The time always comes in which nations and women even the most stupid
perceive that their innocence is being abused. The cleverest policy may
for a long time proceed in a course of deceit; but it would be very
happy for men if they could carry on their deceit to an infinite
period; a vast amount of bloodshed would then be avoided, both in
nations and in families.
Nevertheless, we hope that the means of defence put forth in the
preceding Meditations will be sufficient to deliver a certain number of
husbands from the clutches of the Minotaur! You must agree with the
doctor that many a love blindly entered upon perishes under the
treatment of hygiene or dies away, thanks to marital policy. Yes [what
a consoling mistake!] many a lover will be driven away by personal
efforts, many a husband will learn how to conceal under an impenetrable
veil the machinery of his machiavelism, and many a man will have better
success than the old philosopher who cried: _Nolo coronari!_
But we are here compelled to acknowledge a mournful truth. Despotism
has its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour
which precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler,
stretched upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile’s distance, the song
of the cicada. Some fine morning an honest woman, who will be imitated
by a great portion of our own women, discerns with an eagle eye the
clever manoeuvres which have rendered her the victim of an infernal
policy. She is at first quite furious at having for so long a time
preserved her virtue. At what age, in what day, does this terrible
revolution occur? This question of chronology depends entirely upon the
genius of each husband; for it is not the vocation of all to put in
practice with the same talent the precepts of our conjugal gospel.
“A man must have very little love,” the mystified wife will exclaim,
“to enter upon such calculations as these! What! From the first day I
have been to him perpetually an object of suspicion! It is monstrous,
even a woman would be incapable of such artful and cruel treachery!”
This is the question. Each husband will be able to understand the
variations of this complaint which will be made in accordance with the
character of the young Fury, of whom he has made a companion.
A woman by no means loses her head under these circumstances; she holds
her tongue and dissembles. Her vengeance will be concealed. Only you
will have some symptoms of hesitation to contend with on the arrival of
the crisis, which we presume you to have reached on the expiration of
the honeymoon; but you will also have to contend against a resolution.
She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so far as regards
you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze. Formerly you were
an object of indifference to her; you are becoming by degrees
absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at the moment in
which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass overflow, some
incident, whose more or less importance we find difficulty in
determining, has rendered you odious. The lapse of time which
intervenes between this last hour, the limit of your good
understanding, and the day when your wife becomes cognizant of your
artifices, is nevertheless quite sufficient to permit you to institute
a series of defensive operations, which we will now explain.
Up to this time you have protected your honor solely by the exertion of
a power entirely occult. Hereafter the wheels of your conjugal
machinery must be set going in sight of every one. In this case, if you
would prevent a crime you must strike a blow. You have begun by
negotiating, you must end by mounting your horse, sabre in hand, like a
Parisian gendarme. You must make your horse prance, you must brandish
your sabre, you must shout strenuously, and you must endeavor to calm
the revolt without wounding anybody.
Just as the author has found a means of passing from occult methods to
methods that are patent, so it is necessary for the husband to justify
the sudden change in his tactics; for in marriage, as in literature,
art consists entirely in the gracefulness of the transitions. This is
of the highest importance for you. What a frightful position you will
occupy if your wife has reason to complain of your conduct at the
moment, which is, perhaps, the most critical of your whole married
life!
You must therefore find some means or other to justify the secret
tyranny of your initial policy; some means which still prepare the mind
of your wife for the severe measures which you are about to take; some
means which so far from forfeiting her esteem will conciliate her; some
means which will gain her pardon, which will restore some little of
that charm of yours, by which you won her love before your marriage.
“But what policy is it that demands this course of action? Is there
such a policy?”
Certainly there is.
But what address, what tact, what histrionic art must a husband possess
in order to display the mimic wealth of that treasure which we are
about to reveal to him! In order to counterfeit the passion whose fire
is to make you a new man in the presence of your wife, you will require
all the cunning of Talma.
This passion is JEALOUSY.
“My husband is jealous. He has been so from the beginning of our
marriage. He has concealed this feeling from me by his usual refined
delicacy. Does he love me still? I am going to do as I like with him!”
Such are the discoveries which a woman is bound to make, one after
another, in accordance with the charming scenes of the comedy which you
are enacting for your amusement; and a man of the world must be an
actual fool, if he fails in making a woman believe that which flatters
her.
With what perfection of hypocrisy must you arrange, step by step, your
hypocritical behavior so as to rouse the curiosity of your wife, to
engage her in a new study, and to lead her astray among the labyrinths
of your thought!
Ye sublime actors! Do ye divine the diplomatic reticence, the gestures
of artifice, the veiled words, the looks of doubtful meaning which some
evening may induce your wife to attempt the capture of your secret
thoughts?
