RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF LOVE
"Love me! You must love me!" This is a cry of sorrow that often man
utters, and oftener a forsaken woman; but it generally is a vain cry. To
demand love as a right is one of the greatest follies; it is like asking
poetry of the slave of thought, or expecting to find the perfumes of the
rose and the cedar in the frigid zones that glaciate the head and the
feet of our planet. Lovers, however, have always the right to hurl into
space another cry of sorrow: "You must not betray me!" Better to snatch
from one's hand the cup of love and shatter it into a thousand pieces
than stealthily to pour into it the poison of betrayal or the wormwood
of indifference. Love bursts forth spontaneously from the human heart,
and draws all its beauty and strength from the infinite freedom of the
horizon in which it moves. The laws that govern it are as simple as the
simplest law of elementary physics: to attract, to unite, to render love
for love, sweetness for sweetness, to give joy to those who give us so
much joy, make happy those who make us happy: such is its law. If love
were only a contact of hearts and thoughts; if, having ascended to
heaven, you have descended from it without an angel; if in your embraces
you have not rekindled the torch of life, greet each other as friends,
bless the happy hours that your love has conceded you, and preserve in
the most precious casket and among the dearest things the memory of the
time that is no more. Never close a day of paradise with a blasphemy or
a remorse; the tears of regret for what you have lost can be the dew of
a summer night that tempers the ardor of the enamored corollas; but your
tears should not be cursed by a lie, a betrayal, an insult.
The only right--that of not being deceived--has its counterpart in a
very simple duty--that of making oneself beloved. You cannot command
love, but through beauty of form, quickness of mind, voluptuous grace of
movements or virtues of the heart you have awakened the affection of
affections; if you know how to preserve it, you will be loved forever.
On the very first page of every code of love, at the beginning of every
gospel of two lovers, I would always write this sentence: "Not to be
loved is always a great fault." And you will find this sentence written
in a hundred different forms in the pages of my book.
Ask the most fortunate of women if she has not often felt impelled to
reconquer a love that threatened to fly away. She jealously conceals the
numberless stratagems with which she warmed the tepid, aroused the
sleeping, caused the wearied to smile, made hungry and thirsty him who
had the happy misfortune of overgorging himself at the banquet of
voluptuousness. Man is, by nature, polygamous, more unfaithful, more
brutal, more capricious, more licentious than woman, and it is her duty
to make him monogamous, faithful, constantly tender and modestly virile.
If it is true that man attacks and conquers, it is also very true that
nature assigns to woman the more difficult task of keeping the conquest,
of being the vestal of that fire which man has nearly always been the
first to kindle. This is perhaps the most common formula that expresses
the different missions which man and woman have in love. To us to kindle
the fire, to our companion to keep it burning.
By all that you hold most sacred on earth, do not be so brutal as to
record the embrace among the rights and duties of love. This is written
in the code, and is daily repeated by those Boeotians for whom love is
but the union of male and female. Voluptuousness should be inebriating
foam that floats on the quivering wave of passion and overflows and
falls irresistibly into those abysses where man loses the consciousness
of existence and believes in the infinite; it cannot be a feast ordered
for a stated hour, much less a tribute exacted with the rudeness of a
tax collector. How many delicate loves were extinguished by the
sacrilegious hand of an arrogant desire, which would assume the air of
command and tread the ground with the iron boot of an alleged right! No;
the embrace is not a right and much less a duty: it is a unanimous
consent of two powerful energies that seek each other through infinite
space and, suavely struggling against each other, die together in an
ocean of sweetness.
Sincerity and fidelity, which are after all an identical thing and
constitute the entire code of love, should never be on the lips of two
lovers, and the words _right_ and _duty_ should be debarred from the
amorous vocabulary. Who ever loses his time in discussing the beauties
of the sun? Who doubts that air is necessary to live? When certain
things begin to be discussed, they are already in serious danger of
being lost; and if a continuous, vexatious investigation should at every
hour cast the shadow of doubt upon the faithfulness of one's companion,
the latter would have the right of feeling wretchedly loved or at least
cruelly loved. I do not fear sudden anger between two lovers, or the
querulous and tender lamentations; but I have a deep horror of every
question about right and duty. When these discourses appear on the
horizon, I always see at the same time dark clouds massing; I see
looming up the horns of Balzac's tawny moon.
