Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?
Is not your object to prove that marriage unites for life two beings who
do not know each other?
That life consists in passion, and that no passion survives marriage?
That marriage is an institution necessary for the preservation of
society, but that it is contrary to the laws of nature?
That divorce, this admirable release from the misfortunes of marriage,
should with one voice be reinstated?
That, in spite of all its inconveniences, marriage is the foundation on
which property is based?
That it furnishes invaluable pledges for the security of government?
That there is something touching in the association of two human beings
for the purpose of supporting the pains of life?
That there is something ridiculous in the wish that one and the same
thoughts should control two wills?
That the wife is treated as a slave?
That there has never been a marriage entirely happy?
That marriage is filled with crimes and that the known murders are not
the worst?
That fidelity is impossible, at least to the man?
That an investigation if it could be undertaken would prove that in the
transmission of patrimonial property there was more risk than security?
That adultery does more harm than marriage does good?
That infidelity in a woman may be traced back to the earliest ages
of society, and that marriage still survives this perpetuation of
treachery?
That the laws of love so strongly link together two human beings that no
human law can put them asunder?
That while there are marriages recorded on the public registers, there
are others over which nature herself has presided, and they have
been dictated either by the mutual memory of thought, or by an utter
difference of mental disposition, or by corporeal affinity in the
parties named; that it is thus that heaven and earth are constantly at
variance?
That there are many husbands fine in figure and of superior intellect
whose wives have lovers exceedingly ugly, insignificant in appearance or
stupid in mind?
All these questions furnish material for books; but the books have been
written and the questions are constantly reappearing.
Physiology, what must I take you to mean?
Do you reveal new principles? Would you pretend that it is the right
thing that woman should be made common? Lycurgus and certain Greek
peoples as well as Tartars and savages have tried this.
Can it possibly be right to confine women? The Ottomans once did so, and
nowadays they give them their liberty.
Would it be right to marry young women without providing a dowry and
yet exclude them from the right of succeeding to property? Some English
authors and some moralists have proved that this with the admission of
divorce is the surest method of rendering marriage happy.
Should there be a little Hagar in each marriage establishment? There is
no need to pass a law for that. The provision of the code which makes
an unfaithful wife liable to a penalty in whatever place the crime
be committed, and that other article which does not punish the
erring husband unless his concubine dwells beneath the conjugal roof,
implicitly admits the existence of mistresses in the city.
Sanchez has written a dissertation on the penal cases incident to
marriage; he has even argued on the illegitimacy and the opportuneness
of each form of indulgence; he has outlined all the duties, moral,
religious and corporeal, of the married couple; in short his work would
form twelve volumes in octavo if the huge folio entitled _De Matrimonio_
were thus represented.
Clouds of lawyers have flung clouds of treatises over the legal
difficulties which are born of marriage. There exist several works on
the judicial investigation of impotency.
Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the subject
of marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery.
In the nineteenth century the _Physiology of Marriage_ is either an
insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools;
old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed the most
trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers have put on
their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind of married
transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and drawn it over all
the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted to the bench and have
decided all the cases of marriage dissolution; whole generations have
passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on the subject, each age has
cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit, poets and writers have
recounted everything from the days of Eve to the Trojan war, from Helen
to Madame de Maintenon, from the mistress of Louis XIV to the woman of
their own day.
Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?
Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less skillfully
drawn, for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries:
From ambition--that is well known;
From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her
mother;
From rage, in order to disinherit his relations;
From scorn of a faithless mistress;
From weariness of a pleasant bachelor life;
From folly, for each man always commits one;
In consequence of a wager, which was the case with Lord Byron;
From interest, which is almost always the case;
From youthfulness on leaving college, like a blockhead;
From ugliness,--fear of some day failing to secure a wife;
Through Machiavelism, in order to be the heir of some old woman at an
early date;
From necessity, in order to secure the standing to _our_ son;
From obligation, the damsel having shown herself weak;
From passion, in order to become more surely cured of it;
On account of a quarrel, in order to put an end to a lawsuit;
From gratitude, by which he gives more than he has received;
From goodness, which is the fate of doctrinaires;
From the condition of a will when a dead uncle attaches his legacy to
some girl, marriage with whom is the condition of succession;
From custom, in imitation of his ancestors;
From old age, in order to make an end of life;
From _yatidi_, that is the hour of going to bed and signifies amongst
the Turks all bodily needs;
From religious zeal, like the Duke of Saint-Aignan, who did not wish to
commit sin?[*]
[*] The foregoing queries came in (untranslatable) alphabetic order in
the original.--Editor
But these incidents of marriage have furnished matter for thirty
thousand comedies and a hundred thousand romances.
