THE HELL OF LOVE
Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite
as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean's abysses,
has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love.
And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most
inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the
somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows.
From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning,
more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to
the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience
of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged
desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of
affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of
sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path
through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by
love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and
hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the
summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for
those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees
in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of
his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with
betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and
drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism.
I certainly have neither strength nor courage sufficient to accompany
the reader into the lower regions of the amorous hell. If you have
already passed your thirtieth year, you surely must have among the
memories of your past some half hour of desperation and some sleepless
night which make you shudder only by recalling them; you must have
suffered certain torments, compared to which Dante's infernal region
will seem blooming flower-beds to you, and you must imagine that nature
rarely torments one man with all the tortures of the amorous passion. In
human nature some sorrows make the heart incapable of suffering certain
others, and the morbid rage of jealous pride protects us against the
bitter sob of a generous sorrow, just as the chaste reserve of a modest
nature deprives us of the possibility of suffering the ardent thirst for
certain pleasures.
If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to
sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the
hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other
all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this
cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have
ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger
than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one;
the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to
touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.
Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows
of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys
shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds
of times: "I would have her dead rather than belonging to another--a
thousand times buried, but not unfaithful." And frequently the man who
utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end,
stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim.
Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride
and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful
storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man
into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that
few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region
which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater torture than the
death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred,
betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this
creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have
poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our
thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple
of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken,
ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god
live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar.
Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a
spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless
cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that
she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that
she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the
numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there
is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light
brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the
weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives,
hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible
than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more
inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not
believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.
But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as
to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a
wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the
joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills
of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who
embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are
nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain
suspended between an infinity of joy that _was_ ours and an infinity of
sorrow that _is_ ours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are
so cowardly as to live,--then we may look upon suicide as the supreme
joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand
how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his
bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how
imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the
fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished
in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the
wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.
In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each
other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering
of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely
pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and
which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is
because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no
longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of
the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the
withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or
maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which
reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same
leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse
is buried there--but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on
one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to
be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for
the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and
silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the
summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of
the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand
certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them
is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.
I feel very sure that many who weep for love, either because their love
is not returned or because they fear deception--if they have not already
been deceived--or because of their bitter disappointment when they
found that they had burned their incense to an idol of clay or a statue
of marble, will repute my description exaggerated, yet it is
nevertheless a pallid picture of a sorrow which pen of man will never be
able to portray from nature, but succeed only in divining from afar. To
many death, the absolute evil, in the presence of which every hope
perishes, seems preferable to the torture that threatens life yet does
not kill, which opens the wounds and hinders the work done by nature to
heal them. I wish that these gentlemen may never have the opportunity of
making the cruel comparison for themselves, of experiencing the effects
of an assimilated anatomy of two great sorrows, one of which is termed
death, the other desperation. If they truly love, may they die earlier
than their beloved! This is the sweetest blessing that I can offer them
from the pages of my book.
Love is a passion so fervid and so deep that we must not wonder if it
has abrupt convulsions and sudden swoons. Accustomed to dwell always in
lofty regions, to have but extreme voluptuousness for nourishment, to
vibrate with the highest notes of sentiment and the delirium of the
senses, it may instantaneously become possessed, when it least expects
it, by unreasonable fears, idiotic suspicions, inexplicable
restlessness. By this I do not mean diffidence, jealousy, disgust, weary
libertinism, or bitter disappointments, but a vague and shapeless fog
that invades the heart which, by feeling too deeply, has become languid
and congeals the nerves exhausted from excessive quivering. It is an
indefinable hysteria which from a slight disorder may develop into a
most intense bitterness.
An immense love, whatever the source of the heart from which it springs
forth, is always followed by the shadow of an infinite fear. You adore
your child; you have left him for five minutes on the lawn or in your
garden, intent on filling his little cart with sand; he was as rosy and
fresh as the flowers near him; as bright as the sun that gilded his
curly locks. Now, while you are seated at your table, you have wished to
call him, I know not why, perhaps to hear the sweet sound of his
silvery voice; and he does not answer you. You call him again, and again
silence. He is utterly absorbed in the ponderous care of his wagon; but
you, flying in a few seconds over a thousand miles of thought, have
imagined that he was dead, that a snake had bitten him, that he had
fallen in a swoon--who knows the fantastic visions that have passed
through your mind! With your heart throbbing, your skin in a
perspiration, you are afraid to rise and wish to defer for a moment the
spectacle of a cruel loss. Of these and greater follies we are given a
sad spectacle every day by that love of loves which alone was called by
this name as the prince and god of all the amorous sentiments.
Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the
most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures
that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law
which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy
on this planet.
In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals
the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied:
"_Clamando misere amat_." For these unfortunates (we have already
described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by
so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and
wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything,
scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they
pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss
they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel
only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that
love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles
and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find
and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical
soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the
infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter.
These creatures were certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if
nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an
Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy,
because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love.
There is perhaps no greater torture than that which a woman must suffer
when compelled to submit to the caress of a man whom she does not love.
I do not mean by this the brutal violence that assimilates an embrace to
homicide, and relegates it to the criminal code and the prison. In this
case we would have a human beast that strikes, bites, sheds the blood of
a poor creature who swoons with terror or struggles powerlessly in the
clutches of a tiger: they are sorrows which belong to the story of
terror, to the bloodiest pages of supreme tortures. I intend to speak
here of the caresses that a woman must accord to a man because law,
money or a surprise of the senses has sold her to him without love; I
intend to speak of torture bitter, somber, deep as infinity, and which
assimilates the prostitute to the martyr.
These sorrows, among the greatest that the human heart can suffer, were
by a cruel nature almost exclusively reserved for woman. Man, by the
special nature of his aggressive sex, must be spurred to the embrace by
a sudden enthusiasm; his senses must be clouded by intense lust. In him
voluptuousness can do without love, and physical love has a joy that is
sufficient to conceal mercifully all his lack of sentiment and passion.
For if indifference, hatred, contempt permeate him entirely, invading
even the last intrenchments of love, then no caress in the world can
revive it, no law, human or divine, can force him to accept a caress
which to him is repugnant. There is no case in which the ancient theory
of freedom of the will shows its ridiculous falsity as plainly as in
this.
Woman, however, may be as cold as ice, feel chilly shivers of aversion
and loathing run through her entire body, hate a man to the desire of
death, despise to abhorrence a man who is near to her; and yet in many
cases she can, and in very many she must, submit to his caress. Frigid,
with grief in her heart and hatred on her lips, she beholds the ardor
of that man which burns but does not warm her; she looks on the
sublimity of enthusiasm only as the culmination of ridicule; she
discerns passion, but finds it simply grotesque; she perceives
impetuosity, and for her it is nothing but violence; instead of love,
with its flashes, its light, its perfumes, she sees, smells, touches
simply a brutal force which debases, prostitutes, pollutes her; an
infinity of repugnance in an ocean of nausea!
When woman has fallen into that mire through her own fault, she cannot
be more cruelly punished. The immensity of prostitution is avenged with
an infinity of outrage; the holiest thing is plunged into the most fetid
mud; the greatest joy gives place to the greatest shame. But when, on
the contrary, the daughter of Eve is brought to this sacrifice of the
body by the tyranny of the law, by the perverted tendencies of our moral
education, when she finds herself led to that cruel misfortune through
ignorance or through the fault of others,--then, if she does not yet
possess that skepticism which heals the heart or that cynicism which
shields it, if she still knows what modesty is, if she still remembers
the trepidations of love, then that poor woman drinks drop by drop the
most cruel torture that any creature can endure; then she passes through
a long and merciless agony.
To have dreamed for years and years of the promised land of love, to
have conquered it, inch by inch, through the reveries of childhood and
the rosy aurora of adolescence; to have felt an immense, horrible fear
of dying before having loved; to have loved and to love, to be aware of
a volcano in the heart, to be at the gates of paradise and inhale
through the portal its inebriating perfumes--and then, after all this,
to become conscious of having been transformed into a vessel which
satisfies the thirst, to feel in the bosom a roaring beast--to be a part
of the régime of a man, like magnesia or leeches--truly this is more
cruel torture than the inquisitors ever invented; it is really too great
a sorrow for a lonely weak creature!
What mass of meditations, what abysses of desperation are gathered in a
few seconds in the head of a woman caressed by a man whom she does not
love! What eloquence in silence, that silence which Ovid, the libertine,
eagerly advised women to avoid! Often does a man press to his bosom a
creature who does not love him and whom he too heedlessly prostitutes,
while the victim meditates a long, cruel revenge. More than one
adultery, more than one assassination was conceived, discussed, vowed in
that moment when man, enjoying the supreme bliss, believed to have in
his arms a happy creature. More than one embrace has generated twins, a
new man and a new hatred; a tenacious and bitter hatred, which only the
death of the one who hates can extinguish, since it often survives the
death of its object.
O men, you who see in love a cup to empty, and find in matrimony only an
association of two capitals or a mechanism for reproducing the species,
remember that for many creatures love is the first and the last of
passions, the first and the last of joys; and remember that for very
many women, whom you neglect and perhaps despise, love is all of life.
