A PHILOSOPHER'S ADVICE
Desgenais saw that my despair was incurable, that I would neither listen
to any advice nor leave my room, he took the thing seriously. I saw him
enter one evening with an expression of gravity on his face; he spoke of
my mistress and continued in his tone of persiflage, saying all manner of
evil of women. While he was speaking I was leaning on my elbow, and,
rising in my bed, I listened attentively.
It was one of those sombre evenings when the sighing of the wind recalls
the moaning of a dying man. A fitful storm was brewing, and between the
plashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All
nature suffers in such moments, the trees writhe in pain and hide their
heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of
cities are deserted. I was suffering from my wound. But a short time
before I had a mistress and a friend. The mistress had deceived me and
the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly
distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under
the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find
myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream,
ridiculous and puerile, the falseness of which had just been disclosed.
Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious,
although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as
dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him bald before his
time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was
a materialist and he waited for death.
"Octave," he said, "after what has happened to you, I see that you
believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a
word, you believe in what is said here below and not in what is done.
That is because you do not reason soundly, and it may lead you into great
misfortune.
"Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create
melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization,
they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the
most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.
There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls;
Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types
of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single
faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical
instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a
long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds.
Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or
less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion
can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that
degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from
lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.
"To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is
but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect
nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.
"Perfection does not exist; to comprehend it is the triumph of human
intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies.
Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form
some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and
who will die to-morrow! This spectacle of immensity in every country in
the world produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it
was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians
delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the
people of the earth have stretched out their hands to that immensity and
have longed to plunge into it. The fool wishes to possess heaven; the
sage admires it, kneels before it, but does not desire it.
"Perfection, my friend, is no more made for us than immensity. We must
seek for nothing in it, demand nothing of it, neither love nor beauty,
happiness nor virtue; but we must love it if we would be virtuous, if we
would attain the greatest happiness of which man is capable.
"Let us suppose you have in your study a picture by Raphael that you
consider perfect. Let us say that upon a close examination you discover
in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb distorted, or a
muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered, they say, in one
of the arms of an antique gladiator. You would experience a feeling of
displeasure, but you would not throw that picture in the fire; you would
merely say that it is not perfect, but that it has qualities that are
worthy of admiration.
"There are women whose natural singleness of heart and sincerity are such
that they could not have two lovers at the same time. You believed your
mistress such an one; that is best, I admit. You have discovered that
she has deceived you; does that oblige you to depose and to abuse her, to
believe her deserving of your hatred?
"Even if your mistress had never deceived you, even if at this moment she
loved none other than you, think, Octave, how far her love would still be
from perfection, how human it would be, how small, how restrained by the
hypocrisies and conventions of the world; remember that another man
possessed her before you, that many others will possess her after you.
"Reflect: what drives you at this moment to despair is the idea of
perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when
you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and
restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the rotten
ladder of human imperfection.
"I think you will readily admit that your mistress has had other
admirers, and that she will have still others in the future; you will
doubtless reply that it matters little, so long as she loved you. But I
ask you, since she has had others, what difference does it make whether
it was yesterday or two years since? Since she loves but one at a time,
what does it matter whether it is during an interval of two years or in
the course of a single night? Are you a man, Octave? Do you see the
leaves falling from the trees, the sun rising and setting? Do you hear
the ticking of the horologe of time with each pulsation of your heart?
Is there, then, such a difference between the love of a year and the love
of an hour? I challenge you to answer that, you fool, as you sit there
looking out at the infinite through a window not larger than your hand.
"You consider that woman faithful who loves you two years; you must have
an almanac that will indicate just how long it takes for an honest man's
kisses to dry on a woman's lips. You make a distinction between the
woman who sells herself for money and the one who gives herself for
pleasure; between the one who gives herself through pride and the one who
gives herself through devotion. Among women who are for sale, some cost
more than others; among those who are sought for pleasure some inspire
more confidence than others; and among those who are worthy of devotion
there are some who receive a third of a man's heart, others a quarter,
others a half, depending upon her education, her manner, her name, her
birth, her beauty, her temperament, according to the occasion, according
to what is said, according to the time, according to what you have drunk
at dinner.
"You love women, Octave, because you are young, ardent, because your
features are regular, and your hair dark and glossy, but you do not, for
all that, understand woman.
"Nature, having all, desires the reproduction of beings; everywhere, from
the summit of the mountain to the bottom of the sea, life is opposed to
death. God, to conserve the work of His hands, has established this law-
that the greatest pleasure of all sentient beings shall be to procreate.
"Oh! my friend, when you feel bursting on your lips the vow of eternal
love, do not be afraid to yield, but do not confound wine with
intoxication; do not think of the cup divine because the draught is of
celestial flavor; do not be astonished to find it broken and empty in the
evening. It is but woman, but a fragile vase, made of earth by a potter.