Physiology, for the third and last time I ask you--What is your meaning?
So far everything is commonplace as the pavement of the street, familiar
as a crossway. Marriage is better known than the Barabbas of the
Passion. All the ancient ideas which it calls to light permeate
literature since the world is the world, and there is not a single
opinion which might serve to the advantage of the world, nor a
ridiculous project which could not find an author to write it up, a
printer to print it, a bookseller to sell it and a reader to read it.
Allow me to say to you like Rabelais, who is in every sense our master:
“Gentlemen, God save and guard you! Where are you? I cannot see you;
wait until I put on my spectacles. Ah! I see you now; you, your wives,
your children. Are you in good health? I am glad to hear it.”
But it is not for you that I am writing. Since you have grown-up
children that ends the matter.
Ah! it is you, illustrious tipplers, pampered and gouty, and you,
tireless pie-cutters, favorites who come dear; day-long pantagruellists
who keep your private birds, gay and gallant, and who go to tierce,
to sexts, to nones, and also to vespers and compline and never tire of
going.
It is not for you that the _Physiology of Marriage_ is addressed, for
you are not married and may you never be married. You herd of bigots,
snails, hypocrites, dotards, lechers, booted for pilgrimage to Rome,
disguised and marked, as it were, to deceive the world. Go back, you
scoundrels, out of my sight! Gallows birds are ye all--now in the
devil’s name will you not begone? There are none left now but the good
souls who love to laugh; not the snivelers who burst into tears in prose
or verse, whatever their subject be, who make people sick with their
odes, their sonnets, their meditation; none of these dreamers, but
certain old-fashioned pantagruellists who don’t think twice about it
when they are invited to join a banquet or provoked to make a repartee,
who can take pleasure in a book like _Pease and the Lard_ with
commentary of Rabelais, or in the one entitled _The Dignity of
Breeches_, and who esteem highly the fair books of high degree, a quarry
hard to run down and redoubtable to wrestle with.
It no longer does to laugh at a government, my friend, since it has
invented means to raise fifteen hundred millions by taxation. High
ecclesiastics, monks and nuns are no longer so rich that we can drink
with them; but let St. Michael come, he who chased the devil from
heaven, and we shall perhaps see the good time come back again! There is
only one thing in France at the present moment which remains a laughing
matter, and that is marriage. Disciples of Panurge, ye are the only
readers I desire. You know how seasonably to take up and lay down a
book, how to get the most pleasure out of it, to understand the hint in
a half word--how to suck nourishment from a marrow-bone.
The men of the microscope who see nothing but a speck, the
census-mongers--have they reviewed the whole matter? Have they
pronounced without appeal that it is as impossible to write a book on
marriage as to make new again a broken pot?
Yes, master fool. If you begin to squeeze the marriage question you
squirt out nothing but fun for the bachelors and weariness for the
married men. It is everlasting morality. A million printed pages would
have no other matter in them.
In spite of this, here is my first proposition: marriage is a fight to
the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven,
because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the
fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in
the hands of the cleverer of the two.
Undoubtedly. But do you see in this a fresh idea?
Well, I address myself to the married men of yesterday and of to-day; to
those who on leaving the Church or the registration office indulge the
hope of keeping their wives for themselves alone; to those whom some
form or other of egotism or some indefinable sentiment induces to say
when they see the marital troubles of another, “This will never happen
to me.”
I address myself to those sailors who after witnessing the foundering
of other ships still put to sea; to those bachelors who after witnessing
the shipwreck of virtue in a marriage of another venture upon wedlock.
And this is my subject, eternally now, yet eternally old!
