XCII.
LOVERS IGNORE MODESTY.
We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy
of Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something
inexpressibly terrible in the situation of a married woman at the moment
when unlawful love turns her away from her duties as mother and wife. As
Diderot has very well put it, “infidelity in a woman is like unbelief in
a priest, the last extreme of human failure; for her it is the greatest
of social crimes, since it implies in her every other crime besides, and
indeed either a wife profanes her lawless love by continuing to belong
to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which attach her to her
family, by giving herself over altogether to her lover. She ought to
choose between the two courses, for her sole possible excuse lies in the
intensity of her love.”
She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma;
she will work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in
his passion, or that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.
It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
inconsistencies of women’s conduct is to be attributed. In this lies the
origin of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret of all
their mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover, even as
simply based upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a woman who
accepts the unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the bliss which
is bought by crime, is a hundred times more reasonable. Nevertheless,
almost all women will risk suffering in the future and ages of
anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour. If the human feeling of
self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check them, how
fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the
Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he for
whom these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a gentleman
to whom we would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man who buttons
his coat just as all of us do, it is enough to make one burst into a
roar of laughter so loud, that starting from the Luxembourg it would
pass over the whole of Paris and startle an ass browsing in the pasture
at Montmartre.
It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we
have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole
of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the
addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances
a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by a
startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case so
manifold.