The coquette in _Flirt_ is a lady of the ordinary bourgeois type. She
is determined to have admirers at any price, and despises no means
whereby to capture the indifferent, fears no humiliation if only she
can render submissive those who seek to resist her, nor does she
hesitate to hold out hopes wherewith to attract the doubtful. She would
have them all burn on the altar of her vanity like incense rising in
her nostrils, but for the sake of convenience she remains an honourable
woman. Her toilet is the sole occupation of her mind; to charm and
afterwards reject is the daily excitement without which she cannot live.
_L’Amour Artificiel_ is a truer and more striking picture of the age.
Jules Cazes has emancipated himself from the conventional French custom
of never describing any erotic experiences except those of married
women. This story takes place before marriage. Stella is a daughter of
the Plutocracy, probably half a Jewess, spoilt, pretentious, talented,
with all the coldness of soul and temperament that belongs to the
emancipated woman, and which she mistakes for pride, she has that same
feeling of superiority over the man combined with the consciousness of
being unloveable--a new type that is very un-French, and which offers
a singular proof of the manner in which foreign influence has forced
its way through the closed circle of culture belonging to French
perception. Stella is a young lady imbued with the tone of Ibsen’s and
Kielland’s women’s rights women. Her story is a continual withering of
the soul.
She has a fine voice and a remarkable talent for execution, but what
is she to sing when she feels nothing? She is a stranger to the depths
of life; a young girl _comme il faut_, belonging to the moneyed
aristocracy, is not likely to experience anything very deep--from lack
of disposition, lack of opportunity, or both; she is unbearably bored
in the society to which she belongs, and has a longing for sensations;
her mornings are spent in gazing at herself in the looking-glass, in
paying visits and trying on dresses, in annoying her friends, and in
practising the newest songs; but how in the world is she to spend her
evenings? She lures a penniless young author, flirts with him and
makes prodigious advances, only to chase him away again like a dog.
The young man sees through her game, but his poor, foolish head is
turned by her perfumes, her fashionable dresses and her cold, proud
beauty, and his sufferings are quite sufficient to afford her an
agreeable distraction. The type which she represents bears a certain
resemblance to that which Marie Bashkirtseff records in her diary.
It is the same fever of girlhood, the same wild desire to attract
men, the same self-deification combined with the utter incapacity for
loving which undermined that great talent and hot temperament, and
drove its possessor to an early illness and death. But Stella is far
from possessing a hot temperament. She has that injured consciousness
of her actions which is the property of all calculating souls. She
seizes one initiative after the other with regard to the poor silly
youth, to whose modest mind the idea never occurs of seducing such
a self-possessed young lady. But Stella, who has been over hasty in
breaking with her intended who did not allow himself to be sufficiently
tyrannised over to please her, has grown anxious to be married. Without
love, without tenderness, without ever forgetting herself, cold and
brutal, she tempts him to the act of love. The hardness of her heart
undergoes no change through the experience, and when soon afterwards
her father becomes bankrupt, she marries a rich old dandy who had
always been the object of her scorn.
In this study of a girl the new element is compounded of shallow
curiosity and soulless impulse; it is an unprejudiced attempt to depict
a degenerate woman, who among the many caricatures of nature and
society, is no rarity; it is a step on the way towards a psychological
analysis of modern humanity. Though it were nothing more than a search
after a truer description of human nature than that presented to us
in the models of the old æsthetic school, the author would still have
rendered an undoubted service.
The cleverest and most profound study of a woman occurs in the
description of Madame de Burne in Maupassant’s _Notre Cœur_.
Maupassant was in fact the only realist among modern French authors,
whereby I mean that he had the clearest and most spontaneous vision
for the nature of things and their connection with one another; he had
that nobility of temperament and sense of proportion that never thrust
itself between the world and himself, to distort the former after the
manner of a bad looking-glass. He let the facts speak for themselves,
and as he was possessed of that health which neither requires the
digestive expedient of moralising, not yet that of sentimentalising,
one could feel tolerably certain of protection from the so-called
“contemplation of the world,” from which one never escapes in the
writings of Daudet, Zola and Bourget. It is certainly not the great
depths that are measured in such transparent water, but we will return
to that subject another time.
_Notre Cœur_ is a very clever book, and Madame de Burne, herself a
clever lady, is at the same time a very clever study of a woman. There
is a philosopher in the book, a French novelist called Lamarthe, who
has many characteristics in common with Paul Bourget, amongst others
an unceasing interest in the analysis of woman. This man, who loves
in order that he may study the object of his affections, and in whose
mind the most intimate experiences are changed into psychological
perceptions, passes the following judgment on the present generation
of ladies in society.
“No, they are not women; the more we know them, the less they give us
that sensation of sweet intoxication which the real woman never fails
to give. Look at their toilets; they are birds, they are flowers, they
are serpents, but they are not women. The object of their lives is
to rival one another and to pursue their admirers. It amuses them to
see men overpowered, conquered and governed by the irresistible force
of woman, and, as time goes on, the tendency develops like a hidden
instinct, and grows gradually into an instinct of war and conquest.
Take Madame de Burne for an example. She is a widow. Perhaps it was
her marriage with a despotic churl that awoke in her heart a longing
to execute vengeance, a sombre craving to make men suffer for all that
she had endured at the hands of one of them, to feel herself for once
the strongest, able to bend the will of others, to inflict suffering,
and to conquer opposition. But before all else she is a born coquette.
Her heart does not hunger for emotion, like the hearts of tender and
sensitive women. She does not desire the love of one man, she does not
seek the happiness of a strong passion; what she would like is the
admiration of all, and if you would remain her friend, you must love
her. It is not the real wine of former times. Love was different under
the Restoration, it was different under the Second Empire, and now it
has become different again. When the romanticists idealised women and
made them dream dreams, women introduced into life the experiences
of their hearts whilst reading. Nowadays you pride yourselves on the
suppression of all deceitful, poetic glamour, and your novels are as
dry as your lives; but believe me, no more love in your books, no more
love in your lives!”
Afterwards he continues: “Look at this Madame de Burne who is so
charming, so amiable, so clever and so fascinating. It is not her
wishes that torment her, it is her nerves. She thinks, she does not
feel; or she thinks her feelings. She is proud of her intellect and has
no idea of the narrowness of her intelligence. Nothing interests her in
which she cannot make herself the central point. She expects too much
from men, she expects too much from their goodness, their nature, their
character, their delicacy, while she herself never has anything to give
that is not for every one alike. Woman was created and came into the
world for two purposes--for love and for the child. But this kind of
woman is incapable of loving and does not wish for children. If she
happens to have any, they are a misfortune and a burden to her.”
Then follows a subtle criticism of this entire group of women, who
are to be met with in all countries at a certain level of culture,
especially where comfortable circumstances predominate. Flowery
declaimers for the most part, women who interest themselves in
every kind of question--pampered beings with numerous wants and
an affectation of simplicity. A description of these “détraquées
contemporaines,” to whom Madame de Burne belongs, flows from the pen of
Lamarthe in his novel called _One of Them_. He writes as follows:
“They are a new race of women with reasoning, hysterical nerves excited
by a thousand contradictory emotions, which are hardly worthy of being
called wishes; disappointed with life without having tasted anything
owing to lack of experience; void of passion, void of affection, they
unite the temper of spoilt children with the dulness of aged sceptics.”