[The following conversation in the first act of the play
takes place in the pleasant morning-room of a country-house
near Paris, the home of M. and Madame Leverdet. M. Leverdet
is asleep in his chair. The speakers are Madame Leverdet, a
coquettish, sprightly lady approaching middle age, and young
M. De Ryons, a friend and neighbor. Madame Leverdet is
determined to marry off De Ryons advantageously, and as soon
as possible. Unfortunately he is a confirmed bachelor, not to
say woman-hater, whose cynicism is the result of severely
disappointing experiences. Under that cynicism there is
however genuine respect and even chivalry as to the right
sort of woman,--the superior and sincere type, which he does
not happen often to encounter.]
_Madame Leverdet_--Let us come to serious topics while we are alone,
my friend.
_De Ryons_--And apropos of them?
_Madame Leverdet_--Are you willing to be married off yet?
_De Ryons_ [_with a start of terror_]--Pardon me, my dear lady! At
what hour can I take the first train for Paris?
_Madame Leverdet_--Now listen to me, at least.
_De Ryons_--What! Here it is two years since I have called on you; I
come to make you a little visit of a morning, in all good friendship,
with the thermometer forty, centigrade; I am totally unsuspecting; all
I ask is to have a little lively chat with a clever woman--and see how
you receive me.
_Madame Leverdet_ [_continuing_]--A simple, charming young girl--
_De Ryons_ [_interrupting her, and in the same tone_]-- --musical,
speaks English, draws nicely, sings agreeably, a society woman, a
domestic woman,--all at the choice of the applicant.
_Madame Leverdet_ [_laughing_]--Yes, and pretty and graceful and rich;
and, by-the-by, one who finds you a charming fellow.
_De Ryons_--She is quite right there. I shall make a charming
husband--I shall; I know it. Only thirty-two years old; all my teeth,
all my hair (no such very common detail, the way young men are
nowadays); lively, sixty thousand livres income as a landed
proprietor--oh, I am an excellent match: only unfortunately I am not a
marrying man.
_Madame Leverdet_--And why not, if you please?
_De Ryons_ [_smiling_]--It would interfere severely with my studies.
_Madame Leverdet_--What sort of studies?
_De Ryons_--My studies of--woman.
_Madame Leverdet_--Really! I don't understand you.
_De Ryons_--What! Do you not know that I am making women my
particular, my incessant study, and that I am reckoning on leaving
some new and very interesting documents dealing with that branch of
natural history?--a branch very little understood just at present, in
spite of all that has been written on the topic. My friend, I cannot
sacrifice the species to the individual; I belong to science. It is
quite impossible for me to give myself wholly and completely--as one
certainly should do when he marries--to one of those charming and
terrible little carnivora for whose sake men dishonor themselves, ruin
themselves, kill themselves; whose sole preoccupation, in the midst of
the universal carnage that they make, is to dress themselves now like
umbrellas and now like table bells.
_Madame Leverdet_ [_scornfully_]--So you really think you understand
women, do you?
_De Ryons_--I rather think I do. Why, just as you see me this instant,
at the end of five minutes' study or conversation I can tell you to
what class a woman belongs,--whether to the middle class, to women of
rank, artists, or whatever you please; what are her tastes, her
characteristics, her antecedents, the state of her heart,--in a word,
everything that concerns my special science.
_Madame Leverdet_--Really! Will you have a glass of water?
_De Ryons_--Not yet, thank you.
_Madame Leverdet_--I suppose, then, you are under the impression that
you know me too.
_De Ryons_--As if I did not!
_Madame Leverdet_--Well, and I am--what?
_De Ryons_--Oh, you are a clever woman. It is for that reason that I
call on you [_aside:_ every two years].
_Madame Leverdet_--Will you kindly give me the sum of your
observations in general? You can tell me so much, since I am a clever
woman.
_De Ryons_--The true, the true, the true sum?
_Madame Leverdet_--Yes.
_De Ryons_--Simply that woman of our day is an illogical, subordinate,
and mischief-making creature. [_In saying this De Ryons draws back and
crouches down as if expecting to be struck._]
_Madame Leverdet_--So then, you detest women?
_De Ryons_--I? I detest women? On the contrary, I adore them; but I
hold myself in such a position toward them that they cannot bite me. I
keep on the outside of the cage.
_Madame Leverdet_--Meaning by that--what?
_De Ryons_--Meaning by that, that I am a friend of the sex; for I have
long perceived that just as truly as women are dangerous in love, just
so much are they adorable in friendship, with men;--that is to say,
with no obligations, and therefore no treasons; no rights, and in
consequence no tyrannies. One assists, too, as a spectator, often as a
collaborator, in the comedy of love. A man under such conditions sees
before his nose the stage tricks, the machinery, the changes of
scenes, all that stage mounting so dazzling at a distance and so
simple when one is near by. As a friend of the sex and on a basis of
friendship, one estimates the causes, the contradictions, the
incoherences, of that phantasmagoric changeableness that belongs to
the heart of a woman. So you have something that is interesting and
instructive. Under such circumstances a man is the consoler, and gives
his advice; he wipes away tears; he brings quarrelsome lovers
together; he asks for the letters that must be returned; he hands back
the photographs (for you know that in love affairs photographs are
taken only in order to be returned, and it is nearly always the same
photograph that serves as many times as may be necessary. I know one
photograph that I have had handed back by three different men, and it
ended its usefulness by being given for good and all to a fourth one,
who was--not single).... In short, you see, my dear madam, I am above
all the friend of those women--who have known what it is to be in
love. And moreover inasmuch, just as Rochefoucauld says, as women do
not think a great deal of their first experience,--why, one fine day
or another--
_Madame Leverdet_--You prove to be the second one.
