FAULTS AND CRIMES OF LOVE
If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love,
probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: "Love is
inconstant; love is a liar." If, on the other hand, you consult the
gloomy volumes in which man gathers the statistics of his crimes, you
will find several columns bristling with figures indicating the large
number of suicides and homicides for love; you will find no records of
inconstancy, and but rarely, scattered here and there, some cases of
adultery. The jurymen, then, that amorphous and chaotic mass in which
every idea of right and wrong dissolves and vanishes, always deal very
leniently with crimes for which the code would send the culprit to death
or to prison for life, and they often acquit the man who has turned
murderer for love.
In none of the human institutions is such impenetrable darkness as in
the field of love, where an intricate mass of reticences,
contradictions, tolerations and cruelties causes common sense to stumble
at every step and, what is worse, offends and wounds the sentiment of
justice. It is a written law that adultery is a crime to be punished
with the gravest penalties, but in actual life adultery is the most
common and most venial sin ever known; it is not only tolerated, but
fêted and almost accepted as a social institution. The incitement to
prostitution is considered a very serious crime, but many legislators
sell their daughters to a rich husband who cannot love her, never will
love her and will drive her to adultery with the force of irresistible
necessity. And is this not prostitution? Man is either not worthy of the
laws which he has imposed on himself, or he is rambling in a labyrinth
of maniacal vertigo; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a shameless
liar.
Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite. He proclaims
solemnly to the four winds that he is a son of God and that he inhabits
the earth by chance and temporarily; born in Olympus, he will return
there soon and forever. He is a god on vacation who condescends to play
and eat with the peasants, but he is winged and lives only on ideals. A
moment later he forgets his proclamations, his braggardism and shows
more than ever that he is an animal of the soil; he sees the painful
contrast between what he has said and what he has done, covers himself
and goes into hiding. Such is the eternal formula of his eternal
contradictions. In love he lies more frequently and more brazenly than
in any other case. He has supposed for a moment that love, too, could be
just and hence measured on the same scale as the other sentiments, and
above all leveled by the common yoke of the other affections. And yet
love may possess all virtues; it may be merciful, heroic, kind,
generous, but it can never be just; born in injustice, it lives on
injustice and dies of injustice; it has but one right--strength; it
possesses only one weapon--arrogance.
When deceived love arms itself with an homicidal knife, I class that
crime among the most inevitable effects of instantaneous hatred and
natural revenge; when love is imposed as a duty on a girl, and instead
of love hatred is born, instead of affection contempt springs up, I
remark that love cannot be ordered for a fixed hour like a dinner, and
that, if infamies and bastards are born from the obscene nuptials of
gold and vanity, love has nothing to do with it, because love was
absent, and he who can prove an alibi is at once acquitted by the most
cruel and most stubborn of public prosecutors. When I see love kill
dignity, friendship, the holiest affections of the heart; when I see it
breaking with furious rage the iron bars of the cage in which a cruel
code of laws has imprisoned it, I acquit it instantly because love is
not a wild beast that can be shut up in a menagerie, but a creature as
free as air, that lives on bright light and burning suns, on the aroma
of the forest and the fragrance of the meadows. You have made it
hydrophobic with hunger and thirst; you have made it furious with your
own violence; and you complain because the mad creature bites and kills?
This is admitted to be true by universal consent; and as there is an
immense inequality between what the laws require and that of which human
loves are capable, men shrug their shoulders and forgive, forgive
always, forgive all, even where human justice should rise in all the
solemn grandeur of its majesty to protect the most sacred rights of
family and society. In the codes, love is often a crime; in the paths of
life, for the most rigorous individuals, it is at most a weakness--a
dear, a sympathetic weakness.
For me hypocrisy is a chain that ties and chokes love in modern society,
and I dare affirm that the only fault, the only crime which this
sentiment can commit is falsehood. Let us begin by freeing it from the
leprosy which infects, devours, disgraces it, and then we shall see what
remains sound beneath in that dear, nude and virginal love that Mother
Nature has conceded us. Let us first save the life of this poor
creature, and then we shall attend to the rest; we shall find out
whether it has other misfortunes, whether it can commit other crimes
besides that of lying.
