MAN VERSUS WOMAN IN LOVE
How many times can a man and a woman love?--They love differently--
A delicate question--'Lucky dog!'--The inexorability of the
virtuous woman.
Man is capable of love as earnestly as woman is; but love is not the
whole business of his life, whereas it is a woman's. When a child, she
loves her doll; when a girl, her mother; when a woman, a man. She can
feed on love and die of it. When a mother, she loves her children; when
she dies, surrounded by beloved grandchildren, she may say that her
life has been well filled.
I believe that a woman can love more than once. I have known widows
remarry, and love their second husbands with the same devotion as their
first.
A man really loves once only. I knew a man under fifty who was married
three times. He was a good and devoted husband to his three wives, but
he never really loved but the second. If he dies suddenly without
having time to take all his precautions, the portrait of his second
wife will be found on his heart.
The reason of this is that men and women love in different ways. A man
loves because his whole being--heart, soul, and body--craves for a
woman. A woman often gives herself to a man because it pleases her to
be loved by him. For a man, love is the pleasure he feels in the
company of a woman; for a woman, it is the enjoyment of the pleasure
she gives to a man. A woman is proud to call herself a reward, and that
is why all heroes appeal to her so much. Mirabeau was the plainest of
men, with his face covered with smallpox marks, yet no man ever made so
many conquests among women. Successful generals, explorers, great
orators, authors, artists, singers, all appeal to women. They may not
love them personally, but it affords them great pleasure to be loved by
them. There is in every woman a craving for a man superior to herself,
and that is why women who try to dominate men are such dismal failures.
* * * * *
To a woman love is sacred, her food, her life.
Never have a sneer at a woman or at a child. Whenever you feel
sarcastic, exercise your talents on something else.
Never profane the words, 'I love you'; they may seal the fate of a
woman; but when you have uttered these three words in great
earnestness, and the woman has answered with that great religious,
almost sad, smile that Victor Hugo called 'the smile of angels,' when,
in a word, she is yours, place her on a pedestal, on an altar, and
worship her. The world has nothing better to offer you.
* * * * *
A man can cure a woman of a man. Nothing can cure a man of a woman,
unless it be that woman herself.
While on the subject of love and tender relations, let me ask a
question of my lady readers: Which would you rather know, that the man
you love had broken his allegiance to you, but kept his heart faithful,
or that he had lost his heart with another woman, but kept his
'monastic' vows? A clever woman once answered me in the following
manner: 'If that man was my husband, I would much rather know that his
heart had gone from me for a time. If I was not married to him, I would
prefer to know that his heart had remained faithful.'
Only I must warn you that if a man put this question to his wife, she
would probably say to him at once: 'Jack, which of the two are you
guilty of?'
'In ninety cases out of a hundred,' says Paul Bourget, 'for a woman to
play her heart in the game of love is to play at cards with a sharper,
and gold against counterfeit pieces.' How true! for when the game is
over, society (which ought to be ashamed of itself in its treatment of
men and women) says of the man, 'Lucky dog!' but mocks at the woman who
has given way, puts her outside the pale when she forgets herself for
the moment, and turns away from her when she gives way to despair. Poor
woman! She cannot rebel, for if man is the cause of her downfall, it is
woman who becomes her bitterest enemy. There is no pity in the breast
of a woman for the woman who has fallen, unless she herself has had the
same sad experience. The virtuous woman is inexorable, although her
virtue is very often like a fortress which never had to capitulate for
the reason that it never was attacked.
If I were a woman, oh, how I should hate women!
Madame de Stael said that what consoled her to know that she was a
woman was that she would never have to marry a woman.