If his ugliness were still a little visible to her eyes, the fervour
of an entire audience, and the nervous effect produced upon a young
heart,[2] soon managed to eclipse

[Pg 58]
it. If anything was still heard about his ugliness, it was mere talk;
but not a word of it--Lekain's lady enthusiasts could be heard to
exclaim "He's lovely!"

Remember that beauty is the expression of character, or, put
differently, of moral habits, and that consequently it is exempt from
all passion. Now it is passion that we want. Beauty can only supply us
with probabilities about a woman, and probabilities, moreover, based on
her capacity for self-possession; while the glances of your mistress
with her small-pox scars are a delightful reality, which destroys all
the probabilities in the world.

[1] See Madame de Staël in _Delphine_, I think; there you have the
artifice of plain women.

[2] I should be inclined to attribute to this nervous sympathy the
prodigious and incomprehensible effect of fashionable music. (Sympathy
at Dresden for Rossini, 1821.) As soon as it is out of fashion, it
becomes no worse for that, and yet it ceases to have any effect upon
perfectly ingenuous girls. Perhaps it used to please them, as also
stimulating young men to fervour.

Madame de Sévigné says to her daughter (Letter 202, May 6, 1672):
"Lully surpassed himself in his royal music; that beautiful _Miserere_
was still further enlarged: there was a _Libera_ at which all eyes were
full of tears."

It is as impossible to doubt the truth of this effect, as to refuse wit
or refinement to Madame de Sévigné. Lully's music, which charmed her,
would make us run away at present; in her day, his music encouraged
crystallisation--it makes it impossible in ours.

[Pg 59]
                              CHAPTER XIX

                 LIMITATIONS OF BEAUTY--(_continued_)

A woman of quick fancy and tender heart, but timid and cautious in her
sensibility, who the day after she appears in society, passes in review
a thousand times nervously and painfully all that she may have said or
given hint of--such a woman, I say, grows easily used to want of beauty
in a man: it is hardly an obstacle in rousing her affection.

It is really on the same principle that you care next to nothing for
the degree of beauty in a mistress, whom you adore and who repays you
with harshness. You have very nearly stopped crystallising her beauty,
and when your _friend in need_ tells you that she isn't pretty, you are
almost ready to agree. Then he thinks he has made great way.

My friend, brave Captain Trab, described to me this evening his
feelings on seeing Mirabeau once upon a time. No one looking upon that
great man felt a disagreeable sensation in the eyes--that is to say,
found him ugly. People were carried away by his thundering words; they
fixed their attention, they delighted in fixing their attention, only
on what was beautiful in his face. As he had practically no beautiful
features (in the sense of sculpturesque or picturesque beauty)
they minded only what beauty he had of another kind, the beauty of
expression.[1]

[Pg 60]
While attention was blind to all traces of ugliness, picturesquely
speaking, it fastened on the smallest passable details with
fervour--for example, the beauty of his vast head of hair. If he had
had horns, people would have thought them lovely.[2]

[Pg 61]
The appearance every evening of a pretty dancer forces a little
interest from those poor souls, blasé or bereft of imagination, who
adorn the balcony of the opera. By her graceful movements, daring and
strange, she awakens their physical love and procures them perhaps
the only crystallisation of which they are still capable. This is the
way by which a young scarecrow, who in the street would not have been
honoured with a glance, least of all from people the worse for wear,
has only to appear frequently on the stage, and she manages to get
herself handsomely supported. Geoffroy used to say that the theatre is
the pedestal of woman. The more notorious and the more dilapidated a
dancer, the more she is worth; hence the green-room proverb: "Some get
sold at a price who wouldn't be taken as a gift." These women steal
part of their passions from their lovers, and are very susceptible of
love from pique.

How manage not to connect generous or lovable sentiments with the face
of an actress, in whose features there is nothing repugnant, whom for
two hours every evening we see expressing the most noble feelings,
and whom otherwise we do not know? When at last you succeed in being
received by her, her features recall such pleasing feelings, that the
entire reality which surrounds her, however little nobility it may
sometimes possess, is instantly invested with romantic and touching
colours.

