There is, however, a power which is superior even to that of the
headache; and we must avow to the glory of France, that this power is
one of the most recent which has been won by Parisian genius. As in the
case with all the most useful discoveries of art and science, no one
knows to whose intellect it is due. Only, it is certain that it was
towards the middle of the last century that “Vapors” made their first
appearance in France. Thus while Papin was applying the force of
vaporized water in mechanical problems, a French woman, whose name
unhappily is unknown, had the glory of endowing her sex with the faculty
of vaporizing their fluids. Very soon the prodigious influence obtained
by vapors was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing from fibre
to fibre that the science of neurology was born. This admirable science
has since then led such men as Philips and other clever physiologists
to the discovery of the nervous fluid in its circulation; they are now
perhaps on the eve of identifying its organs, and the secret of its
origin and of its evaporation. And thus, thanks to certain quackeries of
this kind, we may be enabled some day to penetrate the mysteries of that
unknown power which we have already called more than once in the present
book, the _Will_. But do not let us trespass on the territory of medical
philosophy. Let us consider the nerves and the vapors solely in their
connection with marriage.
Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as married
women are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest disdain for
medical classifications. Thus we recognize only:
1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS.
2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.
The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses,
as frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
antiquity, pure and simple.
The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
breathe all the melancholy of the North.
That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs the
empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.
Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in tears.
“What is the matter, my darling?”
“It is nothing.”
“But you are in tears!”
“I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the clouds,
and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some disaster--I
think I must be going to die.”
Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses, she
is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart palpitate
with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You say to
yourself, with a self-satisfied air:
“I know exactly what this is all about!”
And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns like
an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew, who
implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories.
She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is
buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and
at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium,
you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her
melts away in the cloud of Ixion.
There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their
feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts,
or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are
employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.
On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman
takes pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her dressing
herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms of spleen;
she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother or her sister,
has tried to tear her away from that divan which monopolizes her and
on which she spends her life in improvising elegies. Madame is going to
spend a fortnight in the country because the doctor orders it. In short,
she goes where she likes and does what she likes. Is it possible that
there can be a husband so brutal as to oppose such desires, by hindering
a wife from going to seek a cure for her cruel sufferings? For it
has been established after many long discussions that in the nerves
originate the most fearful torture.
But it is especially in bed that vapors play their part. There when a
woman has not a headache she has her vapors; and when she has neither
vapors nor headache, she is under the protection of the girdle of Venus,
which, as you know, is a myth.
Among the women who fight with you the battle of vapors, are some more
blonde, more delicate, more full of feeling than others, and who possess
the gift of tears. How admirably do they know how to weep! They weep
when they like, as they like and as much as they like. They organize
a system of offensive warfare which consists of manifesting sublime
resignation, and they gain victories which are all the more brilliant,
inasmuch as they remain all the time in excellent health.
Does a husband, irritated beyond all measure, at last express his wishes
to them? They regard him with an air of submission, bow their heads and
keep silence. This pantomime almost always puts a husband to rout. In
conjugal struggles of this kind, a man prefers a woman should speak and
defend herself, for then he may show elation or annoyance; but as for
these women, not a word. Their silence distresses you and you experience
a sort of remorse, like the murderer who, when he finds his victim
offers no resistance, trembles with redoubled fear. He would prefer to
slay him in self-defence. You return to the subject. As you draw near,
your wife wipes away her tears and hides her handkerchief, so as to
let you see that she has been weeping. You are melted, you implore your
little Caroline to speak, your sensibility has been touched and you
forget everything; then she sobs while she speaks, and speaks while
she sobs. This is a sort of machine eloquence; she deafens you with
her tears, with her words which come jerked out in confusion; it is the
clapper and torrent of a mill.
French women and especially Parisians possess in a marvelous degree
the secret by which such scenes are enacted, and to these scenes their
voices, their sex, their toilet, their manner give a wonderful charm.
How often do the tears upon the cheeks of these adorable actresses give
way to a piquant smile, when they see their husbands hasten to break the
silk lace, the weak fastening of their corsets, or to restore the comb
which holds together the tresses of their hair and the bunch of golden
ringlets always on the point of falling down?
But how all these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of
antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic
dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the
vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances,
in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is then
that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth like
the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow which
glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of love, she
sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above all, she sees
the present moment and tramples on her husband, and impresses him with a
sort of terror.
The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so many
feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to wrong
her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of some
terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for the
smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his ways,
whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he had been
put into a lion’s cage, and some one had said to him that he must not
irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.
Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.
Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these sublime
creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St. Thomas,
who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed with an
incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of all
these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis, they
concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played before
them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the springs that
sets her going; and when they have discovered the mechanism of
this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight impulse to the
puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either of the reality of
the disease or the artifices of these conjugal mummeries.
But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a terrible
weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, for she never destroys
with her own hands her empire over her husband without some sort of
repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the fatal knife
of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last paragraph of
the present Meditation.