marriage, your wife will pretend that she ought to have her opinion
and you yours. "In marrying," she will say, "a woman does not vow that
she will abdicate the throne of reason. Are women then really slaves?
Human laws can fetter the body; but the mind!--ah! God has placed it
so near Himself that no human hand can touch it."
These ideas necessarily proceed either from the too liberal teachings
which you have allowed her to receive, or from some reflections which
you have permitted her to make. A whole Meditation has been devoted to
_Home Instruction_.
Then your wife begins to say, "_My_ chamber, _my_ bed, _my_
apartment." To many of your questions she will reply, "But, my dear,
this is no business of yours!" Or: "Men have their part in the
direction of the house, and women have theirs." Or, laughing at men
who meddle in household affairs, she will affirm that "men do not
understand some things."
The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.
One fine morning, you will see in your little church two altars, where
before you never worshiped but at one. The altar of your wife and your
own altar have become distinct, and this distinction will go on
increasing, always in accordance with the system founded upon the
dignity of woman.
Then the following ideas will appear, and they will be inculcated in
you whether you like it or not, by means of a living force very
ancient in origin and little known. Steam-power, horse-power,
man-power, and water-power are good inventions, but nature has provided
women with a moral power, in comparison with which all other powers
are nothing; we may call it _rattle-power_. This force consists in a
continuance of the same sound, in an exact repetition of the same
words, in a reversion, over and over again, to the same ideas, and
this so unvaried, that from hearing them over and over again you will
admit them, in order to be delivered from the discussion. Thus the
power of the rattle will prove to you:
That you are very fortunate to have such an excellent wife;
That she has done you too much honor in marrying you;
That women often see clearer than men;
That you ought to take the advice of your wife in everything, and
almost always ought to follow it;
That you ought to respect the mother of your children, to honor her
and have confidence in her;
That the best way to escape being deceived, is to rely upon a wife's
refinement, for according to certain old ideas which we have had the
weakness to give credit, it is impossible for a man to prevent his
wife from minotaurizing him;
That a lawful wife is a man's best friend;
That a woman is mistress in her own house and queen in her
drawing-room, etc.
Those who wish to oppose a firm resistance to a woman's conquest,
effected by means of her dignity over man's power, fall into the
category of the predestined.
At first, quarrels arise which in the eye of wives give an air of
tyranny to husbands. The tyranny of a husband is always a terrible
excuse for inconsistency in a wife. Then, in their frivolous
discussions they are enabled to prove to their families and to ours,
to everybody and to ourselves, that we are in the wrong. If, for the
sake of peace, or from love, you acknowledge the pretended rights of
women, you yield an advantage to your wife by which she will profit
eternally. A husband, like a government, ought never to acknowledge a
mistake. In case you do so, your power will be outflanked by the
subtle artifices of feminine dignity; then all will be lost; from that
moment she will advance from concession to concession until she has
driven you from her bed.
The woman being shrewd, intelligent, sarcastic and having leisure to
meditate over an ironical phrase, can easily turn you into ridicule
during a momentary clash of opinions. The day on which she turns you
into ridicule, sees the end of your happiness. Your power has expired.
A woman who has laughed at her husband cannot henceforth love him. A
man should be, to the woman who is in love with him, a being full of
power, of greatness, and always imposing. A family cannot exist
without despotism. Think of that, ye nations!
Now the difficult course which a man has to steer in presence of such
serious incidents as these, is what we may call the _haute politique_
of marriage, and is the subject of the second and third parts of our
book. That breviary of marital Machiavelism will teach you the manner
in which you may grow to greatness within that frivolous mind, within
that soul of lacework, to use Napoleon's phrase. You may learn how a
man may exhibit a soul of steel, may enter upon this little domestic
war without ever yielding the empire of his will, and may do so
without compromising his happiness. For if you exhibit any tendency to
abdication, your wife will despise you, for the sole reason that she
has discovered you to be destitute of mental vigor; you are no longer
a _man_ to her.
But we have not yet reached the point at which are to be developed
those theories and principles, by means of which a man may unite
elegance of manners with severity of measures; let it suffice us, for
the moment, to point out the importance of impending events and let us
pursue our theme.
At this fatal epoch, you will see that she is adroitly setting up a
right to go out alone.
You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that
height of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the
garments of the saints.
"Oh, mon Dieu! My dear," said Madame de la Valliere to her husband,
"how badly you wear your sword! M. de Richelieu has a way of making it
hang straight at his side, which you ought to try to imitate; it is in
much better taste."