"Devotee, in the days of my youth, of that boring French tragedy,[3]
whenever I had the luck of supping with Mlle. Olivier, I found myself
every other moment overbrimming with respect, in the belief that I was
speaking to a queen; and really I have never been quite sure whether,
in her case, I had fallen in love with a queen or a pretty tart."

[1] That is the advantage of being _à la mode_. Putting aside the
defects of a face which are already familiar, and no longer have any
effect upon the imagination, the public take hold of one of the three
following ideas of beauty:--

(1) The people--of the idea of wealth.

(2) The upper classes--of the idea of elegance, material or moral.

(3) The Court--of the idea: "My object is to please the women."

Almost all take hold of a mixture of all three. The happiness attached
to the idea of riches is linked to a refinement in the pleasure which
the idea of elegance suggests, and the whole comes into touch with
love. In one way or another the imagination is led on by novelty. It
is possible in this way to be interested in a very ugly man without
thinking of his ugliness,[*] and in good time his ugliness becomes
beauty. At Vienna, in 1788, Madame Viganò, a dancer and _the_ woman
of the moment, was with child--very soon the ladies took to wearing
little _Ventres à la Viganò_. For the same reason reversed, nothing
more fearful than a fashion out of date! Bad taste is a confusion of
fashion, which lives only by change, with the lasting beauty produced
by such and such a government, guided by such and such a climate. A
building in fashion to-day, in ten years will be out of fashion. It
will be less displeasing in two hundred years, when its fashionable day
will be forgotten. Lovers are quite mad to think about their dress; a
woman has other things to do, when seeing the object of her love, than
to bother about his get-up; we look at our lover, we do not examine
him, says Rousseau. If this examination takes place, we are dealing
with gallant-love and not passion-love. The brilliance of beauty is
almost offensive in the object of our love; it is none of our business
to see her beautiful, we want her tender and languishing. Adornment has
effect in love only upon girls, who are so rigidly guarded in their
parents' house, that they often lose their hearts through their eyes.
(L.'s words. September 15, 1820.)

* Le petit Germain, _Mémoires de Grammont_.

[2] For their polish or their size or their form! In this way, or by
the combination of sentiments (see above, the small-pox scars) a woman
in love grows used to the faults of her lover. The Russian Princess
C. has actually become used to a man who literally has no nose. The
picture of his courage, of his pistol loaded to kill himself in despair
at his misfortune, and pity for the bitter calamity, enhanced by the
idea that he will recover and is beginning to recover, are the forces
which have worked this miracle. The poor fellow with his wound must
appear not to think of his misfortune. (Berlin, 1807.)

[3] Improper expression copied from the Memoirs of my friend, the
late Baron de Bottmer. It is by the same trick that Feramorz pleases
Lalla-Rookh. See that charming poem.

[Pg 62]
                              CHAPTER XX

Perhaps men who are not susceptible to the feelings of passion-love are
those most keenly sensitive to the effects of beauty: that at least is
the strongest impression which such men can receive of women.

He who has felt his heart beating at a distant glimpse of the white
satin hat of the woman he loves, is quite amazed by the chill left upon
him by the approach of the greatest beauty in the world. He may even
have a qualm of distress, to observe the excitement of others.

Extremely lovely women cause less surprise the second day. 'Tis a great
misfortune, it discourages crystallisation. Their merit being obvious
to all and public property, they are bound to reckon more fools in the
list of their lovers than princes, millionaires, etc.[1]

[1] It is quite clear that the author is neither prince nor
millionaire. I wanted to steal that sally from the reader.

[Pg 63]
                              CHAPTER XXI

                          LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

Imaginative souls are sensitive and also mistrustful, even the most
ingenuous,[1]--I maintain. They may be suspicious without knowing it:
they have had so many disappointments in life. Thus everything set-out
and official, when a man is first introduced, scares the imagination
and drives away the possibility of crystallisation; the romantic is
then, on the contrary, love's triumph.

Nothing simpler--for in the supreme astonishment, which keeps the
thoughts busy for long upon something out of the ordinary, is already
half the mental exercise necessary to crystallisation.

I will quote the beginning of the Amours of Séraphine (_Gil Blas_, Bk.
IV, Chap. X). It is Don Fernando who tells the story of his flight,
when pursued by the agents of the inquisition....

