Before applying ourselves to the examination of these three methods of
living together, which must necessarily have different influences upon
the happiness of husbands and wives, we must take a rapid survey of the
practical object served by the bed and the part it plays in the
political economy of human existence.
The most incontrovertible principle which can be laid down in this
matter is, _that the bed was made to sleep upon_.
It would be easy to prove that the practice of sleeping together was
established between married people but recently, in comparison with the
antiquity of marriage.
By what reasonings has man arrived at that point in which he brought in
vogue a practice so fatal to happiness, to health, even to
_amour-propre_? Here we have a subject which it would be curious to
investigate.
If you knew one of your rivals who had discovered a method of placing
you in a position of extreme absurdity before the eyes of those who
were dearest to you—for instance, while you had your mouth crooked like
that of a theatrical mask, or while your eloquent lips, like the copper
faucet of a scanty fountain, dripped pure water—you would probably stab
him. This rival is sleep. Is there a man in the world who knows how he
appears to others, and what he does when he is asleep?
In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power
which seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest
shapes; some have a sleep which is intellectual, while the sleep of
others is mere stupor.
There are some people who slumber with their mouths open in the
silliest fashion.
There are others who snore loud enough to make the timbers shake.
Most people look like the impish devils that Michael Angelo sculptured,
putting out their tongues in silent mockery of the passers-by.
The only person I know of in the world who sleeps with a noble air is
Agamemnon, whom Guerin has represented lying on his bed at the moment
when Clytemnestra, urged by Egisthus, advances to slay him. Moreover, I
have always had an ambition to hold myself on my pillow as the king of
kings Agamemnon holds himself, from the day that I was seized with
dread of being seen during sleep by any other eyes than those of
Providence. In the same way, too, from the day I heard my old nurse
snorting in her sleep “like a whale,” to use a slang expression, I have
added a petition to the special litany which I address to Saint-Honoré,
my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me from indulging in
this sort of eloquence.
When a man wakes up in the morning, his drowsy face grotesquely
surmounted by the folds of a silk handkerchief which falls over his
left temple like a police cap, he is certainly a laughable object, and
it is difficult to recognize in him the glorious spouse, celebrated in
the strophes of Rousseau; but, nevertheless, there is a certain gleam
of life to illume the stupidity of a countenance half dead—and if you
artists wish to make fine sketches, you should travel on the
stage-coach and, when the postilion wakes up the postmaster, just
examine the physiognomies of the departmental clerks! But, were you a
hundred times as pleasant to look upon as are these bureaucratic
physiognomies, at least, while you have your mouth shut, your eyes are
open, and you have some expression in your countenance. Do you know how
you looked an hour before you awoke, or during the first hour of your
sleep, when you were neither a man nor an animal, but merely a thing,
subject to the dominion of those dreams which issue from the gate of
horn? But this is a secret between your wife and God.
Is it for the purpose of insinuating the imbecility of slumber that the
Romans decorated the heads of their beds with the head of an ass? We
leave to the gentlemen who form the academy of inscriptions the
elucidation of this point.
Assuredly, the first man who took it into his head, at the inspiration
of the devil, not to leave his wife, even while she was asleep, should
know how to sleep in the very best style; but do not forget to reckon
among the sciences necessary to a man on setting up an establishment,
the art of sleeping with elegance. Moreover, we will place here as a
corollary to Axiom XXV of our Marriage Catechism the two following
aphorisms:
A husband should sleep as lightly as a watch-dog, so as never to be
caught with his eyes shut.
A man should accustom himself from childhood to go to bed bareheaded.
Certain poets discern in modesty, in the alleged mysteries of love,
some reason why the married couple should share the same bed; but the
fact must be recognized that if primitive men sought the shade of
caverns, the mossy couch of deep ravines, the flinty roof of grottoes
to protect his pleasure, it was because the delight of love left him
without defence against his enemies. No, it is not more natural to lay
two heads upon the same pillow, than it is reasonable to tie a strip of
muslin round the neck. Civilization is come. It has shut up a million
of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in
streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square;
after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes
of a telescope.
From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together
of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality
and simultaneity in rising and retiring.
And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling
most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its own
spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness
of its desires, which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its
outbursts—this thing we call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to
that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of Longitude!
If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock,
had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me
good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in
this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment
becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means
when it is bound to a fixed hour!
Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and
eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here
below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste
Rousseau, can play the role of the sun.
From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not natural
for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed;
That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;
And that this constant living together threatens the husband with
inevitable dangers.
We are going to try, therefore, to find out a method which will bring
our customs in harmony with the laws of nature, and to combine custom
and nature in a way that will enable a husband to find in the mahogany
of his bed a useful ally, and an aid in defending himself.