_Madame de Rumieres_--See here, now, Remonin, you who claim to explain
everything as a learned man--can you solve this proposition? Why is it
that with all the quantity of love in this world, there are so many
unhappy marriages?
_M. Remonin_--I could give you a perfect explanation, my dear lady, if
you were not a woman.
_Madame de Rumieres_--You mean that the explanation is not decent?
_M. Remonin_--No, I mean that it is a matter based on the abstract....
It is this. The reason why marriages are rarely happy, in spite of the
"quantity of love" in question, is because love and marriage,
scientifically considered, have no relationship. They belong to two
sorts of things, completely differing. Love is of the physical.
Marriage is a matter of chemistry.
_Madame de Rumieres_--Explain yourself.
_Remonin_--Certainly. Love is an element of the natural evolution of
our being; it comes to us of itself in course of our life, at one time
or another, independent of all our will, and even without a definite
object. The human creature can wish to be in love before really loving
any one!... But marriage is a social combination, an adjustment, that
refers itself to chemistry, as I have said; since chemistry concerns
itself with the action of one element on another and the phenomena
resulting: ... to the end of bringing about family life, morality, and
labor, and in consequence the welfare of man, as involved in all
three. Now, so often as you really can conform to the theory of such a
blending of things, so long as you happen to have effected in marriage
such a combination of the physical _and_ chemical, all goes well; the
experiment is happy, it results well. But if you are ignorant or
maladroit enough to seek and to make a combination of two refractory
chemical forces in the matrimonial experiment, then in the place of a
fusion you will find you have only inert forces; and the two elements
remain there, together but unfused, eternally opposed to each other,
never able to be united!... Or else there is not merely inertia--there
are shocks, explosions, catastrophes, accidents, dramas....
_Madame de Rumieres_--Have you ever been in love?
_M. Remonin_--I? My dear marquise, I am a scientist--I have never had
time! And you?
_Madame de Rumieres_--I have loved my children. M. de Rumieres was a
charming man all his life; but he didn't expect me really to love him.
My son tells me his affairs of the heart; ... my daughter has already
made me a grandmother ... I have little to reproach myself as to my
past life, and now I look on at the lives of others, sometimes much
interested. I am like the subscribers to the Opera, who know the whole
repertory by heart, but who can always hear some passages with
pleasure and who encourage the debutants.
Condensed and translated for 'A Library of the World's Best
Literature,' by E. Irenaeus Stevenson.