The question, perhaps, is not so much how many virtuous women there
are, as what possibility there is of an honest woman remaining
virtuous.
In order to throw light upon a point so important, let us cast a rapid
glance over the male population.
From among our fifteen millions of men we must cut off, in the first
place, the nine millions of bimana of thirty-two vertebrae and exclude
from our physiological analysis all but six millions of people. The
Marceaus, the Massenas, the Rousseaus, the Diderots and the Rollins
often sprout forth suddenly from the social swamp, when it is in a
condition of fermentation; but, here we plead guilty of deliberate
inaccuracy. These errors in calculation are likely, however, to give
all their weight to our conclusion and to corroborate what we are
forced to deduce in unveiling the mechanism of passion.
From the six millions of privileged men, we must exclude three millions
of old men and children.
It will be affirmed by some one that this subtraction leaves a
remainder of four millions in the case of women.
This difference at first sight seems singular, but is easily accounted
for.
The average age at which women are married is twenty years and at forty
they cease to belong to the world of love.
Now a young bachelor of seventeen is apt to make deep cuts with his
penknife in the parchment of contracts, as the chronicles of scandal
will tell you.
On the other hand, a man at fifty-two is more formidable than at any
other age. It is at this fair epoch of life that he enjoys an
experience dearly bought, and probably all the fortune that he will
ever require. The passions by which his course is directed being the
last under whose scourge he will move, he is unpitying and determined,
like the man carried away by a current who snatches at a green and
pliant branch of willow, the young nursling of the year.
XIV.
Physically a man is a man much longer than a woman is a woman.
With regard to marriage, the difference in duration of the life of love
with a man and with a woman is fifteen years. This period is equal to
three-fourths of the time during which the infidelities of the woman
can bring unhappiness to her husband. Nevertheless, the remainder in
our subtraction from the sum of men only differs by a sixth or so from
that which results in our subtraction from the sum of women.
Great is the modest caution of our estimates. As to our arguments, they
are founded on evidence so widely known, that we have only expounded
them for the sake of being exact and in order to anticipate all
criticism.
It has, therefore, been proved to the mind of every philosopher,
however little disposed he may be to forming numerical estimates, that
there exists in France a floating mass of three million men between
seventeen and fifty-two, all perfectly alive, well provided with teeth,
quite resolved on biting, in fact, biting and asking nothing better
than the opportunity of walking strong and upright along the way to
Paradise.
The above observations entitle us to separate from this mass of men a
million husbands. Suppose for an instant that these, being satisfied
and always happy, like our model husband, confine themselves to
conjugal love.
Our remainder of two millions do not require five sous to make love.
It is quite sufficient for a man to have a fine foot and a clear eye in
order to dismantle the portrait of a husband.
It is not necessary that he should have a handsome face nor even a good
figure;
Provided that a man appears to be intellectual and has a distinguished
expression of face, women never look where he comes from but where he
is going to;
The charms of youth are the unique equipage of love;
A coat made by Brisson, a pair of gloves bought from Boivin, elegant
shoes, for whose payment the dealer trembles, a well-tied cravat are
sufficient to make a man king of the drawing-room;
And soldiers—although the passion for gold lace and aiguillettes has
died away—do not soldiers form of themselves a redoubtable legion of
celibates? Not to mention Eginhard—for he was a private secretary —has
not a newspaper recently recorded how a German princess bequeathed her
fortune to a simple lieutenant of cuirassiers in the imperial guard?
But the notary of the village, who in the wilds of Gascony does not
draw more than thirty-six deeds a year, sends his son to study law at
Paris; the hatter wishes his son to be a notary, the lawyer destines
his to be a judge, the judge wishes to become a minister in order that
his sons may be peers. At no epoch in the world’s history has there
been so eager a thirst for education. To-day it is not intellect but
cleverness that promenades the streets. From every crevice in the rocky
surface of society brilliant flowers burst forth as the spring brings
them on the walls of a ruin; even in the caverns there droop from the
vaulted roof faintly colored tufts of green vegetation. The sun of
education permeates all. Since this vast development of thought, this
even and fruitful diffusion of light, we have scarcely any men of
superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of
his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about,
think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful
catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the
want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the
swarms, and especially are we in need of more pretty women.
But the maladies by which a man is afflicted do not nullify the sum
total of human passion. To our shame be it spoken, a woman is never so
much attached to us as when we are sick.
With this thought, all the epigrams written against the little sex —for
it is antiquated nowadays to say the fair sex—ought to be disarmed of
their point and changed into madrigals of eulogy! All men ought to
consider that the sole virtue of a woman is to love and that all women
are prodigiously virtuous, and at that point to close the book and end
their meditation.