 After crossing several walks I came to a drawing-room, the door
 of which was also left open. I entered, and when I had observed all
 its magnificence.... One side of the room a door stood ajar; I partly
 opened it and saw a suite of apartments

[Pg 64]
 whereof only the furthest was lighted. "What is to be done now?"
 I asked myself.... I could not resist my curiosity.... Advancing
 boldly, I went through all the rooms and reached one where there
 was a light--to wit, a taper upon a marble table in a silver-gilt
 candlestick.... But soon afterwards, casting my eyes upon a bed, the
 curtains of which were partly drawn on account of the heat, I perceived
 an object which at once engrossed my attention: a young lady, fast
 asleep in spite of the noise of the thunder, which had just been
 bursting forth. I softly drew near her. My mind was suddenly troubled
 at the sight. Whilst I feasted my eyes with the pleasure of beholding
 her, she awoke.

 Imagine her surprise at seeing in her room at midnight a man who was
 an utter stranger to her! She trembled on beholding me and shrieked
 aloud.... I took pains to reassure her and throwing myself on my knees
 before her, said--"Madam, have no fear." She called her women.... Grown
 a little braver by his (an old servant's) presence, she haughtily asked
 me who was, etc. etc."[2]

There is an introduction not easily to be forgotten! On the other hand,
could there be anything sillier in our customs of to-day than the
official, and at the same time almost sentimental, introduction of the
young wooer to his future wife: such legal prostitution goes so far as
to be almost offensive to modesty.

"I have just been present this afternoon, February 17th, 1790," says
Chamfort, "at a so-called family function. That is to say, men of
respectable reputation and a decent company were congratulating on
her good fortune Mlle. de Marille, a young person of beauty, wit and
virtue, who is to be favoured with becoming the wife of M. R.--an
unhealthy dotard, repulsive, dishonest, and mad, but rich: she has
seen him for the third time to-day, when signing the contract. If
anything characterises an age of infamy, it is the jubilation on an
occasion like this, it is the folly of such joy and--looking ahead--the
sanctimonious cruelty, with which the same society will heap contempt
without reserve upon

[Pg 65]
the pettiest imprudence of a poor young woman in love."

Ceremony of all kinds, being in its essence something affected and
set-out beforehand, in which the point is to act "properly," paralyses
the imagination and leaves it awake only to that which is opposed
to the object of the ceremony, e. g. something comical--whence the
magic effect of the slightest joke. A poor girl, struggling against
nervousness and attacks of modesty during the official introduction of
her _fiancé_, can think of nothing but the part she is playing, and
this again is a certain means of stifling the imagination.

Modesty has far more to say against getting into bed with a man whom
you have seen but twice, after three Latin words have been spoken in
church, than against giving way despite yourself to the man whom for
two years you have adored. But I am talking double Dutch.

The fruitful source of the vices and mishaps, which follow our
marriages nowadays, is the Church of Rome. It makes liberty for girls
impossible before marriage, and divorce impossible, when once they have
made their mistake, or rather when they find out the mistake of the
choice forced on them. Compare Germany, the land of happy marriages: a
delightful princess (Madame la Duchesse de Sa----) has just married in
all good faith for the fourth time, and has not failed to ask to the
wedding her three first husbands, with whom she is on the best terms.
That is going too far; but a single divorce, which punishes a husband
for his tyranny, prevents a thousand cases of unhappy wedded life.
What is amusing is that Rome is one of the places where you see most
divorces.

Love goes out at first sight towards a face, which reveals in a man at
once something to respect and something to pity.

[1] _The Bride of Lammermoor_, Miss Ashton.

A man who has lived finds in his memory numberless examples of
"affairs," and his only trouble is to make his choice. But if he
wishes to write, he no longer knows where to look for support. The
anecdotes of the particular circles he has lived in are unknown to the
public, and it would require an immense number of pages to recount them
with the necessary circumstantiality. I quote for that reason from
generally-known novels, but the ideas which I submit to the reader I do
not ground upon such empty fictions, calculated for the most part with
an eye to the picturesque rather than the true effect.

[2] [Translation of Henri van Laun.--Tr.]

