Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to
inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but
well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that claims
the right, on a woman’s part, to dispose of her own body as she
chooses, as one may well believe, when we consider that half the women
in the world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as
Diderot supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way
before sickness and before misery?
Justice may be done to all these questions.
An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass of
surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit our
attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were
subjected to treatment by women surgeons.
The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.
To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those
crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as
unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later
comes.
Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and
let us inquire in what modesty consists.
Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which
females display before males. This opinion appears to us equally
mistaken.
The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense
services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon
sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis.
They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have
retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress
of science which will always draw its first principles from the Gospel,
principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent disciples of
the Son of Man.
The study of thought’s mysteries, the discovery of those organs which
belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of
its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to
have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport
ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily organs,
—in a word the laws of thought’s dynamic and those of its physical
influence,—these things will fall to the lot of the next century, as
their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of the
present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks
which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a
glorious edifice.
Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains
modesty by the relations of different human beings to each other
instead of explaining it by the moral relations of each one with
himself. Modesty is no more susceptible of analysis than conscience;
and this perhaps is another way of saying that modesty is the
conscience of the body; for while conscience directs our sentiments and
the least movement of our thoughts towards the good, modesty presides
over external movements. The actions which clash with our interests and
thus disobey the laws of conscience wound us more than any other; and
if they are repeated call forth our hatred. It is the same with acts
which violate modesty in their relations to love, which is nothing but
the expression of our whole sensibility. If extreme modesty is one of
the conditions on which the reality of marriage is based, as we have
tried to prove [See _Conjugal Catechism, Meditation IV._], it is
evident that immodesty will destroy it. But this position, which would
require long deductions for the acceptance of the physiologist, women
generally apply, as it were, mechanically; for society, which
exaggerates everything for the benefit of the exterior man, develops
this sentiment of women from childhood, and around it are grouped
almost every other sentiment. Moreover, the moment that this boundless
veil, which takes away the natural brutality from the least gesture, is
dragged down, woman disappears. Heart, mind, love, grace, all are in
ruins. In a situation where the virginal innocence of a daughter of
Tahiti is most brilliant, the European becomes detestable. In this lies
the last weapon which a wife seizes, in order to escape from the
sentiment which her husband still fosters towards her. She is powerful
because she had made herself loathsome; and this woman, who would count
it as the greatest misfortune that her lover should be permitted to see
the slightest mystery of her toilette, is delighted to exhibit herself
to her husband in the most disadvantageous situation that can possibly
be imagined.
It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish you
from the conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in
bidding the father of Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife
is not blamed for the pleasure she takes in interrupting you by the
most imperative questions. Where there formerly was movement and life
is now lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long
discussed and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we have
in another place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the comic
element in a matrimonial crisis, although here we may be permitted to
disdain the diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall have
found in the treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity
of their talk, amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit in
certain situations. It is too sad to laugh at, and too funny to mourn
over. When a woman resorts to such extreme measures, worlds at once
separate her from her husband. Nevertheless, there are some women to
whom Heaven has given the gift of being charming under all
circumstances, who know how to put a certain witty and comic grace into
these performances, and who have such smooth tongues, to use the
expression of Sully, that they obtain forgiveness for their caprices
and their mockeries, and never estrange the hearts of their husbands.
What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist in
his passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who
loves him no longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who
repulses him, who deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly
and capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and
cleanliness, rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in
presence of a wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the
horror caused by her indecency?