In my opinion, love is today a liar from head to foot; a liar when it
swears and when it forswears; a liar when, a hundred times a day, it
pronounces the words _eternal_, _eternity_, _eternally_; it is a liar in
law and in life; it is unfaithful, a thief, a traitor, solely because it
is a liar. I may have a _Scipionian mania_, the fixed idea of a _delenda
Carthago_; but if I should have to answer the questions: "Which are the
true, the great loves?" "Which are the happy loves?" I would reply
without hesitation: "The sincere." All the faults of love are all lies;
almost all the misfortunes of love are the offspring of untruth; and,
finally, adultery is nothing but the most infamous of love's lies. "What
is," I will ask in turn, "the only remedy for unhappy loves, the only
anchor of salvation for betrayed loves?" "Sincerity, sincerity, nothing
but sincerity."
At the risk of seeing many disciples and many masters of love smile
skeptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she
loves, lies less than we do, and during the life of love she is less
unfaithful than we are. Man, in his first declaration, even when quite
sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite
affection; while woman, more modest, more timid, more reserved, answers
that she does not love yet; that she has not yet consulted her heart;
that, perhaps, she will love. The less one swears, the less one
forswears; and if a holy horror may deprive speech of some fiery accent
and some amorous expansion of inebriating expressions, it nevertheless
stamps it with virile dignity which makes it blessed among women, while
it gives the sexual relations a character of tender reserve and delicate
serenity. Man often uses the "eternal oaths" as weapons of seduction,
and parades them at every hour as a measure of the bottomless depths of
his love; but sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because nothing
so boldly generates eternity and infinity as does armed desire. It is
only too true, however, that the hasty and imprudent vow is a fruitful
father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of infidelity.
Very few are the eternal loves, as are geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos.
We all anxiously climb the mountain of the ideal, but few can get a
branch or a leaf of the sacred tree. Some loves of the lower orders last
years; others, months; some of them are as transient as the ephemera,
for which long is the life of a day. Now, frankness can give all loves
the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man can die without amorous
remorse if his loves were all honest. He has loved much and fleetingly,
but he has never lied, never betrayed anybody, never perjured himself.
Sometimes lies are told through compassion, and woman, more frequently
than we, striving in vain to keep alive a dying love, is loath to
inflict a cruel wound on the companion who still loves her, and
endeavors with a mighty effort to deceive herself and him, until through
habit of hypocrisy she succeeds in feigning a love that no longer
exists; and from lie to betrayal the road is short and slippery. The
lie at first was merciful, then it grew into a habit, and at last became
transformed into a crime.
No; lovers or husbands, companions of voluptuousness or vestals of the
family, never tell an untruth, even when it is suggested to you by pity.
It is hard, cruel, to see the blooming tree of a happy passion felled by
a sudden hurricane; tremendous is the rending of a heart that breaks in
a day under the shock of an atrocious blight; but these sorrows do not
debase us, and, although capable of killing, do not humiliate us. Love
killed by violence remains stretched on the ground as beautiful as a
thunderstruck angel, and memory weaves a wreath for him and with the
most precious aromas and balsams preserves him from putrefaction. Love
killed by the lingering tabes of a secret betrayal, is a leper who dies
in the fetidness of a hospital, a horror to himself and to the others; a
corpse slowly corroded by phthisis and scrofula, leaving no trace
whatever of the time when he, too, was a young and robust organism.
False and cruel is the pity that causes us to simulate a love which no
longer exists. No sorrow is greater than that which deception inflicts
upon us; love, self-esteem, self-love, love of ownership, all the
warmest and most powerful of human affections, are pierced with a
hundred stabs at the same time, and the pain is so intense that it
poisons all our life with wormwood and gall. How beautiful, instead, how
sublime is a love that, without swearing eternity or infinity, lasts
eternal and infinite as long as two human hearts throb together; how
beautiful is a love that needs no chains and lives on faith and liberty!
To love means to be all of another; to be loved means to have become a
living part of another: the lie begins when, with cynical
licentiousness, the man or the woman is divided in two parts, and the
body is given to one, the soul, as it were, to the other. Love is a
whole that cannot be divided without being killed, and, unless
voluptuousness is reduced to a plain question of hygiene, one cannot
love two human creatures at the same time with that sentiment which for
its superiority over all other affections is called love, without
betraying both. I hold in much higher estimation a woman who, after a
long career of facile loves, can say, "I have never loved two men at the
same time," than a bigoted matron who boasts of having never betrayed
her duties as a spouse because with wise and cautious lechery she knows
how to sell voluptuousness without seriously compromising the property
reserved for the husband.