Ah! do you not remember that black and gloomy hour when lonely and
suffering, making accusations against men and especially against your
friends, weak, discouraged, and filled with thoughts of death, your
head supported by a fevered pillow and stretched upon a sheet whose
white trellis-work of linen was stamped upon your skin, you traced with
your eyes the green paper which covered the walls of your silent
chamber? Do you recollect, I say, seeing some one noiselessly open your
door, exhibiting her fair young face, framed with rolls of gold, and a
bonnet which you had never seen before? She seemed like a star in a
stormy night, smiling and stealing towards you with an expression in
which distress and happiness were blended, and flinging herself into
your arms!
“How did you manage it? What did you tell your husband?” you ask.
“Your husband!”—Ah! this brings us back again into the depths of our
subject.
XV.
Morally the man is more often and longer a man than the woman is a
women.
On the other hand we ought to consider that among these two millions of
celibates there are many unhappy men, in whom a profound sense of their
misery and persistent toil have quenched the instinct of love;
That they have not all passed through college, that there are many
artisans among them, many footmen—the Duke of Gevres, an extremely
plain and short man, as he walked through the park of Versailles saw
several lackeys of fine appearance and said to his friends, “Look how
these fellows are made by us, and how they imitate us”—that there are
many contractors, many trades people who think of nothing but money;
many drudges of the shop;
That there are men more stupid and actually more ugly than God would
have made them;
That there are those whose character is like a chestnut without a
kernel;
That the clergy are generally chaste;
That there are men so situated in life that they can never enter the
brilliant sphere in which honest women move, whether for want of a
coat, or from their bashfulness, or from the failure of a mahout to
introduce them.
But let us leave to each one the task of adding to the number of these
exceptions in accordance with his personal experience—for the object of
a book is above all things to make people think—and let us instantly
suppress one-half of the sum total and admit only that there are one
million of hearts worthy of paying homage to honest women. This number
approximately includes those who are superior in all departments. Women
love only the intellectual, but justice must be done to virtue.
As for these amiable celibates, each of them relates a string of
adventures, all of which seriously compromise honest women. It would be
a very moderate and reserved computation to attribute no more than
three adventures to each celibate; but if some of them count their
adventures by the dozen, there are many more who confine themselves to
two or three incidents of passion and some to a single one in their
whole life, so that we have in accordance with the statistical method
taken the average. Now if the number of celibates be multiplied by the
number of their excesses in love the result will be three millions of
adventures; to set against this we have only four hundred thousand
honest women!
If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does
not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so
little success attended the first.
Here then we have a people, a society which has been sifted, and you
see the result!
XVI.
Manners are the hypocrisy of nations, and hypocrisy is more or less
perfect.
XVII.
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all the
time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so regular
as at the table.
A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of any
man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of
gastronomy.
Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving,
that science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the French
alone possess, for that science originated in this country.
Well, after all, isn’t it enough to enrage all husbands when they think
that man is so endowed with an innate desire to change from one food to
another, that in some savage countries, where travelers have landed,
they have found alcoholic drinks and ragouts?
Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more
numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the
caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences of
our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us
celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking
whom we may devour.
Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search
his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of
one woman only!
How, alas! are we to explain, while respecting the honor of all the
peoples, the problem which results from the fact that three millions of
burning hearts can find no more than four hundred thousand women on
which they can feed? Should we apportion four celibates for each woman
and remember that the honest women would have already established,
instinctively and unconsciously, a sort of understanding between
themselves and the celibates, like that which the presidents of royal
courts have initiated, in order to make their partisans in each chamber
enter successively after a certain number of years?
That would be a mournful way of solving the difficulty!
Should we make the conjecture that certain honest women act in dividing
up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that
case, half at least of our altars would become whited sepulchres!
Ought one to suggest for the honor of French ladies that in the time of
peace all other countries should import into France a certain number of
their honest women, and that these countries should mainly consist of
England, Germany and Russia? But the European nations would in that
case attempt to balance matters by demanding that France should export
a certain number of her pretty women.
Morality and religion suffer so much from such calculations as this,
that an honest man, in an attempt to prove the innocence of married
women, finds some reason to believe that dowagers and young people are
half of them involved in this general corruption, and are liars even
more truly than are the celibates.
But to what conclusion does our calculation lead us? Think of our
husbands, who to the disgrace of morals behave almost all of them like
celibates and glory _in petto_ over their secret adventures.
Why, then we believe that every married man, who is at all attached to
his wife from honorable motives, can, in the words of the elder
Corneille, seek a rope and a nail; _foenum habet in cornu_.
It is, however, in the bosom of these four hundred thousand honest
women that we must, lantern in hand, seek for the number of the
virtuous women in France! As a matter of fact, we have by our
statistics of marriage so far only set down the number of those
creatures with which society has really nothing to do. Is it not true
that in France the honest people, the people _comme il faut_, form a
total of scarcely three million individuals, namely, our one million of
celibates, five hundred thousand honest women, five hundred thousand
husbands, and a million of dowagers, of infants and of young girls?