_De Ryons_--No, no; I have no number, I! A well-brought-up woman never
goes from one experience of the heart to another one, without a decent
interval of time, more or less long. Two railroad accidents never come
together on the same railway. During the _intervals_ a woman really
needs a friend, a good confidant; and it is then that I turn up. I let
her tell me all the melancholy affairs in question; I see the unhappy
victim in tears after the traitor has called; I lament with her, I
weep with her, I make her laugh with me: and little by little I
replace the delinquent without her seeing that I am doing so. But then
I know very well that I am without importance, that I am a mere
politician of the moment, a cabinet minister without a portfolio, a
sentimental distraction without any consequences; and some fine day,
after having been the confidential friend as to past events, I become
the confidential friend as to future ones,--for the lady falls in love
for the second time with somebody who knows nothing of the first
experience, who will never know anything about it, and who of course
must be made to suppose he represents the first one. Then I go away
for a little time and leave them to themselves, and then I come back
like a new friend to the family. By-and-by, when the dear creature is
reckoning up the balance-sheet of her past, when her conscience pours
into her ear the names that she would rather not remember, and my name
comes with the others, she reflects an instant,--and then she says
resolutely and sincerely to herself, "Oh, _he_ does not count!" My
friend, I am always the one that does not count, and I like it
extremely.
_Madame Leverdet_ [_indignantly_]--You are simply a monster!
_De Ryons_--Oh no, oh no, oh no, I am not!
_Madame Leverdet_--According to your own account, you have no faith in
women.... Wretch! Ungrateful creature! And yet it is woman who
inspires all the great things in this life.
_De Ryons_--But somehow forbids us to accomplish them.
_Madame Leverdet_--Go out from here, my dear De Ryons, and never let
me see you again.
_De Ryons_ [_rising promptly and making a mocking bow_]--My dear
lady--
_Madame Leverdet_--No, I will _not_ shake hands with you.
_De Ryons_--Then I shall die of chagrin--that's all about it.
_Madame Leverdet_--Do you know how you will end, you incorrigible
creature? When you are fifty years old you will have rheumatism.
_De Ryons_--Yes, or sciatica. But I shall find some one who will
embroider me warm slippers.
_Madame Leverdet_--Indeed you will not! You will marry your cook.
_De Ryons_--That depends on how well she cooks. Again farewell, dear
madam.
_Madame Leverdet_--No, stay one moment.
_De Ryons_--It is you who are keeping me; so look out.
_Madame Leverdet_--Let me have really your last word on the whole
matter.
_De Ryons_--It is very easily given. There are just two kinds of
women: those who are good women, and those who are not.
_Madame Leverdet_--Without fine distinctions?
_De Ryons_--Without fine distinctions.
_Madame Leverdet_--What is one to do in the case of those who are
not--good women?
_De Ryons_--They must be consoled.
_Madame Leverdet_--And those who are?
_De Ryons_--They must be guaranteed against being anything else; and
as to that process of guarantee I have taken a patent.
_Madame Leverdet_--Come now, if you are playing in parlor theatricals,
say so. What are you trying to be,--Lovelace or Don Quixote?
_De Ryons_--I am neither the one nor the other. I am a man who, having
nothing else to do, took to studying women just as another man studies
beetles and minerals, only I am under the impression that my
scientific study is more interesting and more useful than that of the
other savant--because we meet your sex everywhere. We meet the mother,
the sister, the daughter, the wife, the woman who is in love; and it
is important to be well informed upon such an eternal associate in
our lives. Now I am a man of my time, exercised over one theory
or another, hardly knowing what he must believe, good or bad, but
inclined to believe in good when occasion presents itself. I respect
women who respect themselves.... It is not I who created the world; I
take it as I find it.... And as to marriage, the day when I shall find
a young girl with the four qualities of goodness of heart, sound
health, thorough self-respect, and cheerfulness,--the squaring of the
conjugal hypothenuse,--then I count for nothing all my long term of
waiting; like the great Doctor Faust, I become young again, and such
as I am, I give myself to her. My friend, if this same young girl of
whom you have been speaking (and by the way, I know her just as well
as you do) really unites these conditions,--I do not believe she does
so, though I shall see very soon,--why then, I will marry her
to-morrow--I will marry her to-night. But in the mean time, as I have
positively nothing to do,--if you happen to know a self-respecting
woman who needs to be kept from a bit of folly ... why, I am wholly at
your service.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
by E. Irenaeus Stevenson