Lies are all infamous; but in love there are some venial and some
perfidious: it is one thing to deceive an old libertine and another to
betray a faithful husband; one to lie to a frivolous coquette, another
to deceive a virtuous woman. Further on we shall outline the rights and
duties of love; but here we must point out the stem from which they
hang, like the grapes from their stalk. Woman belongs to man, man
belongs to woman; Love is the son of the most free selection; it is born
when it wants and as it wants; it appears on the plains or on the summit
of the mountains; it is born nude and as free as the air; it does not
ask for passports, because it passes with impunity through all the
police lines.
Men and women, free and pure, you should seek and love each other; study
true love, and consecrate it with the only vow that love should make
when it would close itself in the temple of the family. If you truly
love, if you are worthy of each other, if your love offends no superior
duty, no human force can oppose your powerful attraction, and nature and
men will bless your selection. Read and read again all that I have
written on the first loves; swear seldom; never swear if you possess
this virtue; at most swear but once, the first and last oath that will
unite you in wedlock. The compact violated in the first steps of the
life of love is a murder and prepares the career of a brigand tolerated
by civilization. To betray a virgin is, in so far as the law is
concerned, a question for the public prosecutor or for the mayor of your
town; to betray her without dishonoring her is an anonymous infamy that
poisons two existences and two loves, that leaves in you an eternal
bitterness, in the woman an eternal rancor. Love, seek, study each
other, but never swear, never lie to the maiden who at the dawn of youth
demands of the first sun a ray to enlighten and warm her.
There is, however, a lie in love that excels all lies, a betrayal that
surpasses all others; there is a perfidiousness that outclasses every
assassination, every homicide, every rape: love with the wife of
another, a crime which, protected by the law, cherished by consuetudes,
fêted by our infamously hypocritical customs, avoids prison and scaffold
only because it takes the simple and easy precaution not to be termed
adultery. To introduce ourselves into the sanctuary of a happy family,
to become a friend to him whom we wish to betray, to cover him with the
mantle of our benevolent protection; to seduce slowly and pitilessly the
wife of another; with surprise, with the thousand pitfalls of moral
violence to open for her an abyss into which she will fall; to acquire
with the first conquest the impunity of a long series of crimes and open
in the family a large spring of gall that will poison two or three
generations: to do all this without expense and without danger,--these
in our century are termed the deeds of astute men, the consolation of
unhappy wives; and it can be done once, twice, ten times without the
perpetrators losing either the love of women or the esteem of men.
To be seized by a vertigo of the senses, to embrace publicly the wife of
another, or to let oneself be seen by her husband, is called adultery,
and, according to the circumstances and, above all, the gravity of the
scandal, it means a journey to prison or to some other rigorous penal
institution; it means disgrace to one's name and to that of one's
children. Modern society particularly recommends prudence; it does not
want any scandal; it does not want to be disturbed in its loves so amply
polygamous, but so piously cautious; modern civilization does not wish
to behold publicly any nudity whatever; it wishes to be believed moral,
respectful and respected. It matters little and is none of its concern
if an astute libertine spends his youth in filling families with
bastards, awaiting the day when he can abandon the betrayed wives for a
convenient marriage. It is a private affair with which husbands and
wives should occupy themselves individually. It is recommended to do
things nicely, to make no noise, to take good care of the keyholes and
listen attentively to the footsteps of those who walk in the apartments.
The meshes of the law are wide, very wide; he must be more than an idiot
who falls into them and cannot extricate himself. The flag of matrimony
covers all contraband; to try to establish one's paternity is
prohibited; the sons born of a legitimate couple are legitimate. Onward,
onward! For heaven's sake do not bother with your whims and your
embarrassing declarations of foreign merchandise. The customs, officers
close their eyes and do not see, shut their ears and do not hear; why
are you such an idiotic crowd as to wish to awaken them with your
imprudent cries? Onward, onward! The meshes of the law are wide.
Bastardize families, falsify names and surnames, spread mendacity and
sow deception in all the paths of social and civil life! Disseminate
lies and scatter deceptions everywhere! See to it that there shall be no
wall against which to lean, no road that can be trod without injuring
the foot with a sharp stone or a piece of poisoned glass! Make the name
of father a senseless word, that of mother a blasphemy!