Are you then astonished at the famous verse of Boileau? This verse
proves that the poet had cleverly fathomed the discovery mathematically
propounded to you in these tiresome meditations and that his language
is by no means hyperbolical.
Nevertheless, virtuous women there certainly are:
Yes, those who have never been tempted and those who die at their first
child-birth, assuming that their husbands had married them virgins;
Yes, those who are ugly as the Kaifakatadary of the Arabian Nights;
Yes, those whom Mirabeau calls “fairy cucumbers” and who are composed
of atoms exactly like those of strawberry and water-lily roots.
Nevertheless, we need not believe that!
Further, we acknowledge that, to the credit of our age, we meet, ever
since the revival of morality and religion and during our own times,
some women, here and there, so moral, so religious, so devoted to their
duties, so upright, so precise, so stiff, so virtuous, so—that the
devil himself dare not even look at them; they are guarded on all sides
by rosaries, hours of prayer and directors. Pshaw!
We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from
stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have
intellect.
In conclusion, we may remark that it is not impossible that there exist
in some corner of the earth women, young, pretty and virtuous, whom the
world does not suspect.
But you must not give the name of virtuous woman to her who, in her
struggle against an involuntary passion, has yielded nothing to her
lover whom she idolizes. She does injury in the most cruel way in which
it can possibly be done to a loving husband. For what remains to him of
his wife? A thing without name, a living corpse. In the very midst of
delight his wife remains like the guest who has been warned by Borgia
that certain meats were poisoned; he felt no hunger, he ate sparingly
or pretended to eat. He longed for the meat which he had abandoned for
that provided by the terrible cardinal, and sighed for the moment when
the feast was over and he could leave the table.
What is the result which these reflections on the feminine virtue lead
to? Here they are; but the last two maxims have been given us by an
eclectic philosopher of the eighteenth century.
XVIII.
A virtuous woman has in her heart one fibre less or one fibre more than
other women; she is either stupid or sublime.
XIX.
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
XX.
The most virtuous women have in them something which is never chaste.
XXI.
“That a man of intellect has doubts about his mistress is conceivable,
but about his wife!—that would be too stupid.”
XXII.
“Men would be insufferably unhappy if in the presence of women they
thought the least bit in the world of that which they know by heart.”
The number of those rare women who, like the Virgins of the Parable,
have kept their lamps lighted, will always appear very small in the
eyes of the defenders of virtue and fine feeling; but we must needs
exclude it from the total sum of honest women, and this subtraction,
consoling as it is, will increase the danger which threatens husbands,
will intensify the scandal of their married life, and involve, more or
less, the reputation of all other lawful spouses.
What husband will be able to sleep peacefully beside his young and
beautiful wife while he knows that three celibates, at least, are on
the watch; that if they have not already encroached upon his little
property, they regard the bride as their destined prey, for sooner or
later she will fall into their hands, either by stratagem, compulsive
conquest or free choice? And it is impossible that they should fail
some day or other to obtain victory!
What a startling conclusion!
On this point the purist in morality, the _collets montes_ will accuse
us perhaps of presenting here conclusions which are excessively
despairing; they will be desirous of putting up a defence, either for
the virtuous women or the celibates; but we have in reserve for them a
final remark.
Increase the number of honest women and diminish the number of
celibates, as much as you choose, you will always find that the result
will be a larger number of gallant adventurers than of honest women;
you will always find a vast multitude driven through social custom to
commit three sorts of crime.
If they remain chaste, their health is injured, while they are the
slaves of the most painful torture; they disappoint the sublime ends of
nature, and finally die of consumption, drinking milk on the mountains
of Switzerland!
If they yield to legitimate temptations, they either compromise the
honest women, and on this point we re-enter on the subject of this
book, or else they debase themselves by a horrible intercourse with the
five hundred thousand women of whom we spoke in the third category of
the first Meditation, and in this case, have still considerable chance
of visiting Switzerland, drinking milk and dying there!
Have you never been struck, as we have been, by a certain error of
organization in our social order, the evidence of which gives a moral
certainty to our last calculations?
The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age
at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight
are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his
life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his
wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his
life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately
that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature.
During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are
obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male
population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a
position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for
society.
“Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman.
But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at
twenty years of age?
Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all? It would
seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural
habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in
those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said: “There
must always be a period of libertinage in life either in one state or
another. It is an evil leaven which sooner or later ferments.”
Now what mother of a family is there who would expose her daughter to
the risk of this fermentation when it has not yet taken place?
On the other hand, what need is there to justify a fact under whose
domination all societies exist? Are there not in every country, as we
have demonstrated, a vast number of men who live as honestly as
possible, without being either celibates or married men?
Cannot these men, the religious women will always ask, abide in
continence like the priests?
Certainly, madame.