"My dear, you could not tell me in a more tactful manner that we have
been married five months!" replied the Duke, whose repartee made his
fortune in the reign of Louis XV.
She will study your character in order to find weapons against you.
Such a study, which love would hold in horror, reveals itself in the
thousand little traps which she lays purposely to make you scold her;
when a woman has no excuse for minotaurizing her husband she sets to
work to make one.
She will perhaps begin dinner without waiting for you.
If you drive through the middle of the town, she will point out
certain objects which escaped your notice; she will sing before you
without feeling afraid; she will interrupt you, sometimes vouchsafe no
reply to you, and will prove to you, in a thousand different ways,
that she is enjoying at your side the use of all her faculties and
exercising her private judgment.
She will try to abolish entirely your influence in the management of
the house and to become sole mistress of your fortune. At first this
struggle will serve as a distraction for her soul, whether it be empty
or in too violent commotion; next, she will find in your opposition a
new motive for ridicule. Slang expressions will not fail her, and in
France we are so quickly vanquished by the ironical smile of another!
At other times headaches and nervous attacks make their appearance;
but these symptoms furnish matter for a whole future Meditation. In
the world she will speak of you without blushing, and will gaze at you
with assurance. She will begin to blame your least actions because
they are at variance with her ideas, or her secret intentions. She
will take no care of what pertains to you, she will not even know
whether you have all you need. You are no longer her paragon.
In imitation of Louis XIV, who carried to his mistresses the bouquets
of orange blossoms which the head gardener of Versailles put on his
table every morning, M. de Vivonne used almost every day to give his
wife choice flowers during the early period of his marriage. One
morning he found the bouquet lying on the side table without having
been placed, as usual, in a vase of water.
"Oh! Oh!" said he, "if I am not a cuckold, I shall very soon be one."
You go on a journey for eight days and you receive no letters, or you
receive one, three pages of which are blank.--Symptom.
You come home mounted on a valuable horse which you like very much,
and between her kisses your wife shows her uneasiness about the horse
and his fodder.--Symptom.
To these features of the case, you will be able to add others. We
shall endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold
fresco style and leave the miniatures to you. According to the
characters concerned, the indications which we are describing, veiled
under the incidents of ordinary life, are of infinite variety. One man
may discover a symptom in the way a shawl is put on, while another
needs to receive a fillip to his intellect, in order to notice the
indifference of his mate.
Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a
country party, this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is
listless and the happiness within her reach has no more attractions
for her. Her mind, her imagination, perhaps her natural caprices call
for a lover. Nevertheless, she dare not yet embark upon an intrigue
whose consequences and details fill her with dread. You are still
there for some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance,
although a very light one. On the other hand, the lover presents
himself arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of
mystery. The conflict which has arisen in the heart of your wife
becomes, in presence of the enemy, more real and more full of peril
than before. Very soon the more dangers and risks there are to be run,
the more she burns to plunge into that delicious gulf of fear,
enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her imagination kindles and sparkles,
her future life rises before her eyes, colored with romantic and
mysterious hues. Her soul discovers that existence has already taken
its tone from this struggle which to a woman has so much solemnity in
it. All is agitation, all is fire, all is commotion within her. She
lives with three times as much intensity as before, and judges the
future by the present. The little pleasure which you have lavished
upon her bears witness against you; for she is not excited as much by
the pleasures which she has received, as by those which she is yet to
enjoy; does not imagination show her that her happiness will be keener
with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than with you? And then, she
finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror in her enjoyment. Then
she falls in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles
hung over her head by you yourself, thus preferring the delirious
agonies of such a passion, to that conjugal inanity which is worse to
her than death, to that indifference which is less a sentiment than
the absence of all sentiment.
You, who must go to pay your respects to the Minister of Finance, to
write memorandums at the bank, to make your reports at the Bourse, or
to speak in the Chamber; you, young men, who have repeated with many
others in our first Meditation the oath that you will defend your
happiness in defending your wife, what can you oppose to these desires
of hers which are so natural? For, with these creatures of fire, to
live is to feel; the moment they cease to experience emotion they are
dead. The law in virtue of which you take your position produces in
her this involuntary act of minotaurism. "There is one sequel," said
D'Alembert, "to the laws of movement." Well, then, where are your
means of defence?-- Where, indeed?
Alas! if your wife has not yet kissed the apple of the Serpent, the
Serpent stands before her; you sleep, we are awake, and our book
begins.
