hair uncombed: people turn to look and laugh when they meet me, and
take me for a young rake who has passed the night at the ale-house or
elsewhere. I am drunk to all intent, although I have drunk nothing,
and I have the aspect of a drunken man even to the uncertain gait, now
slow, now fast. I go from street to street like a dog that has lost
his master, looking in every direction, ill at ease, on the alert,
turning at the slightest sound, gliding into the centre of every
group, heedless of the rebuffs of the people I jostle against, and
scrutinizing everything with a clear-sightedness that I do not possess
at other times.--Then all of a sudden it is made clear to me that I am
mistaken, that that surely is not the place, that I must go on farther,
to the other end of the town, Heaven knows where.--And I rush off as
if the devil were after me.--I touch the ground only with the tips of
my toes and I don't weigh an ounce.--Really I must be a strange sight
with my terrified, frantic manner, my waving arms and the inarticulate
cries I utter.--When I think it over in cold blood, I laugh at myself
with all my heart, which doesn't prevent me, I beg you to believe, from
doing it all over again on the first occasion.
If any one should ask me why I rush about so, I certainly should be
much embarrassed to answer. I am in no hurry to arrive, as I am going
nowhere. I am not afraid of being late, as I have no appointment.--No
one is waiting for me--and I have no possible reason for hurrying so.
Is it because an opportunity to love, an adventure, a woman, an idea,
a fortune, or anything else is missing in my life, and I am seeking it
unconsciously, impelled by a vague instinct? is my existence struggling
to complete itself? is it a longing to get away from myself and my
surroundings, the tiresomeness of my life and the wish for something
different? It is one of these, or perhaps all of them together.--At
all events, it is a very unpleasant experience, a feverish irritation
ordinarily succeeded by the most complete collapse.
I often have the idea that, if I had started an hour earlier, or if I
had quickened my gait, I should have arrived in time; that, while I was
passing through one street, the thing I was looking for passed through
another, and that a block of carriages was enough to make me miss what
I have been pursuing, regardless of everything else, for so long a
time.--You cannot imagine the intense melancholy and profound despair
into which I fall when I see that all this comes to nothing and that
my youth is passing and no prospect opening before me; thereupon all
my idle passions mutter in my heart and devour each other for lack of
better food, like the wild beasts in a menagerie whom the keeper has
forgotten to feed. Despite the stifled, unacknowledged disappointments
of every day, there is something within me that resists and will not
die. I have no hope, for, in order to hope, one must have a desire,
a certain propensity to wish that things should turn out in one way
rather than another. I desire nothing, for I desire everything. I do
not hope, or rather I have ceased to hope;--this is too absurd--and
it is absolutely one to me whether a thing is or is not.--I am
waiting--for what? I don't know, but I am waiting.
It is a shuddering sort of expectation, overflowing with impatience,
broken with somersaults and nervous movements, like the suspense of a
lover waiting for his mistress.--Nothing comes;--I fly into a passion
or begin to weep.--I am waiting for heaven to open and an angel to
descend and make some revelation to me, for a revolution to break out
and the people to give me a throne, for one of Raphaël's virgins to
step out of its canvas and come and embrace me, for relations that
I don't possess to die and leave me the wherewithal to set my fancy
afloat upon a sea of gold, for a hippogriff to snatch me up and bear me
away into unknown regions.--But whatever I am waiting for, it certainly
is nothing commonplace and ordinary.
It has gone so far that, when I return home, I never fail to ask: "Has
no one been here? is there no letter for me? nothing new?"--I know
perfectly well that there is nothing, that there can be nothing. That
makes no difference; I am always much surprised and much disappointed
when I receive the regular reply:--"No, monsieur--nothing at all."
Sometimes--very rarely, however--the idea takes a more definite
form.--It will be some lovely woman whom I don't know and who doesn't
know me, whom I have met at church or at the theatre and who has not
taken the slightest notice of me.--I rush all over the house, and until
I have opened the door of the last room--I hardly dare confess it, it
is so utterly absurd--I hope that she has come and is there.--It is
not conceit on my part.--I am so far from being conceited that several
women have taken a most affectionate interest in me--at least so others
have told me--when I had supposed them to be entirely indifferent to
me and never to have thought much about me.--That comes from another
source.
When I am not stupefied by ennui and discouragement my mind awakes
and recovers all its former vigor. I hope, I love, I desire, and my
desires are so violent that I imagine they will force everything to
come to them, as a powerful magnet attracts bits of iron although they
are at a great distance.--That is why I wait for the things I desire,
instead of going to them, and I often neglect opportunities that open
most favorably before my hopes.--Another than I would write the most
amorous note you can imagine to his heart's divinity, or would seek an
opportunity to approach her.--But I ask the messenger for the reply
to a letter I have not written, and pass my time constructing in my
brain situations most marvellously adapted to exhibit me to the woman
I love in the most unlooked-for and most favorable light.--I could
make a book thicker and more ingenious than the Stratagems of Polybius
of all the stratagems I invent to make my way to her presence and
reveal my passion to her. Generally it would be enough to say to one
of my friends: "Present me to Madame So-and-So," and to indulge in a
mythological compliment suitably punctuated with sighs.
After listening to all this, one would naturally think me a fit subject
for the Petites-Maisons; I am a sensible fellow enough, however, and
I haven't carried many mad ideas into execution. All this takes place
in the cellar of my brain, and all these ridiculous ideas are very
carefully buried in my lowest depths; no one notices anything on the
outside, and I am reputed to be a calm, cold young man, by no means
susceptible to female charms and indifferent to things affected by most
young men of my age; all of which is as far from the truth as society's
judgments usually are.
However, in spite of all the things that have happened to dishearten
me, some of my longings have been gratified, and from the small amount
of pleasure their gratification has afforded me, I have come to dread
the realization of the others. You remember the childish ardor of my
longing to have a horse of my own? my mother gave me one very recently;
he is as black as ebony, with a little white star on his face, flowing
mane and tail, glossy coat, slender legs, just exactly the horse I
wanted. When they brought him to me, it gave me such a shock, that I
was as pale as death, and unable to recover myself, for a good quarter
of an hour; then I mounted him, and started off at a gallop without
saying a word; I rode straight ahead through the fields for more than
an hour, in a state of ecstasy hard to conceive; I did the same every
day for more than a week, and, upon my word, I don't know why I didn't
founder him, or at least break his wind.--Gradually my intense zeal
slackened. I rode my horse at a trot, then at a walk, then I began to
ride so indifferently that he would frequently stop without my noticing
it: the pleasure was transformed to a habit much more quickly than I
supposed.--As for Ferragus--that is the name I gave him--he is really
the most beautiful creature you can imagine. The hair on his feet
is like the down on a young eagle; he is as active as a goat and as
gentle as a lamb. You will enjoy above all things taking a gallop on
him when you come here; and, although my passion for equestrianism has
grown decidedly cool, I am still very fond of him, for he has a very
estimable equine character and I very much prefer him to many human
beings. If you could hear his neigh of delight when I go to see him in
his stable, and how intelligent his eyes are when he looks at me! I
confess that I am touched by those marks of affection, and I put my arm
around his neck and kiss him as affectionately, on my word, as if he
were a lovely girl.
I had another longing also, more intense, more ardent, more constantly
awake, more dearly cherished, upon which I had built a fascinating
house of cards in my mind, a palace of chimeras, very often demolished,
and reared again with desperate constancy;--it was to have a
mistress--a mistress all my own--like the horse.--I cannot say whether
the realization of that dream would have cooled my ardor as speedily
as the realization of the other; I doubt it. But perhaps I am wrong,
perhaps I should have grown weary as quickly.--It is a peculiarity of
my disposition that I crave so frantically what I desire, although I
never do anything to procure it, that if by chance, or by any other
means, I attain the object of my desire, I am so afflicted with moral
weakness and confused to such an extent, that I feel faint and ill,
and have no strength left to enjoy it: so it is that the things that
come to me without my having wished for them ordinarily afford me more
pleasure than those I have most eagerly coveted.
I am twenty-two years old; I am not virgin.--Alas! nowadays nobody
is so at that age,--either in body--or in heart--which is much
worse.--Aside from those who afford pleasure to men for money, and
who ought not to count any more than a bad dream, I have had, here
and there, in some dark corner, divers virtuous, or almost virtuous
women, neither lovely nor ugly, neither young nor old, such as fall
in the way of a young man who has no settled attachment and whose
heart is disengaged.--With a little good will and a considerable dose
of romantic illusion, you can call that having a mistress, if you
choose.--So far as I am concerned, it is impossible, and if I should
have a thousand of that sort I should still consider my longing as far
from accomplishment as ever.
I have had no mistress, therefore, and my sole desire is to have
one.--It is a matter that disturbs me strangely; it isn't an
effervescent temperament, a boiling of the blood, the first glow of
virility. It is not woman that I want, it is a woman, a mistress; I
want her, I will have her, and before long; if I don't succeed, I
admit that I shall never get over it and that I shall retain an inward
timidity, a secret discouragement that will have a serious influence
on the rest of my life.--I shall consider myself lacking in certain
respects, inharmonious, incomplete--deformed in mind or heart; for,
after all, what I ask is no more than fair, and nature owes it to
every man. So long as I fail to gain my end, I shall look upon myself
as nothing more than a child, and I shall not have the confidence in
myself that I ought to have.--A mistress for myself, that is the _toga
virilis_ for a young Roman.
I see so many men, despicable in every respect, with lovely women whose
lackeys they are hardly worthy to be, that a blush rises to my cheeks
for the women--and for myself.--It gives me a pitiable opinion of
women to see them sully themselves with such blackguards who despise
and deceive them, rather than bestow themselves upon some loyal,
sincere young man who would deem himself very fortunate and would adore
them on bended knees; myself, for example. To be sure, that sort of
creature frequents salons, struts about in all weathers, and is always
sprawling over the back of some easy-chair, while I stay at home, with
my face against the window-pane, watching the river steam and the
mist rise, while rearing silently in my heart the perfumed sanctuary,
the marvellous temple in which I am to set up the future idol of my
soul.--A chaste and poetical occupation which makes women feel as
little kindly toward you as possible.
Women have very little liking for contemplative men and take strangely
to those who put their ideas into action. After all, they are not
wrong. Compelled by their education and social position to hold their
tongues and to wait, they naturally prefer those men who come to
them and talk, for they relieve them from an unnatural and wearisome
silence: I realize all that; but never as long as I live shall I be
able to make up my mind, as I see many men do, to leave my seat, walk
across a salon and say unexpectedly to a woman: "Your dress makes you
look like an angel," or: "Your eyes are particularly bright to-night."
All this does not make it any less essential for me to have a mistress.
I don't know who it will be, but I see no one among the women I know
who can fill that dignified and important position properly. I find in
them but very few of the qualities I must have. Those who are young
enough haven't sufficient beauty or charm of mind; those who are young
and beautiful are disgracefully and repulsively virtuous or lack the
necessary freedom of action; and then there is always some husband or
brother about, or a mother or an aunt, or I don't know what, who has
big eyes and long ears, and whom one must cajole or throw out of the
window.--Every rose has its grub, every woman has heaps of relations
whom you must get rid of like the caterpillars on a tree, if you want
to pluck the fruit of her beauty some day. There is not one of them,
even to the third cousins in the provinces, whom no one has ever seen,
who is not determined to maintain his or her dear cousin's immaculate
purity in all its snowy whiteness. That is nauseating, and I shall
never have the necessary patience to tear up all the rank weeds and lop
off the thorns that fatally obstruct the approaches to a pretty woman.
I don't care much for mammas and I care still less for little girls. I
must confess, too, that married women have very moderate attractions
for me.--There is a confusion and mixture in the latter case that
disgust me; I cannot endure the idea of going shares. The woman who has
a husband and a lover is a prostitute to one of them, often to both,
and then I could never consent to give place to another. My natural
pride would be incapable of stooping to such degradation. Never will
I go away because another man is coming. Though the woman should be
compromised and ruined, though we should fight with knives, each with
one foot on her body--I would remain.--Secret staircases, closets,
wardrobes, and all the machinery of adultery would be poor expedients
with me.
I am but little enamored of what is known as virgin purity, the
innocence of the flower of life, purity of heart, and other charming
things which sound most beautiful in verse; I call it all pure
nonsense, ignorance, imbecility, or hypocrisy.--Virgin purity, which
consists in sitting on the edge of a chair, with the arms pressed close
against the body, the eye on the point of the corset, and in speaking
only after permission from its grandparents, the innocence which has a
monopoly of uncurled hair and white dresses, the purity of heart which
wears the corsage high in the neck, because it has as yet no breast or
shoulders, do not seem to me, in very truth, a marvellously tempting
pleasure.
I am not at all anxious to teach little fools to say the alphabet of
love.--I am not old enough or corrupt enough to take any great pleasure
in that. I should have but ill-success, too, for I have never had the
knack of teaching anybody, even the things that I knew best. I prefer
women who can read freely, you get to the end of the chapter sooner;
and in all things, but especially in love, what one must consider, is
the end. In that respect I am much like those people who take a novel
by the tail and read the conclusion first, being prepared then to
go backward to the first page. That method of reading and loving has
its charm. One relishes the details better when one's mind is at ease
concerning the end, and reversing the natural order of things brings
the unexpected to pass.
So young girls and married women are excluded from the category.
Therefore we must select our divinity from among the widows.--Alas! I
am very much afraid that although we have nothing left but them, we
shall still fail to find what we want.
If I should fall in love with one of those pale narcissuses bathed in a
warm dew of tears and stooping with melancholy grace over the brand-new
marble gravestone of some husband happily and recently deceased, I
should certainly be, and in a very short time, as unhappy as the
defunct spouse in his lifetime. Widows, however young and charming
they may be, have one terrible inconvenience that other women have
not; the instant that everything does not go well with them and the
slightest cloud floats across the sky of love, they say at once, with
a high and mighty, contemptuous manner: "Oh! how you act to-day! You
are exactly like monsieur: when we quarrelled he never said anything
but that; it's very strange, you have the same tone and the same
expression; when you are angry, you can't imagine how much you resemble
my husband:--it's enough to make one shudder."--It's very pleasant to
have such things thrown in your face point-blank! There are some who
carry their impudence to the point of praising the departed like an
epitaph and extolling his heart and his leg at the expense of your
leg and your--heart.--With women who have only one or several lovers,
one has, at all events, the inestimable advantage of never hearing of
one's predecessor, which is no trifling consideration. Women have too
great an affection for what is proper and legitimate not to be very
careful to keep quiet under such circumstances, and all those matters
are relegated as speedily as possible to the old records.--It is always
understood that one is always a woman's first lover.
I do not consider that there is any serious answer to be made to
such a well-founded aversion. It is not that I look upon widows as
altogether unpleasing, when they are young and pretty and haven't put
off their mourning. There are the little languishing airs, the little
tricks of letting the arms fall, bending the neck and puffing up
like a half-fledged turtle-dove; a multitude of charming mannerisms
prettily veiled behind the transparent mask of crêpe, a coquetry of
despair so skilfully managed, sighs so adroitly husbanded, tears that
fall so in the nick of time and make the eyes so bright!--Certainly,
after my wine, if not before, the liqueur I love best to drink is a
lovely, clear, limpid tear trembling at the end of a dark or light
eyelash.--How is a man to resist that!--We don't resist it;--and then
black is so becoming to women!--The fair skin, poetry aside, turns to
ivory, snow, milk, alabaster, to everything pure and white on earth
that madrigal-makers can use: the dark skin has only a dash of brown,
full of animation and fire.--Mourning is good fortune for a woman, and
the reason why I shall never marry is that I am afraid my wife would
get rid of me in order to wear mourning for me.--There are women,
however, who do not know how to make the most of their affliction
and who weep in such a way as to make their noses red and to distort
their features so that they look like the grotesque figures we see
on fountains: that's a great stumbling-block. A woman must have many
charms and much art to weep agreeably; lacking those, she runs the
risk of not being consoled for a long time.--Nevertheless, great as
the pleasure may be of making some Artemisia unfaithful to the shade
of her Mausolus, I do not intend to choose definitely, from among
the lamenting swarm, the one whom I will ask to give me her heart in
exchange for mine.
I hear you say at that: "Whom will you take, then?--You won't have
unmarried girls nor married women, nor widows.--You don't love mammas;
I don't imagine that you love grandmammas any better.--Whom in the
devil do you love?"--That is the key to the charade, and if I knew
it I should not torment myself so. Thus far I have never loved any
woman, but I have loved and I do love _love._ Although I have had no
mistresses and the women I have had have aroused in me nothing but
desire, I have felt and I know the sensation of love itself: I do not
love this one or that one, one rather than another, but some one I
have never seen, who must exist somewhere, and whom I shall find, God
willing. I know what she looks like, and when I meet her I shall know
her.
I have very often imagined the place she lives in, the dress she wears,
the color of her eyes and her hair.--I can hear her voice; I should
know her step among a thousand others, and if, by chance, any one
should mention her name, I should turn to look; it is impossible that
she should not have one of five or six names I have assigned to her in
my head.
She is twenty-six years old--no more, neither less nor more.--She is
not ignorant and she has not yet become _blasé._ It is a charming age
at which to make love as it should be made, without puerile nonsense
and without libertinage.--She is of medium height. I don't like a giant
or a dwarf. I want to be able to carry my deity from the sofa to the
bed without assistance; but it would be unpleasant to me to have to
hunt for her there. She must be just tall enough to put her mouth to
mine for a kiss by standing on tiptoe. That is the proper height. As
for her size, she is rather plump than thin. I am a little of a Turk
on that point, and it would be very disagreeable to me to find an
angle where I was looking for a rounded outline; a woman's skin should
be well filled out, her flesh hard and firm as the pulp of an almost
ripe peach: the mistress I shall have is made in just that way. She
is a blonde with black eyes, the fair skin of a blonde and the rich
coloring of a brunette, something red and sparkling in her smile. The
lower lip a little thick, the pupil of the eye swimming in a sea of
aqueous humor, the throat well-rounded and small, the wrists slender,
the hands long and plump, the gait undulating like a snake rearing on
its tail, the hips full and flexible, the shoulders broad, the back of
the neck covered with down;--a refined and yet healthy style of beauty,
animated and graceful, poetic and human; a sketch by Giorgione executed
by Rubens.
This is her costume! she wears a dress of scarlet or black velvet
slashed with white satin or cloth of silver, an open corsage, a huge
ruff _à la_ Medici, a felt hat, capriciously dented like Helena
Systerman's, and long white feathers crisp and curled, a gold chain or
a stream of diamonds around her neck, and on all her fingers a number
of large rings of various enamels.
I would not waive a single ring or bracelet. The dress must be of
velvet or brocade; if I should allow her to descend to satin, it would
be the utmost concession I would make. I would rather rumple a silk
skirt than a cotton one, and pull pearls or feathers from a head than
natural flowers or a simple knot of ribbon; I am aware that the lining
of the cotton skirt is often at least as appetizing as that of the
silk skirt; but I prefer the latter.--And so, in my dreams, I have
taken for my mistress many queens, many empresses, many princesses,
many sultanas, many famous courtesans, but never middle-class women
or shepherdesses; and in my most vagabond desires, I have never taken
advantage of any one on a carpet of turf or in a bed of Aumale serge.
I consider that beauty is a diamond which should be mounted and set in
solid gold. I cannot imagine a lovely woman who has not a carriage,
horses, servants, and everything that one has with a hundred thousand
francs a year: there is a certain harmony between beauty and wealth.
One demands the other; a pretty foot calls for a pretty shoe, a pretty
shoe calls for carpets and a carriage, and so on. A lovely woman with
mean clothes in a wretched house is, to my mind, the most painful
spectacle one can see, and I could never fall in love with her. Only
the comely and the rich can fall in love without making themselves
ridiculous or pitiable.--On that principle few people have the right to
fall in love: I myself should be shut out first of all; however, that's
my opinion.