Ah! to laugh in your sleeve while you are exhibiting the fierceness of
a tiger; neither to lie nor to tell the truth; to comprehend the
capricious mood of a woman, and yet to make her believe that she
controls you, while you intend to bind her with a collar of iron! O
comedy that has no audience, which yet is played by one heart before
another heart and where both of you applaud because both of you think
that you have obtained success!
She it is who will tell you that you are jealous, who will point out to
you that she knows you better than you know yourself, who will prove to
you the uselessness of your artifices and who perhaps will defy you.
She triumphs in the excited consciousness of the superiority which she
thinks she possesses over you; you of course are ennobled in her eyes;
for she finds your conduct quite natural. The only thing she feels is
that your want of confidence was useless; if she wished to betray, who
could hinder her?
Then, some evening, you will burst into a passion, and, as some trifle
affords you a pretext, you will make a scene, in the course of which
your anger will make you divulge the secret of your distress. And here
comes in the promulgation of our new code.
Have no fear that a woman is going to trouble herself about this. She
needs your jealousy, she rather likes your severity. This comes from
the fact that in the first place she finds there a justification for
her own conduct; and then she finds immense satisfaction in playing
before other people the part of a victim. What delightful expressions
of sympathy will she receive! Afterwards she will use this as a weapon
against you, in the expectation thereby of leading you into a pitfall.
She sees in your conduct the source of a thousand more pleasures in her
future treachery, and her imagination smiles at all the barricades with
which you surround her, for will she not have the delight of
surmounting them all?
Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human
feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the
weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love,
because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost
the only means by which they can control us. Within them jealousy is a
genuine sentiment and springs from the instinct of self-preservation;
it is vital to their life or death. But with men this feeling is
absolutely absurd when it does not subserve some further end.
To entertain feelings of jealousy towards the woman you love, is to
start from a position founded on vicious reasoning. We are loved, or we
are not loved; if a man entertains jealousy under either of these
circumstances, it is a feeling absolutely unprofitable to him; jealousy
may be explained as fear, fear in love. But to doubt one’s wife is to
doubt one’s self.
To be jealous is to exhibit, at once, the height of egotism, the error
of _amour-propre_, the vexation of morbid vanity. Women rather
encourage this ridiculous feeling, because by means of it they can
obtain cashmere shawls, silver toilet sets, diamonds, which for them
mark the high thermometer mark of their power. Moreover, unless you
appear blinded by jealousy, your wife will not keep on her guard; for
there is no pitfall which she does not distrust, excepting that which
she makes for herself.
Thus the wife becomes the easy dupe of a husband who is clever enough
to give to the inevitable revolution, which comes sooner or later, the
advantageous results we have indicated.
You must import into your establishment that remarkable phenomenon
whose existence is demonstrated in the asymptotes of geometry. Your
wife will always try to minotaurize you without being successful. Like
those knots which are never so tight as when one tries to loosen them,
she will struggle to the advantage of your power over her, while she
believes that she is struggling for her independence.
The highest degree of good play on the part of a prince lies in
persuading his people that he goes to war for them, while all the time
he is causing them to be killed for his throne.
But many husbands will find a preliminary difficulty in executing this
plan of campaign. If your wife is a woman of profound dissimulation,
the question is, what signs will indicate to her the motives of your
long mystification?
It will be seen that our Meditation on the Custom House, as well as
that on the Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the
thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of
exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are
immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the Saturnalia
the Romans discovered more features in the character of their slaves,
in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the
year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your establishment,
and to imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell shoot the apple
off his son’s head, was forced to remark, “Here is a man whom I must
get rid of, for he could not miss his aim if he wished to kill me.”
You understand, then, that if your wife wishes to drink Roussillon
wine, to eat mutton chops, to go out at all hours and to read the
encyclopaedia, you are bound to take her very seriously. In the first
place, she will begin to distrust you against her own wish, on seeing
that your behaviour towards her is quite contrary to your previous
proceedings. She will suppose that you have some ulterior motive in
this change of policy, and therefore all the liberty that you give her
will make her so anxious that she cannot enjoy it. As regards the
misfortunes that this change may bring, the future will provide for
them. In a revolution the primary principle is to exercise a control
over the evil which cannot be prevented and to attract the lightning by
rods which shall lead it to the earth.
And now the last act of the comedy is in preparation.
The lover who, from the day when the feeblest of all first symptoms
shows itself in your wife until the moment when the marital revolution
takes place, has jumped upon the stage, either as a material creature
or as a being of the imagination—the LOVER, summoned by a sign from
her, now declares: “Here I am!”