Without inquiring how many husbands, among the five hundred thousand
which this book concerns, will be left with the predestined; how many
have contracted unfortunate marriages; how many have made a bad
beginning with their wives; and without wishing to ask if there be
many or few of this numerous band who can satisfy the conditions
required for struggling against the danger which is impending, we
intend to expound in the second and third part of this work the
methods of fighting the Minotaur and keeping intact the virtue of
wives. But if fate, the devil, the celibate, opportunity, desire your
ruin, in recognizing the progress of all intrigues, in joining in the
battles which are fought by every home, you will possibly be able to
find some consolation. Many people have such a happy disposition, that
on showing to them the condition of things and explaining to them the
why and the wherefore, they scratch their foreheads, rub their hands,
stamp on the ground, and are satisfied.
MEDITATION IX.
EPILOGUE.
Faithful to our promise, this first part has indicated the general
causes which bring all marriages to the crises which we are about to
describe; and, in tracing the steps of this conjugal preamble, we have
also pointed out the way in which the catastrophe is to be avoided,
for we have pointed out the errors by which it is brought about.
But these first considerations would be incomplete if, after
endeavoring to throw some light upon the inconsistency of our ideas,
of our manners and of our laws, with regard to a question which
concerns the life of almost all living beings, we did not endeavor to
make plain, in a short peroration, the political causes of the
infirmity which pervades all modern society. After having exposed the
secret vices of marriage, would it not be an inquiry worthy of
philosophers to search out the causes which have rendered it so
vicious?
The system of law and of manners which so far directs women and
controls marriage in France, is the outcome of ancient beliefs and
traditions which are no longer in accordance with the eternal
principles of reason and of justice, brought to light by the great
Revolution of 1789.
Three great disturbances have agitated France; the conquest of the
country by the Romans, the establishment of Christianity and the
invasion of the Franks. Each of these events has left a deep impress
upon the soil, upon the laws, upon the manners and upon the intellect
of the nation.
Greece having one foot on Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced
by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions;
she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her
legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of
Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was
necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of
Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the marbles
of the gyneceum. The country was reduced to the condition of a city,
to a narrow territory, and the courtesans who were connected with art
and religion by so many ties, were sufficient to satisfy the first
passions of the young men, who were few in number, since their
strength was elsewhere taken up in the violent exercises of that
training which was demanded of them by the military system of those
heroic times.
At the beginning of her royal career Rome, having sent to Greece to
seek such principles of legislation as might suit the sky of Italy,
stamped upon the forehead of the married woman the brand of complete
servitude. The senate understood the importance of virtue in a
republic, hence the severity of manners in the excessive development
of the marital and paternal power. The dependence of the woman on her
husband is found inscribed on every code. The seclusion prescribed by
the East becomes a duty, a moral obligation, a virtue. On these
principles were raised temples to modesty and temples consecrated to
the sanctity of marriage; hence, sprang the institution of censors,
the law of dowries, the sumptuary laws, the respect for matrons and
all the characteristics of the Roman law. Moreover, three acts of
feminine violation either accomplished or attempted, produced three
revolutions! And was it not a grand event, sanctioned by the decrees
of the country, that these illustrious women should make their
appearances on the political arena! Those noble Roman women, who were
obliged to be either brides or mothers, passed their life in
retirement engaged in educating the masters of the world. Rome had no
courtesans because the youth of the city were engaged in eternal war.
If, later on, dissoluteness appeared, it merely resulted from the
despotism of emperors; and still the prejudices founded upon ancient
manners were so influential that Rome never saw a woman on a stage.
These facts are not put forth idly in scanning the history of marriage
in France.
After the conquest of Gaul, the Romans imposed their laws upon the
conquered; but they were incapable of destroying both the profound
respect which our ancestors entertained for women and the ancient
superstitions which made women the immediate oracles of God. The Roman
laws ended by prevailing, to the exclusion of all others, in this
country once known as the "land of written law," or _Gallia togata_,
and their ideas of marriage penetrated more or less into the "land of
customs."
But, during the conflict of laws with manners, the Franks invaded the
Gauls and gave to the country the dear name of France. These warriors
came from the North and brought the system of gallantry which had
originated in their western regions, where the mingling of the sexes
did not require in those icy climates the jealous precautions of the
East. The women of that time elevated the privations of that kind of
life by the exaltation of their sentiments. The drowsy minds of the
day made necessary those varied forms of delicate solicitation, that
versatility of address, the fancied repulse of coquetry, which belong
to the system whose principles have been unfolded in our First Part,
as admirably suited to the temperate clime of France.
To the East, then, belong the passion and the delirium of passion, the
long brown hair, the harem, the amorous divinities, the splendor, the
poetry of love and the monuments of love.-- To the West, the liberty
of wives, the sovereignty of their blond locks, gallantry, the fairy
life of love, the secrecy of passion, the profound ecstasy of the
soul, the sweet feelings of melancholy and the constancy of love.
These two systems, starting from opposite points of the globe, have
come into collision in France; in France, where one part of the
country, Languedoc, was attracted by Oriental traditions, while the
other, Languedoil, was the native land of a creed which attributes to
woman a magical power. In the Languedoil, love necessitates mystery,
in the Languedoc, to see is to love.
At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of
Christianity into France, and there it was preached by women, and
there it consecrated the divinity of a woman who in the forests of
Brittany, of Vendee and of Ardennes took, under the name of
Notre-Dame, the place of more than one idol in the hollow of old
Druidic oaks.
If the religion of Christ, which is above all things a code of
morality and politics, gave a soul to all living beings, proclaimed
that equality of all in the sight of God, and by such principles as
these fortified the chivalric sentiments of the North, this advantage
was counterbalanced by the fact, that the sovereign pontiff resided at
Rome, of which seat he considered himself the lawful heir, through the
universality of the Latin tongue, which became that of Europe during
the Middle Ages, and through the keen interest taken by monks, writers
and lawyers in establishing the ascendency of certain codes,
discovered by a soldier in the sack of Amalfi.
These two principles of the servitude and the sovereignty of women
retain possession of the ground, each of them defended by fresh
arguments.
The Salic law, which was a legal error, was a triumph for the
principle of political and civil servitude for women, but it did not
diminish the power which French manners accorded them, for the
enthusiasm of chivalry which prevailed in Europe supplanted the party
of manners against the party of law.
And in this way was created that strange phenomenon which since that
time has characterized both our national despotism and our
legislation; for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the
Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the
history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions.
Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the
monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so
closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still
remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from
one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it
possible that the woman question should be discussed and woman's
political education and marriage should be ventilated when feudalism
threatened the throne, when reform menaced both king and barons, and
the people, between the hierarchy and the empire, were forgotten?
According to a saying of Madame Necker, women, amid these great
movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case of porcelain.
They were counted for nothing, but without them everything would have
been broken.
A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out
at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner; a collision
between these two principles which frequently occurred, produced odd
situations by the thousand. And then, woman was physically little
understood, and what was actually sickness in her, was considered a
prodigy, witchcraft or monstrous turpitude. In those days these
creatures, treated by the law as reckless children, and put under
guardianship, were by the manners of the time deified and adored. Like
the freedmen of emperors, they disposed of crowns, they decided
battles, they awarded fortunes, they inspired crimes and revolutions,
wonderful acts of virtue, by the mere flash of their glances, and yet
they possessed nothing and were not even possessors of themselves.
They were equally fortunate and unfortunate. Armed with their weakness
and strong in instinct, they launched out far beyond the sphere which
the law allotted them, showing themselves omnipotent for evil, but
impotent for good; without merit in the virtues that were imposed upon
them, without excuse in their vices; accused of ignorance and yet
denied an education; neither altogether mothers nor altogether wives.
Having all the time to conceal their passions, while they fostered
them, they submitted to the coquetry of the Franks, while they were
obliged like Roman women, to stay within the ramparts of their castles
and bring up those who were to be warriors. While no system was
definitely decided upon by legislation as to the position of women,
their minds were left to follow their inclinations, and there are
found among them as many who resemble Marion Delorme as those who
resemble Cornelia; there are vices among them, but there are as many
virtues. These were creatures as incomplete as the laws which governed
them; they were considered by some as a being midway between man and
the lower animals, as a malignant beast which the laws could not too
closely fetter, and which nature had destined, with so many other
things, to serve the pleasure of men; while others held woman to be an
angel in exile, a source of happiness and love, the only creature who
responded to the highest feelings of man, while her miseries were to
be recompensed by the idolatry of every heart. How could the
consistency, which was wanting in a political system, be expected in
the general manners of the nation?
And so woman became what circumstances and men made her, instead of
being what the climate and native institutions should have made her;
sold, married against her taste, in accordance with the _Patria
potestas_ of the Romans, at the same time that she fell under the
marital despotism which desired her seclusion, she found herself
tempted to take the only reprisals which were within her power. Then
she became a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased to be intently
occupied in intestine war, for the same reason that she was a virtuous
woman in the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill
in this outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and
not the poetic suggestion which they yield.