We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy of
Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something
inexpressibly terrible in the situation of a married woman at the
moment when unlawful love turns her away from her duties as mother and
wife. As Diderot has very well put it, “infidelity in a woman is like
unbelief in a priest, the last extreme of human failure; for her it is
the greatest of social crimes, since it implies in her every other
crime besides, and indeed either a wife profanes her lawless love by
continuing to belong to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which
attach her to her family, by giving herself over altogether to her
lover. She ought to choose between the two courses, for her sole
possible excuse lies in the intensity of her love.”
She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma;
she will work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in
his passion, or that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.
It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
inconsistencies of women’s conduct is to be attributed. In this lies
the origin of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret
of all their mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover,
even as simply based upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a
woman who accepts the unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the
bliss which is bought by crime, is a hundred times more reasonable.
Nevertheless, almost all women will risk suffering in the future and
ages of anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour. If the human feeling
of self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check them, how
fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the
Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he
for whom these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a
gentleman to whom we would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man
who buttons his coat just as all of us do, it is enough to make one
burst into a roar of laughter so loud, that starting from the
Luxembourg it would pass over the whole of Paris and startle an ass
browsing in the pasture at Montmartre.
It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we
have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole
of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the
addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances
a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by
a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case
so manifold.