The word _Catastrophe_ is a term of literature which signifies the final
climax of a play.
To bring about a catastrophe in the drama which you are playing is a
method of defence which is as easy to undertake as it is certain to
succeed. In advising to employ it, we would not conceal from you its
perils.
The conjugal catastrophe may be compared to one of those high fevers
which either carry off a predisposed subject or completely restore his
health. Thus, when the catastrophe succeeds, it keeps a woman for years
in the prudent realms of virtue.
Moreover, this method is the last of all those which science has been
able to discover up to this present moment.
The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of
Lucretia, the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of
political catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a
large scale; nevertheless, within their own area, your dramatic climaxes
in conjugal life will not be less effective than these.
But since the art of creating a situation and of transforming it, by the
introduction of natural incidents, constitutes genius; since the return
to virtue of a woman, whose foot has already left some tracks upon
the sweet and gilded sand which mark the pathway of vice, is the most
difficult to bring about of all denouements, and since genius neither
knows it nor teaches it, the practitioner in conjugal laws feels
compelled to confess at the outset that he is incapable of reducing to
definite principles a science which is as changeable as circumstances,
as delusive as opportunity, and as indefinable as instinct.
If we may use an expression which neither Diderot, d’Alembert nor
Voltaire, in spite of every effort, have been able to engraft on our
language, a conjugal catastrophe _se subodore_ is scented from afar; so
that our only course will be to sketch out imperfectly certain conjugal
situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the philosopher of
ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion, walked forward in
his attempt to comprehend laws which were incomprehensible.
A husband, in accordance with the principles comprised in our Meditation
on _Police_, will expressly forbid his wife to receive the visits of a
celibate whom he suspects of being her lover, and whom she has promised
never again to see. Some minor scenes of the domestic interior we leave
for matrimonial imaginations to conjure up; a husband can delineate them
much better than we can; he will betake himself in thought back to those
days when delightful longings invited sincere confidences and when
the workings of his policy put into motion certain adroitly handled
machinery.
Let us suppose, in order to make more interesting the natural scene
to which I refer, that you who read are a husband, whose carefully
organized police has made the discovery that your wife, profiting by
the hours devoted by you to a ministerial banquet, to which she probably
procured you an invitation, received at your house M. A----z.
Here we find all the conditions necessary to bring about the finest
possible of conjugal catastrophes.
You return home just in time to find your arrival has coincided with
that of M. A----z, for we would not advise you to have the interval
between acts too long. But in what mood should you enter? Certainly not
in accordance with the rules of the previous Meditation. In a rage then?
Still less should you do that. You should come in with good-natured
carelessness, like an absent-minded man who has forgotten his purse,
the statement which he has drawn up for the minister, his
pocket-handkerchief or his snuff-box.
In that case you will either catch two lovers together, or your wife,
forewarned by the maid, will have hidden the celibate.
Now let us consider these two unique situations.
But first of all we will observe that husbands ought always to be in a
position to strike terror in their homes and ought long before to make
preparations for the matrimonial second of September.
Thus a husband, from the moment that his wife has caused him to perceive
certain _first symptoms_, should never fail to give, time after time,
his personal opinion on the course of conduct to be pursued by a husband
in a great matrimonial crisis.
“As for me,” you should say, “I should have no hesitation in killing the
man I caught at my wife’s feet.”
With regard to the discussion that you will thus give rise to, you will
be led on to aver that the law ought to have given to the husband, as it
did in ancient Rome, the right of life and death over his children, so
that he could slay those who were spurious.
These ferocious opinions, which really do not bind you to anything, will
impress your wife with salutary terror; you will enumerate them lightly,
even laughingly--and say to her, “Certainly, my dear, I would kill you
right gladly. Would you like to be murdered by me?”
A woman cannot help fearing that this pleasantry may some day become a
very serious matter, for in these crimes of impulse there is a certain
proof of love; and then women who know better than any one else how
to say true things laughingly at times suspect their husbands of this
feminine trick.