"Thank God for giving you a glimpse of heaven, but do not imagine
yourself a bird because you can flap your wings. The birds themselves
can not escape the clouds; there is a region where air fails them and the
lark, rising with its song into the morning fog, sometimes falls back
dead in the field.
"Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your
mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not,
if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is
agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these
things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us
every day.
"Do not tear your hair and stab yourself because you have a rival. You
say that your mistress deceives you for another; it is your pride that
suffers; but change the words, say that it is for you that she deceives
him, and behold, you are happy!
"Do not make a rule of conduct, and do not say that you wish to be loved
exclusively, for in saying that, as you are a man and inconstant
yourself, you are forced to add tacitly: 'As far as possible.'
"Take time as it comes, the wind as it blows, woman as she is. The
Spaniards, first among women, love faithfully; their hearts are sincere
and violent, but they wear a dagger just above them. Italian women are
lascivious. The English are exalted and melancholy, cold and unnatural.
The German women are tender and sweet, but colorless and monotonous. The
French are spirituelle, elegant, and voluptuous, but are false at heart.
"Above all, do not accuse women of being what they are; we have made them
thus, undoing the work of nature.
"Nature, who thinks of everything, made the virgin for love; but with the
first child her bosom loses form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is
made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the
loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the
family, the human law; everything that departs from this law is
monstrous.
"Civilization thwarts the ends of nature. In our cities, according to
our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to run
in the sunlight; to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to
choose and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in.
Meanwhile she hides romance under her cross; pale and idle, she fades
away and loses, in the silence of the nights, that beauty which oppresses
her and needs the open air. Then she is suddenly snatched from this
solitude, knowing nothing, loving nothing, desiring everything; an old
woman instructs her, a mysterious word is whispered in her ear, and she
is thrown into the arms of a stranger. There you have marriage, that is
to say, the civilized family.
"A child is born. This poor creature has lost her beauty and she has
never loved. The child is brought to her with the words: "You are a
mother." She replies: 'I am not a mother; take that child to some woman
who can nurse it. I can not.' Her husband tells her that she is right,
that her child would be disgusted with her. She receives careful
attention and is soon cured of the disease of maternity. A month later
she may be seen at the Tuileries, at the ball, at the opera; her child is
at Chaillot, at Auxerre; her husband with another woman. Then young men
speak to her of love, of devotion, of sympathy, of all that is in the
heart. She takes one, draws him to her bosom; he dishonors her and
returns to the Bourse. She cries all night, but discovers that tears
make her eyes red. She takes a consoler, for the loss of whom another
consoles her; thus up to the age of thirty or more. Then, blase and
corrupted, with no human sentiment, not even disgust, she meets a fine
youth with raven locks, ardent eye and hopeful heart; she recalls her own
youth, she remembers what she has suffered, and telling him the story of
her life, she teaches him to eschew love.
"That is woman as we have made her; such are your mistresses. But you
say they are women and that there is something good in them!
"But if your character is formed, if you are truly a man, sure of
yourself and confident of your strength, you may taste of life without
fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or
respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest?
"If you are mediocre and ordinary, I advise you to consider your course
very carefully before deciding, but do not expect too much of your
mistress.
"If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be
dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make
for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to
your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant,
and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers. The sap of your life will
dissipate into the formation of useless bark; all your actions will be as
colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to water
you, but those from your own eyes; to nourish you, no heart but your own.
"But if you are of an exalted nature, believing in dreams and wishing to
realize them, I say to you plainly: Love does not exist.
"For to love is to give body and soul, or better, it is to make a single
being of two; it is to walk in the sunlight, in the open air through the
boundless prairies with a body having four arms, two heads, and two
hearts. Love is faith, it is the religion of terrestrial happiness, it
is a luminous triangle suspended in the temple of the world. To love is
to walk freely through that temple, at your side a being capable of
understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and raise
your eyes to that celestial triangle. To exercise the noble faculties of
man is a great good--that is why genius is glorious; but to double those
faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a heart and an
intelligence--that is supreme happiness. God has nothing better for man;
that is why love is better than genius.
"But tell me, is that the love of our women? No, no, it must be
admitted. Love, for them, is another thing; it is to go out veiled,
to write in secret, to make trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs
under starched and unnatural robes, then to draw bolts and throw them
aside, to humiliate a rival, to deceive a husband, to render a lover
desolate. To love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play
at hide and seek, a hideous orgy of the heart, worse than the lubricity
of the Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; a bastard parody of vice
itself, as well as of virtue; a loathsome comedy where all is whispering
and sidelong glances, where all is small, elegant, and deformed, like
those porcelain monsters brought from China; a lamentable satire on all
that is beautiful and ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body,
a skeleton of all that God has made."
Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall.