of the sublime

sentiments[2] which, thirteen centuries later, stirred the heart of the

gentle Héloïse.

I borrow the following passage from a distinguished man of letters,[3]

and one who knows the Latin poets much better than I do:--

The brilliant genius of Ovid, the rich imagination of Propertius,

the impressionable heart of Tibullus, doubtless inspired them with

verses of a different flavour, but all, in the same manner, they loved

women of much the same kind. They desire, they triumph, they have

fortunate rivals, they are jealous, they quarrel and make it up; they

are faithless in their turn, they are forgiven; and they recover their

happiness only to be ruffled by the return of the same mischances.

Corinna is married. The first lessons that Ovid gives her are to teach

her the address with which to deceive her husband: the signs they are

to make each other before him and in society,

[Pg 292]

so that they can understand each other and be understood only by

themselves. Enjoyment quickly follows; afterwards quarrels, and, what

you wouldn't expect from so gallant a man as Ovid, insults and blows;

then excuses, tears and forgiveness. Sometimes he addresses himself to

subordinates--to the servants, to his mistress' porter, who is to open

to him at night, to a cursed old beldam who corrupts her and teaches

her to sell herself for gold, to an old eunuch who keeps watch over

her, to a slave-girl who is to convey the tablets in which he begs for

a rendezvous. The rendezvous is refused: he curses his tablets, that

have had such sorry fortune. Fortune shines brighter: he adjures the

dawn not to come to interrupt his happiness.

Soon he accuses himself of numberless infidelities, of his

indiscriminate taste for women. A moment after, Corinna is herself

faithless; he cannot bear the idea that he has given her lessons from

which she reaps the profit with someone else. Corinna in her turn is

jealous; she abuses him like a fury rather than a gentle woman; she

accuses him of loving a slave-girl. He swears that there is nothing

in it and writes to the slave--yet everything that made Corinna angry

was true. But how did she get to know of it? What clue had led to

their betrayal? He asks the slave-girl for another rendezvous. If she

refuse him, he threatens to confess everything to Corinna. He jokes

with a friend about his two loves and the trouble and pleasure they

give him. Soon after, it is Corinna alone that fills his thoughts. She

is everything to him. He sings his triumph, as if it were his first

victory. After certain incidents, which for more than one reason we

must leave in Ovid, and others, which it would be too long to recount,

he discovers that Corinna's husband has become too lax. He is no

longer jealous; our lover does not like this, and threatens to leave

the wife, if the husband does not resume his jealousy. The husband

obeys him but too well; he has Corinna watched so closely, that Ovid

can no longer come to her. He complains of this close watch, which

he had himself provoked--but he will find a way to get round it.

Unfortunately, he is not the only one to succeed therein. Corinna's

infidelities begin again and multiply; her intrigues become so public,

that the only boon that Ovid can crave of her, is that she will take

some trouble to deceive him, and show a little less obviously what she

really is. Such were the morals of Ovid and his mistress, such is the

character of their love.

Cynthia is the first love of Propertius, and she will be his last.

[Pg 293]

No sooner is he happy, but he is jealous. Cynthia is too fond of

dress; he begs her to shun luxury and to love simplicity. He himself

is given up to more than one kind of debauch. Cynthia expects him; he

only comes to her at dawn, leaving a banquet in his cups. He finds

her asleep; it is a long time before she wakes, in spite of the

noise he makes and even of his kisses; at last she opens her eyes

and reproaches him as he deserves. A friend tries to detach him from

Cynthia; he gives his friend a eulogy of her beauty and talents.

He is threatened with losing her; she goes off with a soldier; she

means to follow the army; she will expose herself to every danger in

order to follow her soldier. Propertius does not storm; he weeps and

prays heaven for her happiness. He will never leave the house she has

deserted; he will look out for strangers who have seen her, and will

never leave off asking them for news of Cynthia. She is touched by

love so great. She deserts the soldier and stays with the poet. He

gives thanks to Apollo and the Muses; he is drunk with his happiness.

This happiness is soon troubled by a new access of jealousy,

interrupted by separation and by absence. Far from Cynthia, he can

only think of her. Her past infidelities make him fear for news. Death

does not frighten him, he only fears to lose Cynthia; let him be but

certain that she will be faithful and he will go down without regret

to the grave.

After more treachery, he fancies he is delivered from his love; but

soon he is again in its bonds. He paints the most ravishing portrait

of his mistress, her beauty, the elegance of her dress, her talents

in singing, poetry and dancing; everything redoubles and justifies

his love. But Cynthia, as perverse as she is captivating, dishonours

herself before the whole town by such scandalous adventures that

Propertius can no longer love her without shame. He blushes, but he

cannot shake her off. He will be her lover, her husband; he will never

love any but Cynthia. They part and come together again. Cynthia is

jealous, he reassures her. He will never love any other woman. But

in fact it is never one woman he loves--it is all women. He never

has enough of them, he is insatiable of pleasure. To recall him to

himself, Cynthia has to desert him yet again. Then his complaints

are as vigorous as if he had never been faithless himself. He tries

to escape. He seeks distraction in debauch.--Is he drunk as usual?

He pretends that a troupe of loves meets him and brings him back to

Cynthia's feet. Reconciliation is followed by more storms. Cynthia, at

one

[Pg 294]

of their supper parties, gets heated with wine like himself, upsets

the table and hits him over the head. Propertius thinks this charming.

More perfidy forces him at last to break his chains; he tries to go

away; he means to travel in Greece; he completes all his plans for

the journey, but he renounces the project--and all in order to see

himself once more the butt of new outrages. Cynthia does not confine

herself to betraying him; she makes him the laughing-stock of his

rivals. But illness seizes her and she dies. She reproaches him with

his faithlessness, his caprices and his desertion of her in her last

moments, and swears that she herself, in spite of appearances, was

always faithful.

Such are the morals and adventures of Propertius and his mistress;

such in abstract is the history of their love. Such was the woman that

a soul like Propertius was reduced to loving.