A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy. This
feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman’s
confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and
disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from
any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for
the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is
really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her
the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who possess
treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend
wings and feet to their golden stores.
The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the
heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to
abandon it.
Axiom.—A woman is never deserted without a reason.
This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the
rage of a woman deserted.
Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a
calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may:
for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least
expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty
annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust,
engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of
all.
Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her
rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel’s
affair, which never comes to an end.
Axiom.—Every household has its Chaumontel’s affair. (See TROUBLE WITHIN
TROUBLE.)
In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business
than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and
authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has
rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he
has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow
men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates
the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
“Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
me? Why did he not take me with him?”
These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of
suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
frightful tempests which ravage a woman’s heart springs an ignoble,
unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
shopkeeper’s wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker’s lady, the
angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of
them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in
the interest of their love. This fatal woman’s curiosity reduces them
to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in
this situation, has not lost her self-respect,—a situation in which her
jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your little
boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of your
desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with private
compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling dressing-case, nor
your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way that her husband
dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your india-rubber
girdles—her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is her
maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.
In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman
makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to know
the whole truth.
And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself
with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her
suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold
councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such
relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate
of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
“Madame,” Justine one day observes, “monsieur really _does_ go out to
see a woman.”
Caroline turns pale.
“But don’t be alarmed, madame, it’s an old woman.”
“Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable.”
“But, madame, it isn’t a lady, it’s a woman, quite a common woman.”
“Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de
Fischtaminel told me so.”
And Caroline bursts into tears.
“I’ve been pumping Benoit.”
“What is Benoit’s opinion?”
“Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his
secret from everybody, even from Benoit.”
For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go to
pay spies and to purchase reports.
Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet;
she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a
witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very much
like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand mother who
has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly school-bills,
and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two thousand francs
which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.
“What of the mother?” exclaims Caroline.
To end the matter, Justine, Caroline’s good genius, proves to her that
M’lle Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame
Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her
fortune, or else, again, that her place in society is so low there is
no danger of madame’s ever meeting her.
Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she is
quite happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like a
boy. This little drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the
conjectures to which Mother Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a
causeless jealousy, are laid down here as the type of a situation, the
varieties of which are as innumerable as characters, grades and sorts.
This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women
seated upon the river’s bank may contemplate in it the course of their
own married life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own
adventures to mind, their untold disasters, the foibles which caused
their errors, and the peculiar fatalities to which were due an instant
of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary despair, or sufferings which they
might have spared themselves, happy in their self-delusions.
This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more
serious and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among
vices of another kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work,
women are invariably esteemed honest—until the end.