“Considered as a need,” said the old man, “love makes itself felt last
of all our needs, and is the first to cease. We are inclined to love in
our twentieth year, to speak in round numbers, and we cease to do so at
fifty. During these thirty years, how often would the need be felt, if
it were not for the provocation of city manners, and the modern custom
of living in the presence of not one woman, but of women in general?
What is our debt to the perpetuation of the race? It probably consists
in producing as many children as we have breasts—so that if one dies
the other may live. If these two children were always faithfully
produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of people would
constitute a population too great for France, for the soil is not
sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against misery and
hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its
children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now
this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The
superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve
an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then
with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and
perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature reminds us
every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses
absolutely to grant the excess which our imagination sometimes craves
in love. It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only one
which may be forgotten without causing any disturbance in the economy
of the body. Love is a social luxury like lace and diamonds. But if we
analyze it as a sentiment, we find two distinct elements in it; namely,
pleasure and passion. Now analyze pleasure. Human affections rest upon
two foundations, attraction and repulsion. Attraction is a universal
feeling for those things which flatter our instinct of
self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when
it tells us that something is near which threatens it with injury.
Everything which profoundly moves our organization gives us a deeper
sense of our existence; such a thing is pleasure. It is contracted of
desire, of effort, and the joy of possessing something or other.
Pleasure is a unique element in life, and our passions are nothing but
modifications, more or less keen, of pleasure; moreover, familiarity
with one pleasure almost always precludes the enjoyment of all others.
Now, love is the least keen and the least durable of our pleasures. In
what would you say the pleasure of love consists? Does it lie in the
beauty of the beloved? In one evening you may obtain for money the
loveliest odalisques; but at the end of a month you will in this way
have burnt out all your sentiment for all time. Would you love a women
because she is well dressed, elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has
commercial credit? Do not call this love, for it is vanity, avarice,
egotism. Do you love her because she is intellectual? You are in that
case merely obeying the dictates of literary sentiment.”
“But,” I said, “love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in
one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls,
their lives—”
“Oh dear, dear!” cried the old man, in a jeering tone. “Can you show me
five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I do
not say their life, for that is a slight thing,—the price of a human
life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs; and
there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave men who
would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven men have
sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have slept in
solitude for a whole night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are still rarer than is
the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments proceed from an
unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to consider love as a
passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all and the most
contemptible. It promises everything, and fulfils nothing. It comes,
like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the first. Ah, talk to me
of revenge, hatred, avarice, of gaming, of ambition, of fanaticism.
These passions have something virile in them; these sentiments are
imperishable; they make sacrifices every day, such as love only makes
by fits and starts. But,” he went on, “suppose you abjure love. At
first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties, no worry, none of
those little vexations that waste human life. A man lives happy and
tranquil; in his social relations he becomes infinitely more powerful
and influential. This divorce from the thing called love is the primary
secret of power in all men who control large bodies of men; but this is
a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew with what magic influence a man is
endowed, what wealth of intellectual force, what longevity in physical
strength he enjoys, when detaching himself from every species of human
passion he spends all his energy to the profit of his soul! If you
could enjoy for two minutes the riches which God dispenses to the
enlightened men who consider love as merely a passing need which it is
sufficient to satisfy for six months in their twentieth year; to the
men who, scorning the luxurious and surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy,
feed on the roots which God has given in abundance, and take their
repose on a bed of withered leaves, like the recluses of the
Thebaid!—ah! you would not keep on three seconds the wool of fifteen
merinos which covers you; you would fling away your childish switch,
and go to live in the heaven of heavens! There you would find the love
you sought in vain amid the swine of earth; there you would hear a
concert of somewhat different melody from that of M. Rossini, voices
more faultless than that of Malibran. But I am speaking as a blind man
might, and repeating hearsays. If I had not visited Germany about the
year 1791, I should know nothing of all this. Yes!—man has a vocation
for the infinite. There dwells within him an instinct that calls him to
God. God is all, gives all, brings oblivion on all, and thought is the
thread which he has given us as a clue to communication with himself!”
He suddenly stopped, and fixed his eyes upon the heavens.
“The poor fellow has lost his wits!” I thought to myself.
“Sir,” I said to him, “it would be pushing my devotion to eclectic
philosophy too far to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy
it. Everything in it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God forbid
that I should end my book by such social blasphemies! I would rather
try to return by some pantagruelian subtlety to my herd of celibates
and honest women, with many an attempt to discover some social utility
in their passions and follies. Oh! if conjugal peace leads us to
arguments so disillusionizing and so gloomy as these, I know a great
many husbands who would prefer war to peace.”
“At any rate, young man,” the old marquis cried, “I shall never have to
reproach myself with refusing to give true directions to a traveler who
had lost his way.”
“Adieu, thou old carcase!” I said to myself; “adieu, thou walking
marriage! Adieu, thou stick of a burnt-out fire-work! Adieu, thou
machine! Although I have given thee from time to time some glimpses of
people dear to me, old family portraits,—back with you to the picture
dealer’s shop, to Madame de T——-, and all the rest of them; take your
place round the bier with undertaker’s mutes, for all I care!”