Predestined means destined in advance for happiness or unhappiness.
Theology has seized upon this word and employs it in relation to the
happy; we give to the term a meaning which is unfortunate to our elect
of which one can say in opposition to the Gospel, “Many are called, many
are chosen.”
Experience has demonstrated that there are certain classes of men more
subject than others to certain infirmities; the Gascons are given to
exaggeration and Parisians to vanity. As we see that apoplexy attacks
people with short necks, or butchers are liable to carbuncle, as
gout attacks the rich, health the poor, deafness kings, paralysis
administrators, so it has been remarked that certain classes of husbands
and their wives are more given to illegitimate passions. Thus they
forestall the celibates, they form another sort of aristocracy. If any
reader should be enrolled in one of these aristocratic classes he will,
we hope, have sufficient presence of mind, he or at least his wife,
instantly to call to mind the favorite axiom of Lhomond’s Latin Grammar:
“No rule without exception.” A friend of the house may even recite the
verse--
“Present company always excepted.”
And then every one will have the right to believe, _in petto_, that
he forms the exception. But our duty, the interest which we take in
husbands and the keen desire which we have to preserve young and pretty
women from the caprices and catastrophes which a lover brings in
his train, force us to give notice to husbands that they ought to be
especially on their guard.
In this recapitulation first are to be reckoned the husbands whom
business, position or public office calls from their houses and detains
for a definite time. It is these who are the standard-bearers of the
brotherhood.
Among them, we would reckon magistrates, holding office during pleasure
or for life, and obliged to remain at the Palace for the greater portion
of the day; other functionaries sometimes find means to leave their
office at business hours; but a judge or a public prosecutor, seated on
his cushion of lilies, is bound even to die during the progress of the
hearing. There is his field of battle.
It is the same with the deputies and peers who discuss the laws, of
ministers who share the toils of the king, of secretaries who work with
the ministers, of soldiers on campaign, and indeed with the corporal
of the police patrol, as the letter of Lafleur, in the _Sentimental
Journey_, plainly shows.
Next to the men who are obliged to be absent from home at certain fixed
hours, come the men whom vast and serious undertakings leave not
one minute for love-making; their foreheads are always wrinkled with
anxiety, their conversation is generally void of merriment.
At the head of these unfortunates we must place the bankers, who toil
in the acquisition of millions, whose heads are so full of calculations
that the figures burst through their skulls and range themselves in
columns of addition on their foreheads.
These millionaires, forgetting most of the time the sacred laws of
marriage and the attention due to the tender flower which they have
undertaken to cultivate, never think of watering it or of defending
it from the heat and cold. They scarcely recognize the fact that the
happiness of their spouses is in their keeping; if they ever do remember
this, it is at table, when they see seated before them a woman in rich
array, or when a coquette, fearing their brutal repulse, comes, gracious
as Venus, to ask them for cash--Oh! it is then, that they recall,
sometimes very vividly, the rights specified in the two hundred and
thirteenth article of the civil code, and their wives are grateful
to them; but like the heavy tariff which the law lays upon foreign
merchandise, their wives suffer and pay the tribute, in virtue of the
axiom which says: “There is no pleasure without pain.”
The men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an
antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is
an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who
dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their
life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a
commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their
abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them
strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light
of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times
happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy,
surprises his wife with a German. “Did not I tell you, madame, that
it was necessary that I shall go,” cried the stranger. “My dear sir,”
interrupted the academician, “you ought to say that I _should_ go!”
Then there come, lyre in hand, certain poets whose whole animal strength
has left the ground floor and mounted to the upper story. They know
better how to mount Pegasus than the beast of old Peter, they rarely
marry, although they are accustomed to lavish the fury of their passions
on some wandering or imaginary Chloris.
But the men whose noses are stained with snuff;
But those who, to their misfortune, have a perpetual cold in their head;
But the sailors who smoke or chew;
But those men whose dry and bilious temperament makes them always look
as if they had eaten a sour apple;
But the men who in private life have certain cynical habits, ridiculous
fads, and who always, in spite of everything, look unwashed;
But the husbands who have obtained the degrading name of “hen-pecked”;
Finally the old men who marry young girls.
All these people are _par excellence_ among the predestined.
There is a final class of the predestined whose ill-fortune is almost
certain, we mean restless and irritable men, who are inclined to meddle
and tyrannize, who have a great idea of domestic domination, who openly
express their low ideas of women and who know no more about life than
herrings about natural history. When these men marry, their homes have
the appearance of a wasp whose head a schoolboy has cut off, and who
dances here and there on a window pane. For this sort of predestined
the present work is a sealed book. We do not write any more for those
imbeciles, walking effigies, who are like the statues of a cathedral,
than for those old machines of Marly which are too weak to fling
water over the hedges of Versailles without being in danger of sudden
collapse.
I rarely make my observations on the conjugal oddities with which the
drawing-room is usually full, without recalling vividly a sight which I
once enjoyed in early youth:
In 1819 I was living in a thatched cottage situated in the bosom of the
delightful valley l’Isle-Adam. My hermitage neighbored on the park of
Cassan, the sweetest of retreats, the most fascinating in aspect, the
most attractive as a place to ramble in, the most cool and refreshing
in summer, of all places created by luxury and art. This verdant
country-seat owes its origin to a farmer-general of the good old times,
a certain Bergeret, celebrated for his originality; who among other
fantastic dandyisms adopted the habit of going to the opera, with his
hair powdered in gold; he used to light up his park for his own solitary
delectation and on one occasion ordered a sumptuous entertainment there,
in which he alone took part. This rustic Sardanapalus returned from
Italy so passionately charmed with the scenery of that beautiful country
that, by a sudden freak of enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions
in order to represent in his park the scenes of which he had pictures in
his portfolio. The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees,
long valleys, and prospects the most picturesque that could be brought
from abroad, Borromean islands floating on clear eddying streams like so
many rays, which concentrate their various lustres on a single point, on
an Isola Bella, from which the enchanted eye takes in each detail at
its leisure, or on an island in the bosom of which is a little house
concealed under the drooping foliage of a century-old ash, an island
fringed with irises, rose-bushes, and flowers which appears like an
emerald richly set. Ah! one might rove a thousand leagues for such a
place! The most sickly, the most soured, the most disgusted of our men
of genius in ill health would die of satiety at the end of fifteen days,
overwhelmed with the luscious sweetness of fresh life in such a spot.
The man who was quite regardless of the Eden which he thus possessed
had neither wife nor children, but was attached to a large ape which
he kept. A graceful turret of wood, supported by a sculptured column,
served as a dwelling place for this vicious animal, who being kept
chained and rarely petted by his eccentric master, oftener at Paris
than in his country home, had gained a very bad reputation. I recollect
seeing him once in the presence of certain ladies show almost as much
insolence as if he had been a man. His master was obliged to kill him,
so mischievous did he gradually become.
One morning while I was sitting under a beautiful tulip tree in flower,
occupied in doing nothing but inhaling the lovely perfumes which the
tall poplars kept confined within the brilliant enclosure, enjoying
the silence of the groves, listening to the murmuring waters and the
rustling leaves, admiring the blue gaps outlined above my head by clouds
of pearly sheen and gold, wandering fancy free in dreams of my future,
I heard some lout or other, who had arrived the day before from Paris,
playing on a violin with the violence of a man who has nothing else to
do. I would not wish for my worst enemy to hear anything so utterly
in discord with the sublime harmony of nature. If the distant notes of
Roland’s Horn had only filled the air with life, perhaps--but a noisy
fiddler like this, who undertakes to bring to you the expression of
human ideas and the phraseology of music! This Amphion, who was
walking up and down the dining-room, finished by taking a seat on the
window-sill, exactly in front of the monkey. Perhaps he was looking for
an audience. Suddenly I saw the animal quietly descend from his little
dungeon, stand upon his hind feet, bow his head forward like a swimmer
and fold his arms over his bosom like Spartacus in chains, or Catiline
listening to Cicero. The banker, summoned by a sweet voice whose silvery
tone recalled a boudoir not unknown to me, laid his violin on the
window-sill and made off like a swallow who rejoins his companion by a
rapid level swoop. The great monkey, whose chain was sufficiently long,
approached the window and gravely took in hand the violin. I don’t know
whether you have ever had as I have the pleasure of seeing a monkey try
to learn music, but at the present moment, when I laugh much less than
I did in those careless days, I never think of that monkey without a
smile; the semi-man began by grasping the instrument with his fist and
by sniffing at it as if he were tasting the flavor of an apple. The
snort from his nostrils probably produced a dull harmonious sound in the
sonorous wood and then the orang-outang shook his head, turned over the
violin, turned it back again, raised it up in the air, lowered it, held
it straight out, shook it, put it to his ear, set it down, and picked it
up again with a rapidity of movement peculiar to these agile creatures.
He seemed to question the dumb wood with faltering sagacity and in his
gestures there was something marvelous as well as infantile. At last he
undertook with grotesque gestures to place the violin under his chin,
while in one hand he held the neck; but like a spoiled child he soon
wearied of a study which required skill not to be obtained in a moment
and he twitched the strings without being able to draw forth anything
but discordant sounds. He seemed annoyed, laid the violin on the
window-sill and snatching up the bow he began to push it to and fro
with violence, like a mason sawing a block of stone. This effort only
succeeded in wearying his fastidious ears, and he took the bow with
both hands and snapped it in two on the innocent instrument, source of
harmony and delight. It seemed as if I saw before me a schoolboy holding
under him a companion lying face downwards, while he pommeled him with a
shower of blows from his fist, as if to punish him for some delinquency.
The violin being now tried and condemned, the monkey sat down upon the
fragments of it and amused himself with stupid joy in mixing up the
yellow strings of the broken bow.
Never since that day have I been able to look upon the home of
the predestined without comparing the majority of husbands to this
orang-outang trying to play the violin.
Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love
is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is
necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them,
the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which
befits it. How many monkeys--men, I mean--marry without knowing what a
woman is! How many of the predestined proceed with their wives as the
ape of Cassan did with his violin! They have broken the heart which
they did not understand, as they might dim and disdain the amulet whose
secret was unknown to them. They are children their whole life through,
who leave life with empty hands after having talked about love, about
pleasure, about licentiousness and virtue as slaves talk about liberty.
Almost all of them married with the most profound ignorance of women and
of love. They commenced by breaking in the door of a strange house and
expected to be welcomed in this drawing-room. But the rudest artist
knows that between him and his instrument, of wood, or of ivory, there
exists a mysterious sort of friendship. He knows by experience that it
takes years to establish this understanding between an inert matter and
himself. He did not discover, at the first touch, the resources, the
caprices, the deficiencies, the excellencies of his instrument. It did
not become a living soul for him, a source of incomparable melody until
he had studied for a long time; man and instrument did not come to
understand each other like two friends, until both of them had been
skillfully questioned and tested by frequent intercourse.
Can a man ever learn woman and know how to decipher this wondrous strain
of music, by remaining through life like a seminarian in his cell? Is
it possible that a man who makes it his business to think for others,
to judge others, to rule others, to steal money from others, to feed, to
heal, to wound others--that, in fact, any of our predestined, can spare
time to study a woman? They sell their time for money, how can they give
it away for happiness? Money is their god. No one can serve two masters
at the same time. Is not the world, moreover, full of young women who
drag along pale and weak, sickly and suffering? Some of them are the
prey of feverish inflammations more or less serious, others lie under
the cruel tyranny of nervous attacks more or less violent. All the
husbands of these women belong to the class of the ignorant and the
predestined. They have caused their own misfortune and expended as
much pains in producing it as the husband artist would have bestowed in
bringing to flower the late and delightful blooms of pleasure. The time
which an ignorant man passes to consummate his own ruin is precisely
that which a man of knowledge employs in the education of his happiness.
XXVI.
Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.
In the preceding meditations we have indicated the extent of the evil
with the reckless audacity of those surgeons, who boldly induce the
formation of false tissues under which a shameful wound is concealed.
Public virtue, transferred to the table of our amphitheatre, has lost
even its carcass under the strokes of the scalpel. Lover or husband,
have you smiled, or have you trembled at this evil? Well, it is with
malicious delight that we lay this huge social burden on the conscience
of the predestined. Harlequin, when he tried to find out whether his
horse could be accustomed to go without food, was not more ridiculous
than the men who wish to find happiness in their home and yet refuse to
cultivate it with all the pains which it demands. The errors of women
are so many indictments of egotism, neglect and worthlessness in
husbands.
Yet it is yours, reader, it pertains to you, who have often condemned
in another the crime which you yourself commit, it is yours to hold the
balance. One of the scales is quite loaded, take care what you are going
to put in the other. Reckon up the number of predestined ones who may be
found among the total number of married people, weigh them, and you will
then know where the evil is seated.
Let us try to penetrate more deeply into the causes of this conjugal
sickliness.
The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the
most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter.
Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought,
had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional
sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours
makes of man both an animal and a lover. This distinction gives the key
to the social problem which we are considering.
Marriage may be considered in three ways, politically, as well as from
a civil and moral point of view: as a law, as a contract and as an
institution. As a law, its object is a reproduction of the species; as a
contract, it relates to the transmission of property; as an institution,
it is a guarantee which all men give and by which all are bound:
they have father and mother, and they will have children. Marriage,
therefore, ought to be the object of universal respect. Society can
only take into consideration those cardinal points, which, from a social
point of view, dominate the conjugal question.
Most men have no other views in marrying, than reproduction, property or
children; but neither reproduction nor property nor children constitutes
happiness. The command, “Increase and multiply,” does not imply love. To
ask of a young girl whom we have seen fourteen times in fifteen days, to
give you love in the name of law, the king and justice, is an absurdity
worthy of the majority of the predestined.
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment; happiness in
marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair. Hence
it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by
certain rules of honor and delicacy. After having enjoyed the benefit of
the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also
the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If
he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love
sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.
But to feel this passion is always to feel desire. Can a man always
desire his wife?
Yes.
It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the
same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed
several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a
charming melody.
Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which
is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either
it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and
goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the
child of heaven and earth.
Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything
with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three
arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this
investigation for the next century to carry out.
If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression,
pleasure should be even more diversified. For in the three arts which
aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy,
the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of
two bodies and of two souls. If the three principal methods upon which
we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those
whom nature has made poets, musicians or painters, is it not obvious
that, in order, to be happy, it is necessary to be initiated into the
secrets of pleasure? All men experience the craving for reproduction,
as all feel hunger and thirst; but all are not called to be lovers
and gastronomists. Our present civilization has proved that taste is a
science, and it is only certain privileged beings who have learned how
to eat and drink. Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its
physiologists. As for ourselves, we are contented with pointing out that
ignorance of the principles upon which happiness is founded, is the sole
cause of that misfortune which is the lot of all the predestined.
It is with the greatest timidity that we venture upon the publication
of a few aphorisms which may give birth to this new art, as casts have
created the science of geology; and we offer them for the meditation of
philosophers, of young marrying people and of the predestined.