A young man, or it may be an old one, in love or not in love, has
obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration
office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with
long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty tapering
fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed, trembling
with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with the most
charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like the points
of the iron crown; her skin, which is as fresh as the calyx of a white
camelia, is streaked with the purple of the red camelia; over her
virginal complexion one seems to see the bloom of young fruit and the
delicate down of a young peach; the azure veins spread a kindling warmth
over this transparent surface; she asks for life and she gives it; she
is all joy and love, all tenderness and candor; she loves her husband,
or at least believes she loves him.
The husband who is in love says in the bottom of his heart: “Those eyes
will see no one but me, that mouth will tremble with love for me alone,
that gentle hand will lavish the caressing treasures of delight on me
alone, that bosom will heave at no voice but mine, that slumbering soul
will awake at my will alone; I only will entangle my fingers in those
shining tresses; I alone will indulge myself in dreamily caressing that
sensitive head. I will make death the guardian of my pillow if only I
may ward off from the nuptial couch the stranger who would violate it;
that throne of love shall swim in the blood of the rash or of my own.
Tranquillity, honor, happiness, the ties of home, the fortune of my
children, all are at stake there; I would defend them as a lioness
defends her cubs. Woe unto him who shall set foot in my lair!”
Well now, courageous athlete, we applaud your intention. Up to the
present moment no geographer has ventured to trace the lines of
longitude and latitude in the ocean of marriage. Old husbands have
been ashamed to point out the sand banks, the reefs, the shallows, the
breakers, the monsoons, the coasts and currents which have wrecked their
ships, for their shipwrecks brought them shame. There was no pilot, no
compass for those pilgrims of marriage. This work is intended to supply
the desideratum.
Without mentioning grocers and drapers, there are so many people
occupied in discovering the secret motives of women, that it is really
a work of charity to classify for them, by chapter and verse, all the
secret situations of marriage; a good table of contents will enable them
to put their finger on each movement of their wives’ heart, as a table
of logarithms tells them the product of a given multiplication.
And now what do you think about that? Is not this a novel undertaking,
and one which no philosopher has as yet approached, I mean this attempt
to show how a woman may be prevented from deceiving her husband? Is
not this the comedy of comedies? Is it not a second _speculum vitae
humanae_. We are not now dealing with the abstract questions which we
have done justice to already in this Meditation. At the present day in
ethics as in exact science, the world asks for facts for the results of
observation. These we shall furnish.
Let us begin then by examining the true condition of things, by
analyzing the forces which exist on either side. Before arming our
imaginary champion let us reckon up the number of his enemies. Let us
count the Cossacks who intend to invade his little domain.
All who wish may embark with us on this voyage, all who can may laugh.
Weigh anchor; hoist sail! You know exactly the point from which you
start. You have this advantage over a great many books that are written.
As for our fancy of laughing while we weep, and of weeping while we
laugh, as the divine Rabelais drank while he ate and ate while he drank;
as for our humor, to put Heraclitus and Democritus on the same page
and to discard style or premeditated phrase--if any of the crew mutiny,
overboard with the doting cranks, the infamous classicists, the dead and
buried romanticists, and steer for the blue water!
Everybody perhaps will jeeringly remark that we are like those who say
with smiling faces, “I am going to tell you a story that will make you
laugh!” But it is the proper thing to joke when speaking of marriage!
In short, can you not understand that we consider marriage as a trifling
ailment to which all of us are subject and upon which this volume is a
monograph?
“But you, your bark or your work starts off like those postilions who
crack their whips because their passengers are English. You will not
have galloped at full speed for half a league before you dismount to
mend a trace or to breathe your horses. What is the good of blowing the
trumpet before victory?”
Ah! my dear pantagruellists, nowadays to claim success is to obtain
it, and since, after all, great works are only due to the expansion of
little ideas, I do not see why I should not pluck the laurels, if only
for the purpose of crowning those dirty bacon faces who join us in
swallowing a dram. One moment, pilot, let us not start without making
one little definition.
Reader, if from time to time you meet in this work the terms virtue or
virtuous, let us understand that virtue means a certain labored facility
by which a wife keeps her heart for her husband; at any rate, that the
word is not used in a general sense, and I leave this distinction to the
natural sagacity of all.