Nevertheless, we venture to observe that the vow of chastity is the
most startling exception to the natural condition of man which society
makes necessary; but continence is the great point in the priest’s
profession; he must be chaste, as the doctor must be insensible to
physical sufferings, as the notary and the advocate insensible to the
misery whose wounds are laid bare to their eyes, as the soldier to the
sight of death which he meets on the field of battle. From the fact
that the requirements of civilization ossify certain fibres of the
heart and render callous certain membranes, we must not necessarily
conclude that all men are bound to undergo this partial and exceptional
death of the soul. This would be to reduce the human race to a
condition of atrocious moral suicide.
But let it be granted that, in the atmosphere of a drawing-room the
most Jansenistic in the world, appears a young man of twenty-eight who
has scrupulously guarded his robe of innocence and is as truly virginal
as the heath-cock which gourmands enjoy. Do you not see that the most
austere of virtuous women would merely pay him a sarcastic compliment
on his courage; the magistrate, the strictest that ever mounted a
bench, would shake his head and smile, and all the ladies would hide
themselves, so that he might not hear their laughter? When the heroic
and exceptional young victim leaves the drawing-room, what a deluge of
jokes bursts upon his innocent head? What a shower of insults! What is
held to be more shameful in France than impotence, than coldness, than
the absence of all passion, than simplicity?
The only king of France who would not have laughed was perhaps Louis
XIII; but as for his roue of a father, he would perhaps have banished
the young man, either under the accusation that he was no Frenchman or
from a conviction that he was setting a dangerous example.
Strange contradiction! A young man is equally blamed if he passes life
in Holy Land, to use an expression of bachelor life. Could it possibly
be for the benefit of the honest women that the prefects of police, and
mayors of all time have ordained that the passions of the public shall
not manifest themselves until nightfall, and shall cease at eleven
o’clock in the evening?
Where do you wish that our mass of celibates should sow their wild
oats? And who is deceived on this point? as Figaro asks. Is it the
governments or the governed? The social order is like the small boys
who stop their ears at the theatre, so as not to hear the report of the
firearms. Is society afraid to probe its wound or has it recognized the
fact that evil is irremediable and things must be allowed to run their
course? But there crops up here a question of legislation, for it is
impossible to escape the material and social dilemma created by this
balance of public virtue in the matter of marriage. It is not our
business to solve this difficulty; but suppose for a moment that
society in order to save a multitude of families, women and honest
girls, found itself compelled to grant to certain licensed hearts the
right of satisfying the desire of the celibates; ought not our laws
then to raise up a professional body consisting of female Decii who
devote themselves for the republic, and make a rampart of their bodies
round the honest families? The legislators have been very wrong
hitherto in disdaining to regulate the lot of courtesans.
XXIII.
The courtesan is an institution if she is a necessity.
This question bristles with so many ifs and buts that we will bequeath
it for solution to our descendants; it is right that we shall leave
them something to do. Moreover, its discussion is not germane to this
work; for in this, more than in any other age, there is a great
outburst of sensibility; at no other epoch have there been so many
rules of conduct, because never before has it been so completely
accepted that pleasure comes from the heart. Now, what man of sentiment
is there, what celibate is there, who, in the presence of four hundred
thousand young and pretty women arrayed in the splendors of fortune and
the graces of wit, rich in treasures of coquetry, and lavish in the
dispensing of happiness, would wish to go—? For shame!
Let us put forth for the benefit of our future legislature in clear and
brief axioms the result arrived at during the last few years.
XXIV.
In the social order, inevitable abuses are laws of nature, in
accordance with which mankind should frame their civil and political
institutes.
XXV.
“Adultery is like a commercial failure, with this difference,” says
Chamfort, “that it is the innocent party who has been ruined and who
bears the disgrace.”
In France the laws that relate to adultery and those that relate to
bankruptcy require great modifications. Are they too indulgent? Do they
sin on the score of bad principles? _Caveant consules_!
Come now, courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which is
expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation addresses
to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say
about it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make
you tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid
congeals at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor! Well! my
friend, he who owns soil has war and toil. The men who want your gold
are more numerous than those who want your wife.
After all, husbands are free to take these trifles for arithmetical
estimates, or arithmetical estimates for trifles. The illusions of life
are the best things in life; that which is most respectable in life is
our futile credulity. Do there not exist many people whose principles
are merely prejudices, and who not having the force of character to
form their own ideas of happiness and virtue accept what is ready made
for them by the hand of legislators? Nor do we address those Manfreds
who having taken off too many garments wish to raise all the curtains,
that is, in moments when they are tortured by a sort of moral spleen.
By them, however, the question is boldly stated and we know the extent
of the evil.
It remains that we should examine the chances and changes which each
man is likely to meet in marriage, and which may weaken him in that
struggle from which our champion should issue victorious.