There is no nature so unhappy that its distress could not be relieved by
another nature capable of mending the shreds of the heart, tempering the
bitterness, straightening the rachitic limbs. There is no man, born weak
or sickly, who could not become robust if he only should live in a
climate, be supplied with food and surrounded with the physical and
moral atmosphere that agrees with him. And I believe that the same can
apply to love. If we could dedicate half a century to the search for the
right woman, if Diogenes' lantern could be fitted with the electric
light which modern science concedes to us, certainly among the thousand
millions of human beings who tread this planet we could and should be
able to find the woman who would be happy with us and make us happy.
Unfortunately, life is too short and love is too rapid and exacting in
its desires to make such a search possible; and even for the most
fortunate and wisest creatures a part of happiness is always among the
unknown quantities determined by chance and not by reflection. Hence
many and beautiful natures are tied by love-knots, and still are not
happy because characters fit each other on many sides of the human
polygon but not on all.
The study of these contrasts, of these partial incompatibilities would
require the moral analysis of the entire man, of all his social
vicissitudes, while many of those sorrows do not belong solely to love,
but spring from all human affections and poison friendship, fraternal,
filial and paternal loves; some of them, however, are peculiar to the
love of loves.
To feel at the same hour, at the same moment, in the same degree, the
stimulus of a desire or the thirst for a caress is a rare thing, a
fortunate coincidence which gilds with the most beautiful rays the
happiest hours of life; but it can never be the bread of a daily bliss.
In all other cases, thirst arises in one of the two and is communicated
to the other, so that a spark draws a spark, a caress generates
caresses. It is an invitation of lips, a fluttering of wings, a
harmonious note which calls from a bough to another bough; but it is
always the invitation to a rendezvous, the awakening of one who
slumbers. In these invitations, in these first skirmishes, the
ridiculous always runs parallel and very near to the sublime. Love
stands between them, it is true, and never permits them to unite; but
the least inadvertence, the least unscrupulous or heedless movement may
bring the two elements into contact; and the ridiculous, wherever it
touches, wounds self-love and, with it, love.
Even upon the most impatient, the most ridiculous, the most grotesque
desires you should throw at once the mantle of love to cover them. Every
threat of ridicule then vanishes like vapor; no wounding of self-love is
possible. I address myself to woman, because she oftener than we has the
opportunity of healing these unsightly wounds, because she has her hand
suavely ready to aid. Woe, if your companion should blush through your
fault, because you knew not at the proper time and place how to close
your eyes or shield them with the merciful veil of your hand or your
love!
How much bitterness, how much rancor and spite, how many nettles and
thorns are found on the blooming paths of the most fervid passion, just
because delicacy of sentiment does not always know how to reconcile the
inequalities of the senses, because a too exacting modesty repels a too
live ardor of temperament, or because woman does not decide with wise
perception that the too exacting demands, prompted by selfish love and
not by love, should be allowed to starve! By fleeing one may lose or
conquer; by standing one's ground one may lose or conquer: but many flee
when they should not recede, many stand firm when they should flee;
hence many defeats which disappoint both conquerors and conquered, and
love often lies on the ground drenched with its own blood.
The tortures, the spites, the bitternesses, the wearinesses, the stings,
the torments of love should be deeply studied because they always move
side by side with joy and voluptuousness, and very few are so fortunate
as not to stumble against them. Much luck, a thorough knowledge of man,
great experience can defend us from them, so that at the end of our
career we may bless love, which, though with some slight sorrow, has
perfumed our life with its most beautiful flowers.
I have alluded only to some of the torments which populate the hell of
love; but their number is infinite, their names are countless. In every
field of sentiment, of senses and of intellect man possesses a much
greater possibility to suffer than to enjoy; and when bliss is attained
and the veins are cut from which oozes the bitter sap of sorrow, it is
always after a long, fierce battle, in which we defend ourselves with
all the weapons of nature and art. Here also--and here more, perhaps,
than anywhere else--the weight of mental virtues is revealed in all its
power, the influence of a noble and generous character in all its
strength. The ardent and impetuous heart is not a source of greater
amorous bitterness when the calm light of reason burns within it, when
the sublime incapacity to commit base actions accompanies the desire
for the good, when we enjoy more the pleasure we give than that which we
receive.
Weak and defective natures are strengthened and straightened when they
have for support the robust column of an affectionate and noble nature;
even the rabid rancors of small hearts lose their bitterness in the calm
blue ocean of a character which is all sweetness and sympathy.