If our meditations prove that it is almost impossible for a married
woman to remain virtuous in France, our enumeration of the celibates and
the predestined, our remarks upon the education of girls, and our
rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife
will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after
indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is
laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws,
in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of our
minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. A single
point still claims our observation, and that is the first onslaught of
the evil we are confronting.
We reach this first question on approaching the high problems suggested
by the honeymoon; and although we find here the starting point of all
the phenomena of married life, it appears to us to be the brilliant
link round which are clustered all our observations, our axioms, our
problems, which have been scattered deliberately among the wise quips
which our loquacious meditations retail. The honeymoon would seem to be,
if we may use the expression, the apogee of that analysis to which
we must apply ourselves, before engaging in battle our two imaginary
champions.
The expression _honeymoon_ is an Anglicism, which has become an idiom in
all languages, so gracefully does it depict the nuptial season which is
so fugitive, and during which life is nothing but sweetness and rapture;
the expression survives as illusions and errors survive, for it contains
the most odious of falsehoods. If this season is presented to us as a
nymph crowned with fresh flowers, caressing as a siren, it is because in
it is unhappiness personified and unhappiness generally comes during the
indulgence of folly.
The married couple who intend to love each other during their whole life
have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or rather
its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do not
understand death. But the consideration of this happiness is not germane
to our book; and for our readers marriage is under the influence of two
moons, the honeymoon and the Red-moon. This last terminates its course
by a revolution, which changes it to a crescent; and when once it rises
upon a home its light there is eternal.
How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love each
other?
How can it set, when once it has risen?
Have all marriages their honeymoon?
Let us proceed to answer these questions in order.
It is in this connection that the admirable education which we give to
girls, and the wise provisions made by the law under which men marry,
bear all their fruit. Let us examine the circumstances which precede and
attend those marriages which are least disastrous.
The tone of our morals develops in the young girl whom you make your
wife a curiosity which is naturally excessive; but as mothers in France
pique themselves on exposing their girls every day to the fire which
they do not allow to scorch them, this curiosity has no limit.
Her profound ignorance of the mysteries of marriage conceals from this
creature, who is as innocent as she is crafty, a clear view of the
dangers by which marriage is followed; and as marriage is incessantly
described to her as an epoch in which tyranny and liberty equally
prevail, and in which enjoyment and supremacy are to be indulged in,
her desires are intensified by all her interest in an existence as yet
unfulfilled; for her to marry is to be called up from nothingness into
life!
If she has a disposition for happiness, for religion, for morality,
the voices of the law and of her mother have repeated to her that this
happiness can only come to her from you.
Obedience if it is not virtue, is at least a necessary thing with
her; for she expects everything from you. In the first place, society
sanctions the slavery of a wife, but she does not conceive even the wish
to be free, for she feels herself weak, timid and ignorant.
Of course she tries to please you, unless a chance error is committed,
or she is seized by a repugnance which it would be unpardonable in you
not to divine. She tries to please because she does not know you.
In a word, in order to complete your triumph, you take her at a moment
when nature demands, often with some violence, the pleasure of which you
are the dispenser. Like St. Peter you hold the keys of Paradise.
I would ask of any reasonable creature, would a demon marshal round the
angel whose ruin he had vowed all the elements of disaster with more
solicitude than that with which good morals conspire against the
happiness of a husband? Are you not a king surrounded by flatterers?
This young girl, with all her ignorance and all her desires, committed
to the mercy of a man who, even though he be in love, cannot know her
shrinking and secret emotions, will submit to him with a certain sense
of shame, and will be obedient and complaisant so long as her young
imagination persuades her to expect the pleasure or the happiness of
that morrow which never dawns.
In this unnatural situation social laws and the laws of nature are in
conflict, but the young girl obediently abandons herself to it, and,
from motives of self-interest, suffers in silence. Her obedience is a
speculation; her complaisance is a hope; her devotion to you is a
sort of vocation, of which you reap the advantage; and her silence is
generosity. She will remain the victim of your caprices so long as she
does not understand them; she will suffer from the limitations of your
character until she has studied it; she will sacrifice herself without
love, because she believed in the show of passion you made at the first
moment of possession; she will no longer be silent when once she has
learned the uselessness of her sacrifices.
And then the morning arrives when the inconsistencies which have
prevailed in this union rise up like branches of a tree bent down for
a moment under a weight which has been gradually lightened. You have
mistaken for love the negative attitude of a young girl who was waiting
for happiness, who flew in advance of your desires, in the hope that
you would go forward in anticipation of hers, and who did not dare
to complain of the secret unhappiness, for which she at first accused
herself. What man could fail to be the dupe of a delusion prepared at
such long range, and in which a young innocent woman is at once the
accomplice and the victim? Unless you were a divine being it would
be impossible for you to escape the fascination with which nature and
society have surrounded you. Is not a snare set in everything which
surrounds you on the outside and influences you within? For in order to
be happy, is it not necessary to control the impetuous desires of your
senses? Where is the powerful barrier to restrain her, raised by the
light hand of a woman whom you wish to please, because you do not
possess? Moreover, you have caused your troops to parade and march by,
when there was no one at the window; you have discharged your fireworks
whose framework alone was left, when your guest arrived to see them.
