Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary
to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but
well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that claims the
right, on a woman’s part, to dispose of her own body as she chooses, as
one may well believe, when we consider that half the women in the
world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as Diderot
supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way before
sickness and before misery?
Justice may be done to all these questions.
An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass
of surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit
our attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were
subjected to treatment by women surgeons.
The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.
To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those
crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as
unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later
comes.
Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and
let us inquire in what modesty consists.
Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which females
display before males. This opinion appears to us equally mistaken.
The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense
services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon
sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis.
They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have
retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress
of science which will always draw its first principles from the Gospel,
principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent disciples of
the Son of Man.
The study of thought’s mysteries, the discovery of those organs which
belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of
its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem
to have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport
ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily
organs,--in a word the laws of thought’s dynamic and those of its
physical influence,--these things will fall to the lot of the next
century, as their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps
we, of the present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous
blocks which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of
a glorious edifice.
Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains
modesty by the relations of different human beings to each other instead
of explaining it by the moral relations of each one with himself.
Modesty is no more susceptible of analysis than conscience; and this
perhaps is another way of saying that modesty is the conscience of the
body; for while conscience directs our sentiments and the least movement
of our thoughts towards the good, modesty presides over external
movements. The actions which clash with our interests and thus disobey
the laws of conscience wound us more than any other; and if they are
repeated call forth our hatred. It is the same with acts which violate
modesty in their relations to love, which is nothing but the expression
of our whole sensibility. If extreme modesty is one of the conditions on
which the reality of marriage is based, as we have tried to prove [See
_Conjugal Catechism, Meditation IV._], it is evident that immodesty will
destroy it. But this position, which would require long deductions for
the acceptance of the physiologist, women generally apply, as it were,
mechanically; for society, which exaggerates everything for the benefit
of the exterior man, develops this sentiment of women from childhood,
and around it are grouped almost every other sentiment. Moreover, the
moment that this boundless veil, which takes away the natural brutality
from the least gesture, is dragged down, woman disappears. Heart,
mind, love, grace, all are in ruins. In a situation where the virginal
innocence of a daughter of Tahiti is most brilliant, the European
becomes detestable. In this lies the last weapon which a wife seizes,
in order to escape from the sentiment which her husband still fosters
towards her. She is powerful because she had made herself loathsome; and
this woman, who would count it as the greatest misfortune that her lover
should be permitted to see the slightest mystery of her toilette, is
delighted to exhibit herself to her husband in the most disadvantageous
situation that can possibly be imagined.
It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish
you from the conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in
bidding the father of Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife
is not blamed for the pleasure she takes in interrupting you by the most
imperative questions. Where there formerly was movement and life is now
lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long discussed
and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we have in another
place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the comic element in a
matrimonial crisis, although here we may be permitted to disdain the
diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall have found in the
treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity of their talk,
amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit in certain situations.
It is too sad to laugh at, and too funny to mourn over. When a woman
resorts to such extreme measures, worlds at once separate her from her
husband. Nevertheless, there are some women to whom Heaven has given the
gift of being charming under all circumstances, who know how to put a
certain witty and comic grace into these performances, and who have
such smooth tongues, to use the expression of Sully, that they obtain
forgiveness for their caprices and their mockeries, and never estrange
the hearts of their husbands.
What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist
in his passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who
loves him no longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who
repulses him, who deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly and
capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and cleanliness,
rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in presence of a
wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the horror caused by
her indecency?