When a husband surprises his wife engaged in even innocent conversation
with her lover, his face still calm, should produce the effect
mythologically attributed to the celebrated Gorgon.
In order to produce a favorable catastrophe at this juncture, you
must act in accordance with the character of your wife, either play a
pathetic scene a la Diderot, or resort to irony like Cicero, or rush to
your pistols loaded with a blank charge, or even fire them off, if you
think that a serious row is indispensable.
A skillful husband may often gain a great advantage from a scene
of unexaggerated sentimentality. He enters, he sees the lover and
transfixes him with a glance. As soon as the celibate retires, he falls
at the feet of his wife, he declaims a long speech, in which among other
phrases there occurs this:
“Why, my dear Caroline, I have never been able to love you as I should!”
He weeps, and she weeps, and this tearful catastrophe leaves nothing to
be desired.
We would explain, apropos of the second method by which the catastrophe
may be brought about, what should be the motives which lead a husband
to vary this scene, in accordance with the greater or less degree of
strength which his wife’s character possesses.
Let us pursue this subject.
If by good luck it happens that your wife has put her lover in a place
of concealment, the catastrophe will be very much more successful.
Even if the apartment is not arranged according to the principles
prescribed in the Meditation, you will easily discern the place into
which the celibate has vanished, although he be not, like Lord Byron’s
Don Juan, bundled up under the cushion of a divan. If by chance your
apartment is in disorder, you ought to have sufficient discernment to
know that there is only one place in which a man could bestow himself.
Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made himself so small
that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for we may
expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help
casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to
look in an exactly opposite direction, and then nothing is easier for a
husband than to set a mouse-trap for his wife.
The hiding-place being discovered, you must walk straight up to the
lover. You must meet him face to face!
And now you must endeavor to produce a fine effect. With your face
turned three-quarters towards him, you must raise your head with an air
of superiority. This attitude will enhance immensely the effect which
you aim at producing.
The most essential thing to do at this moment, is to overwhelm the
celibate by some crushing phrase which you have been manufacturing all
the time; when you have thus floored him, you will coldly show him the
door. You will be very polite, but as relentless as the executioner’s
axe, and as impassive as the law. This freezing contempt will already
probably have produced a revolution in the mind of your wife. There
must be no shouts, no gesticulations, no excitement. “Men of high social
rank,” says a young English author, “never behave like their inferiors,
who cannot lose a fork without sounding the alarm throughout the whole
neighborhood.”
When the celibate has gone, you will find yourself alone with your wife,
and then is the time when you must subjugate her forever.
You should therefore stand before her, putting on an air whose affected
calmness betrays the profoundest emotion; then you must choose from
among the following topics, which we have rhetorically amplified, and
which are most congenial to your feelings: “Madame,” you must say, “I
will speak to you neither of your vows, nor of my love; for you have too
much sense and I have too much pride to make it possible that I should
overwhelm you with those execrations, which all husbands have a right
to utter under these circumstances; for the least of the mistakes that I
should make, if I did so, is that I would be fully justified. I will not
now, even if I could, indulge either in wrath or resentment. It is not
I who have been outraged; for I have too much heart to be frightened
by that public opinion which almost always treats with ridicule and
condemnation a husband whose wife has misbehaved. When I examine my
life, I see nothing there that makes this treachery deserved by me,
as it is deserved by many others. I still love you. I have never been
false, I will not say to my duty, for I have found nothing onerous in
adoring you, but not even to those welcome obligations which sincere
feeling imposes upon us both. You have had all my confidence and you
have also had the administration of my fortune. I have refused you
nothing. And now this is the first time that I have turned to you a
face, I will not say stern, but which is yet reproachful. But let us
drop this subject, for it is of no use for me to defend myself at
a moment when you have proved to me with such energy that there is
something lacking in me, and that I am not intended by nature to
accomplish the difficult task of rendering you happy. But I would ask
you, as a friend speaking to a friend, how could you have the heart to
imperil at the same time the lives of three human creatures: that of the
mother of my children, who will always be sacred to me; that of the
head of the family; and finally of him--who loves--[she perhaps at these
words will throw herself at your feet; you must not permit her to do so;
she is unworthy of kneeling there]. For you no longer love me, Eliza.