Your wife, before the pledges of marriage, was like a Mohican at
the Opera: the teacher becomes listless, when the savage begins to
understand.
LVI.
In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each
other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it
is passed.
This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is
encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of her
married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which begins
to be so attractive as soon as it shows love to be in harmony with duty,
is called the honeymoon. How can it last long between two beings who are
united for their whole life, unless they know each other perfectly? If
there is one thing which ought to cause astonishment it is this, that
the deplorable absurdities which our manners heap up around the nuptial
couch give birth to so few hatreds! But that the life of the wise man
is a calm current, and that of the prodigal a cataract; that the child,
whose thoughtless hands have stripped the leaves from every rose upon
his pathway, finds nothing but thorns on his return, that the man who
in his wild youth has squandered a million, will never enjoy, during his
life, the income of forty thousand francs, which this million would have
provided--are trite commonplaces, if one thinks of the moral theory of
life; but new discoveries, if we consider the conduct of most men. You
may see here a true image of all honeymoons; this is their history, this
is the plain fact and not the cause that underlies it.
But that men endowed with a certain power of thought by a privileged
education, and accustomed to think deliberately, in order to shine in
politics, literature, art, commerce or private life--that these men
should all marry with the intention of being happy, of governing a wife,
either by love or by force, and should all tumble into the same pitfall
and should become foolish, after having enjoyed a certain happiness for
a certain time,--this is certainly a problem whose solution is to be
found rather in the unknown depths of the human soul, than in the quasi
physical truths, on the basis of which we have hitherto attempted to
explain some of these phenomena. The risky search for the secret laws,
which almost all men are bound to violate without knowing it, under
these circumstances, promises abundant glory for any one even though he
make shipwreck in the enterprise upon which we now venture to set forth.
Let us then make the attempt.
In spite of all that fools have to say about the difficulty they have
had in explaining love, there are certain principles relating to it
as infallible as those of geometry; but in each character these are
modified according to its tendency; hence the caprices of love, which
are due to the infinite number of varying temperaments. If we were
permitted never to see the various effects of light without also
perceiving on what they were based, many minds would refuse to believe
in the movement of the sun and in its oneness. Let the blind men cry
out as they like; I boast with Socrates, although I am not as wise as
he was, that I know of naught save love; and I intend to attempt the
formulation of some of its precepts, in order to spare married people
the trouble of cudgeling their brains; they would soon reach the limit
of their wit.
Now all the preceding observations may be resolved into a single
proposition, which may be considered either the first or last term in
this secret theory of love, whose statement would end by wearying us, if
we did not bring it to a prompt conclusion. This principle is contained
in the following formula:
LVII.
Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in
proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the obstacles
which the accidents of social life put in the way of your happiness.
If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will
not last more than three nights. Where must we seek for the causes of
this law? I do not know. If you cast your eyes around you, you will find
abundant proof of this rule; in the vegetable world the plants which
take the longest time to grow are those which promise to have the
longest life; in the moral order of things the works produced yesterday
die to-morrow; in the physical world the womb which infringes the laws
of gestation bears dead fruit. In everything, a work which is permanent
has been brooded over by time for a long period. A long future requires
a long past. If love is a child, passion is a man. This general law,
which all men obey, to which all beings and all sentiments must submit,
is precisely that which every marriage infringes, as we have plainly
shown. This principle has given rise to the love tales of the Middle
Ages; the Amadises, the Lancelots, the Tristans of ballad literature,
whose constancy may justly be called fabulous, are allegories of the
national mythology which our imitation of Greek literature nipped in the
bud. These fascinating characters, outlined by the imagination of the
troubadours, set their seal and sanction upon this truth.
LVIII.
We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting
in proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost us.
All our meditations have revealed to us about the basis of the
primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is at
the same time the principle and the result of the law.
LIX.
In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.
This last principle is so self-evident that we will not attempt to
demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to
us of some importance. The writer who said: “Everything is true, and
everything is false,” announced a fact which the human intellect,
naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really
seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds
that contemplate them. This fact may be detailed as follows:
There cannot be found, in all creation, a single law which is not
counterbalanced by a law exactly contrary to it; life in everything is
maintained by the equilibrium of two opposing forces. So in the present
subject, as regards love, if you give too much, you will not receive
enough. The mother who shows her children her whole tenderness calls
forth their ingratitude, and ingratitude is occasioned, perhaps, by
the impossibility of reciprocation. The wife who loves more than she is
loved must necessarily be the object of tyranny. Durable love is that
which always keeps the forces of two human beings in equilibrium. Now
this equilibrium may be maintained permanently; the one who loves the
more ought to stop at the point of the one who loves the less. And is it
not, after all the sweetest sacrifice that a loving heart can make, that
love should so accommodate itself as to adjust the inequality?
What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher
on discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the
world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections
are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers to
bloom, the universe to teem with life!
Perhaps, we ought to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the
following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question
of honeymoons and of Red-moons: