The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses, as
frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
antiquity, pure and simple.
The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
breathe all the melancholy of the North.
That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs the
empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.
Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in tears.
“What is the matter, my darling?”
“It is nothing.”
“But you are in tears!”
“I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the clouds,
and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some disaster—I
think I must be going to die.”
Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses,
she is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart
palpitate with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You
say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:
“I know exactly what this is all about!”
And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns like
an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew, who
implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories.
She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is
buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and
at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium,
you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her
melts away in the cloud of Ixion.
There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their
feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts,
or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are
employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.
On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman takes
pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her dressing
herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms of
spleen; she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother or
her sister, has tried to tear her away from that divan which
monopolizes her and on which she spends her life in improvising
elegies. Madame is going to spend a fortnight in the country because
the doctor orders it. In short, she goes where she likes and does what
she likes. Is it possible that there can be a husband so brutal as to
oppose such desires, by hindering a wife from going to seek a cure for
her cruel sufferings? For it has been established after many long
discussions that in the nerves originate the most fearful torture.
But it is especially in bed that vapors play their part. There when a
woman has not a headache she has her vapors; and when she has neither
vapors nor headache, she is under the protection of the girdle of
Venus, which, as you know, is a myth.
Among the women who fight with you the battle of vapors, are some more
blonde, more delicate, more full of feeling than others, and who
possess the gift of tears. How admirably do they know how to weep! They
weep when they like, as they like and as much as they like. They
organize a system of offensive warfare which consists of manifesting
sublime resignation, and they gain victories which are all the more
brilliant, inasmuch as they remain all the time in excellent health.
Does a husband, irritated beyond all measure, at last express his
wishes to them? They regard him with an air of submission, bow their
heads and keep silence. This pantomime almost always puts a husband to
rout. In conjugal struggles of this kind, a man prefers a woman should
speak and defend herself, for then he may show elation or annoyance;
but as for these women, not a word. Their silence distresses you and
you experience a sort of remorse, like the murderer who, when he finds
his victim offers no resistance, trembles with redoubled fear. He would
prefer to slay him in self-defence. You return to the subject. As you
draw near, your wife wipes away her tears and hides her handkerchief,
so as to let you see that she has been weeping. You are melted, you
implore your little Caroline to speak, your sensibility has been
touched and you forget everything; then she sobs while she speaks, and
speaks while she sobs. This is a sort of machine eloquence; she deafens
you with her tears, with her words which come jerked out in confusion;
it is the clapper and torrent of a mill.
French women and especially Parisians possess in a marvelous degree the
secret by which such scenes are enacted, and to these scenes their
voices, their sex, their toilet, their manner give a wonderful charm.
How often do the tears upon the cheeks of these adorable actresses give
way to a piquant smile, when they see their husbands hasten to break
the silk lace, the weak fastening of their corsets, or to restore the
comb which holds together the tresses of their hair and the bunch of
golden ringlets always on the point of falling down?
But how all these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of
antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic
dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the
vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances,
in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is
then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth
like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow
which glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of
love, she sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above
all, she sees the present moment and tramples on her husband, and
impresses him with a sort of terror.
The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so many
feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to wrong
her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of some
terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for the
smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his ways,
whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he had been
put into a lion’s cage, and some one had said to him that he must not
irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.
Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.
Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these
sublime creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St.
Thomas, who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed
with an incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of
all these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis,
they concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played
before them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the
springs that sets her going; and when they have discovered the
mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight
impulse to the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either
of the reality of the disease or the artifices of these conjugal
mummeries.
But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a terrible
weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, for she never destroys
with her own hands her empire over her husband without some sort of
repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the fatal
knife of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last
paragraph of the present Meditation.