Are the rights of love equal in man and woman? No! a thousand times no!
I say so in a loud voice and after the first white hairs and a wide
experience permit me to believe that I speak without anger or love. No;
the sin of infidelity is not the same in Adam and in Eve: in the latter
it is a hundred times greater. As a right and before the courts all
parties are equal, but man and woman differ too greatly to be punished
in the same measure. If the code is one, the jurors are a thousand; many
are the accusers, many the lawyers; and the sentence of amorous betrayal
has already been pronounced by all civilized nations and always in the
same manner. This unanimous consent was not imposed by the arrogance of
men, who alone were the legislators before the courts and judges in the
forum of public opinion. No; this unanimous consent was dictated by a
deep consciousness of social necessities, by a more profound and subtler
justice that descends into the inmost recess of things to find the roots
of that awkward and superficial justice which asserts that all men are
equal before the law. How false this dogma is can be sufficiently proved
by the history of the jury system, one of the institutions on which our
century seems to pride itself.
From man society exacts a hundred different and difficult virtues: he
must give his blood for his country and the sweat of his brow for his
family and for society; he must be strong, ambitious; he must not allow
himself to be corrupted by gold or the seductions of vanity. A
physician, he must throw himself into the inglorious and tremendous
battle of epidemic; a soldier, he must hold his head high in the face of
murderous fire; a lawyer, he must resist the temptations of gold and
ambition; a statesman, he must fight against himself, against his
family, for the welfare of his country. Defender of the weak, of the
shipwrecked, of the poor, natural defender of the female half of the
human species and of all the individuals who are of no value to society,
he is a warrior perpetually under arms, and should he neglect one of his
duties, he is branded as a coward; society despises him, woman does not
want him, everyone ignores him.
Woman, on the contrary, can be a coward in the face of fire, of work, of
contagion, and of all the battles of life; she can be ignorant and
timorous and still be loved and esteemed by all; for in her weakness
approaches grace, and it is so sweet to us to take the faint-hearted
dove to our bosom and comfort her with our courage, defend her with our
strength!
And even blunders are amusing when pronounced by the beautiful lips of a
beloved woman! We forgive her if she very rarely reaches the height of
genius and more rarely than we attains the average height of the great
intellectual minds; we forgive her if she has no profession, if she does
not earn her bread with work. Of her we ask only one thing: _fidelity_;
from her we exact only one virtue: _fidelity_! Pray, O most gentle and
divine companions, on what side does the scale of the balance fall?
Certainly not our side.
Woman may be humble, ignorant, tremble at every leaf that quivers, at
every wing that vibrates in the air; but she should be faithful to him
who loves her. She may yield to everything, but must resist the
seductions of defiant glances and the corruptions of gold and vanity;
she should be the heroine of sentiment, as we are the heroes of all the
battles of life. She is the vestal of our heart and blood. While we are
fighting in one field for her, for the name she bears, for the honor of
our children, she should assiduously and faithfully watch the sacred
fire of fidelity, that it may not die out through neglect or be
overthrown and extinguished by the hurricane. This virtue only we ask of
her; is it, perhaps, too much? What is her duty, then? What is the
difficult struggle that shall give her also the mark of character and
make her equal to us, worthy to be our companion? If she is beautiful,
we are strong; if she is graceful, we are gifted. For her we have
conquered our planet, subdued the lightning, destroyed the beasts of
prey, invented arts, created sciences. But neither beauty nor grace nor
wit is sufficient for a man to deem himself civilized; there are imposed
on us a thousand dangers, on her but one: that of seduction. We are
dragged into a hundred battles; she has only to gain victory over the
senses. From us the world expects a hundred virtues; from her but one:
_faith_. Are we, then, tyrants? Are we too exacting with her whom we
love so much, for whom we do everything, to whom we dedicate all our
thoughts, our glories, our dreams and our labors?
But there is another powerful reason for which the duties of love are
differently distributed between man and woman. Man, by the special
mission which his sex imposes on him, is a sudden aggressor and has
organic necessities which are unknown to woman, and which he can satisfy
with the rapidity of lightning. Without losing his love, he may have a
caprice more fleeting than the lightning flash, and which, once
vanished, leaves behind not even a pinch of ashes. I neither praise nor
justify these sudden surprises of the senses, these passing
infidelities; but I describe them because I find them frequently in the
aggressive and petulant nature of the virile sex. Woman, instead, must
defend herself. Man loses a great part of energy in the tooth that bites
and in the claws that firmly hold the prey. Woman draws in her horns,
like the snail does in the spires of its labyrinth, and, languidly and
voluptuously concealed in the foam of her shell of love, allows herself
to be caressed. She loses nothing in the struggle for conquest, and she
is wholly consumed in the delights of letting herself be loved. Woman
also may have caprices of the senses, but they are light clouds which no
sooner appear than they are dissolved in the deep azure of the skies,
and do not become ardent desires until the human claws press and
condense them. Woman is silent even when she desires. Very weak in the
attack, she is formidable in the defense, and has in herself so much
energy as to stop and disarm a legion of combatants. With much
shrewdness she defends her weakness every day, telling us that
seductions wage war upon her from all quarters, while we are the first
to seek the opportunities of sin. This is one of the most insidious
sophisms, but it is also one of the weakest arguments of defense. Man
attacks and assails simply because he is a man and could not wait for
the seductions to come to him without condemning himself to be a eunuch
and without inverting the most elementary and most inexorable laws of
nature. Nor would a woman commit less of a sacrilege in turning from the
defensive to the offensive, profaning her sex and violating nature in
that which it holds most sacred and immutable.
Not in vain has nature made the human female a virgin, and denied us the
sorrowful virtue of virginity. The woman who yields to the first amorous
pruriency is a Messalina; the man who darts the first arrow of love is a
warrior who with wise prudence prepares the weapons for the long battle
that awaits him. Man begins with "yes" and "I will"; woman begins and
ends with "no" and "I will not." The sudden caprice of the senses is in
her harassed by so many physical, social and religious impediments that
she must really be more than an Amazon to overthrow them in a single
dash. Everything incites man to a swift assault which perhaps does not
even bruise the epidermis of his heart; everything defends woman from
these caprices. To yield she must have had a long struggle against
nature and society; laws and religions offer her a thousand allies for
defense, and not once in a hundred times she can say without touching
the frontiers of prostitution: "I had a caprice." No one believes in the
efficiency of overbearingness, much less woman herself, unless she
should need this faith to justify her own sin. In love every fault,
every crime, even patricide and incest, are possible--but not theft. Let
woman never profane herself nor spoil the cause, often very just, which
she defends, by speaking of seduction and violence. Let her rather speak
of the irresistible impulse of vengeance, of the law of retaliation; let
her discuss the natural right, because there she is on the ground of
truth and justice; let her complain aloud because in the human organism
she is the left side, the weakest, the least honored and the most
oppressed. Let her demand the right to love and to be loved, but never
ask equality of punishment for sins too disparate.
Nor does society measure human guilt only according to the reckoning of
the natural right; but the more sorrow a crime generates and the more it
offends human needs, the more severe the punishment inflicted by
society. Have you ever thought of the various consequences of a caprice
of infidelity, according as a man or a woman is guilty? For man the
caprice of an hour is a stain that tarnishes the bright mirror of a
sworn faith, of an immaculate and sublime love; but a few moments
afterward a new kiss, more ardent and pregnant with the pungent aroma of
remorse, revives love perhaps more intensely and makes impossible for
long years, perhaps forever, another sudden infidelity. The amorous
caprice may be a blasphemy that breaks forth from the lips of a saint,
but which is immediately deterged by a wave of holy prayer; it is the
weakness of a robust runner who stumbles against a stone, but proudly
resumes his way and with energetic steps recovers the space lost a
hundredfold. The amorous caprice of a woman may in a single instant
procreate a bastard, poison the wave of milk and honey of an entire
family, sow a generation of fraternal hatreds, of infinite sorrows,
overflow into a vast field, inundating everything with wormwood and
gall. In man such a caprice is a stain, in woman a gangrene; in man a
wound by a pin, in woman the caries of a bone; in man a leaf that falls,
in woman a hurricane that fells a whole forest; in man a misdemeanor, in
woman a felony; in man the remorse of an hour, in woman a monument of
infamy that time will never efface.