Well, my poor child [you must not call her _my poor child_ excepting
when the crime has not been committed]--why deceive ourselves? Why do
you not answer me? If love is extinguished between a married couple,
cannot friendship and confidence still survive? Are we not two
companions united in making the same journey? Can it be said that during
the journey the one must never hold out his hand to the other to raise
up a comrade or to prevent a comrade’s fall? But I have perhaps said too
much and I am wounding your pride--Eliza! Eliza!”
Now what the deuce would you expect a woman to answer? Why a catastrophe
naturally follows, without a single word.
In a hundred women there may be found at least a good half dozen of
feeble creatures who under this violent shock return to their husbands
never perhaps again to leave them, like scorched cats that dread the
fire. But this scene is a veritable alexipharmaca, the doses of which
should be measured out by prudent hands.
For certain women of delicate nerves, whose souls are soft and timid, it
would be sufficient to point out the lurking-place where the lover lies,
and say: “M. A----z is there!” [at this point shrug your shoulders].
“How can you thus run the risk of causing the death of two worthy
people? I am going out; let him escape and do not let this happen
again.”
But there are women whose hearts, too violently strained in these
terrible catastrophes, fail them and they die; others whose blood
undergoes a change, and they fall a prey to serious maladies; others
actually go out of their minds. These are examples of women who take
poison or die suddenly--and we do not suppose that you wish the death of
the sinner.
Nevertheless, the most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens
of France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen
Rizzio murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with
the Earl of Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are abnormal in
disposition.
We will suppose, then, that the woman whose portrait adorns our first
Meditation is a little Mary Stuart, and we will hasten to raise the
curtain for the fifth act in this grand drama entitled _Marriage_.
A conjugal catastrophe may burst out anywhere, and a thousand
incidents which we cannot describe may give it birth. Sometimes it is a
handkerchief, as in _Othello_; or a pair of slippers, as in _Don
Juan_; sometimes it is the mistake of your wife, who cries out--“Dear
Alphonse!” instead of “Dear Adolph!” Sometimes a husband, finding out
that his wife is in debt, will go and call on her chief creditor, and
will take her some morning to his house, as if by chance, in order to
bring about a catastrophe. “Monsieur Josse, you are a jeweler and you
sell your jewels with a readiness which is not equaled by the readiness
of your debtors to pay for them. The countess owes you thirty thousand
francs. If you wish to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen should always be
visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon; her husband will
be in the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which she may make to
impose silence upon you--speak out boldly. I will pay all.”
So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are
in arithmetic.
All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based the
means of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are derived
from the nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in different
places in the great book of the world. Just as persons of intellect
instinctively apply the laws of taste whose principles they would find
difficulty in formulating, so we have seen numberless people of deep
feeling employing with singular felicity the precepts which we are about
to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted on a definite system.
The sentiments which this situation inspired only revealed to them
incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the scientific men of the
sixteenth century found that their imperfect microscopes did not enable
them to see all the living organisms, whose existence had yet been
proved to them by the logic of their patient genius.
We hope that the observations already made in this book, and in those
which follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which frivolous
men maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According to our view,
a husband who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more than that, he is
a man who lives quite out of sympathy with the marriage state, of whose
importance he has no conception. In this connection, these Meditations
perhaps will reveal to very many ignorant men the mysteries of a world
before which they stand with open eyes, yet without seeing it.
We hope, moreover, that these principles when well applied will produce
many conversions, and that among the pages that separate this second
part from that entitled _Civil War_ many tears will be shed and many
vows of repentance breathed.
Yes, among the four hundred thousand honest women whom we have so
carefully sifted out from all the European nations, we indulge the
belief that there are a certain number, say three hundred thousand, who
will be sufficiently self-willed, charming, adorable, and bellicose to
raise the standard of _Civil War_.
To arms then, to arms!