[Pg 66]
                             CHAPTER XXII

                            OF INFATUATION

The most fastidious spirits are very given to curiosity and
prepossession: this is to be seen, especially, in beings in which that
sacred fire, the source of the passions, is extinct--in fact it is one
of the most fatal symptoms. There is also the infatuation of schoolboys
just admitted to society. At the two poles of life, with too much or
too little sensibility, there is little chance of simple people getting
the right effect from things, or feeling the genuine sensation which
they ought to give. These beings, either too ardent or excessive in
their ardour, amorous on credit, if one may use the expression, throw
themselves at objects instead of awaiting them.

From afar off and without looking they enfold things in that imaginary
charm, of which they find a perennial source within themselves, long
before sensation, which is the consequence of the object's nature, has
had time to reach them. Then, on coming to close quarters, they see
these things not such as they are, but as they have made them; they
think they are enjoying such and such an object, while, under cover of
that object, they are enjoying themselves. But one fine day a man gets
tired of keeping the whole thing going; he discovers that his idol is
_not playing the game_; infatuation collapses and the resulting shock
to his self-esteem makes him unfair to that which he appreciated too
highly.

[Pg 67]
                             CHAPTER XXIII

                   THE THUNDERBOLT FROM THE BLUE(11)

So ridiculous an expression ought to be changed, yet the thing exists.
I have seen the amiable and noble Wilhelmina, the despair of the
beaux of Berlin, making light of love and laughing at its folly. In
the brilliance of youth, wit, beauty and all kinds of good luck--a
boundless fortune, giving her the opportunity of developing all her
qualities, seemed to conspire with nature to give the world an example,
rarely seen, of perfect happiness bestowed upon an object perfectly
worthy. She was twenty-three years old and, already some time at Court,
had won the homage of the bluest blood. Her virtue, unpretentious but
invulnerable, was quoted as a pattern. Henceforth the most charming
men, despairing of their powers of fascination, aspired only to make
her their friend. One evening she goes to a ball at Prince Ferdinand's:
she dances for ten minutes with a young Captain.

"From that moment," she writes subsequently to a friend,[1] "he was
master of my heart and of me, and this to a degree that would have
filled me with terror, if the happiness of seeing Herman had left me
time to think of the rest of existence. My only thought was to observe
whether he gave me a little notice.

"To-day the only consolation that I might find for my fault is to nurse
the illusion within me, that it is through a superior power that I am
lost to reason and to myself. I have no word to describe, in a way that
comes at all near the reality, the degree of disorder and turmoil

[Pg 68]
to which the mere sight of him could bring my whole being. I blush to
think of the rapidity and the violence with which I was drawn towards
him. If his first word, when at last he spoke to me, had been 'Do you
adore me?'--truly I should not have had the power to have answered
anything but 'yes.' I was far from thinking that the effect of a
feeling could be at once so sudden and so unforeseen. In fact, for an
instant, I believed that I had been poisoned.

"Unhappily you and the world, my dear friend, know how well I have
loved Herman. Well, after quarter of an hour he was so dear to me that
he cannot have become dearer since. I saw then all his faults and I
forgave them all, provided only he would love me.

"Soon after I had danced with him, the king left: Herman, who belonged
to the suite, had to follow him. With him, everything in nature
disappeared. It is no good to try to depict the excess of weariness
with which I felt weighed down, as soon as he was out of my sight. It
was equal only to the keenness of my desire to be alone with myself.

"At last I got away. No sooner the door of my room shut and bolted than
I wanted to resist my passion. I thought I should succeed. Ah, dear
friend, believe me I paid dear that evening and the following days for
the pleasure of being able to credit myself with some virtue."

The preceding lines are the exact story of an event which was the topic
of the day; for after a month or two poor Wilhelmina was unfortunate
enough for people to take notice of her feelings. Such was the origin
of that long series of troubles by which she perished so young and so
tragically--poisoned by herself or her lover. All that we could see in
this young Captain was that he was an excellent dancer; he had plenty
of gaiety and still more assurance, a general air of good nature and
spent his time with prostitutes; for the rest, scarcely a nobleman,
quite poor and not seen at Court.

[Pg 69]
In these cases it is not enough to have no misgivings--one must be sick
of misgivings--have, so to speak, the impatience of courage to face
life's chances.

The soul of a woman, grown tired, without noticing it, of living
without loving, convinced in spite of herself by the example of other
women--all the fears of life surmounted and the sorry happiness of
pride found wanting--ends in creating unconsciously a model, an ideal.
One day she meets this model: crystallisation recognises its object by
the commotion it inspires and consecrates for ever to the master of its
fortunes the fruit of all its previous dreams.[2]

Women, whose hearts are open to this misfortune, have too much grandeur
of soul to love otherwise than with passion. They would be saved if
they could stoop to gallantry.

As "thunderbolts" come from a secret lassitude in what the catechism
calls Virtue, and from boredom brought on by the uniformity of
perfection, I should be inclined to think that it would generally be
the privilege of what is known in the world as "a bad lot" to bring
them down. I doubt very much whether rigidity _à la_ Cato has ever been
the occasion of a "thunderbolt."

What makes them so rare is that if the heart, thus disposed to love
beforehand, has the slightest inkling of its situation, there is no
thunderbolt.

The soul of a woman, whom troubles have made mistrustful, is not
susceptible of this revolution.

Nothing facilitates "a thunderbolt" like praise, given in advance and
by women, to the person who is to occasion it.

False "thunderbolts" form one of the most comic sources of love
stories. A weary woman, but one without much feeling, thinks for a
whole evening that she is in love for life. She is proud of having
found at last one of those great commotions of the soul, which used to

[Pg 70]
allure her imagination. The next day she no longer knows where to hide
her face and, still more, how to avoid the wretched object she was
adoring the night before.

Clever people know how to spot, that is to say, make capital out of
these "thunderbolts."

Physical love also has its "thunderbolts." Yesterday in her carriage
with the prettiest and most easy-going woman in Berlin, we saw her
suddenly blush. She became deeply absorbed and preoccupied. Handsome
Lieutenant Findorff had just passed. In the evening at the play,
according to her own confession to me, she was out of her mind, she
was beside herself, she could think of nothing but Findorff, to whom
she had never spoken. If she had dared, she told me, she would have
sent for him--that pretty face bore all the signs of the most violent
passion. The next day it was still going on. After three days, Findorff
having played the blockhead, she thought no more about it. A month
later she loathed him.

[1] Translated _ad litteram_ from the Memoirs of Bottmer.

[2] Several phrases taken from Crébillon.

[Pg 71]
                             CHAPTER XXIV

                       VOYAGE IN AN UNKNOWN LAND

I advise the majority of people born in the North to skip the present
chapter. It is an obscure dissertation upon certain phenomena
relative to the orange-tree, a plant which does not grow or reach its
full height except in Italy and Spain. In order to be intelligible
elsewhere, I should have had to cut down the facts.

I should have had no hesitation about this, if for a single moment
I had intended to write a book to be generally appreciated. But
Heaven having refused me the writer's gift, I have thought solely of
describing with all the ill-grace of science, but also with all its
exactitude, certain facts, of which I became involuntarily the witness
through a prolonged sojourn in the land of the orange-tree. Frederick
the Great, or some such other distinguished man from the North, who
never had the opportunity of seeing the orange-tree growing in the
open, would doubtless have denied the facts which follow--and denied in
good faith. I have an infinite respect for such good faith and can see
its _wherefore_.

As this sincere declaration may seem presumption, I append the
following reflexion:--

We write haphazard, each one of us what we think true, and each gives
the lie to his neighbour. I see in our books so many tickets in a
lottery and in reality they have no more value. Posterity, forgetting
some and reprinting others, declares the lucky numbers. And in so far,
each one of us having written as best he can, what he thinks true, has
no right to laugh at his neighbour--except

[Pg 72]
where the satire is amusing. In that case he is always right,
especially if he writes like M. Courrier to Del Furia(12).

After this preamble, I am going bravely to enter into the examination
of facts which, I am convinced, have rarely been observed at Paris. But
after all at Paris, superior as of course it is to all other towns,
orange-trees are not seen growing out in the open, as at Sorrento,
and it is there that Lisio Visconti observed and noted the following
facts--at Sorrento, the country of Tasso, on the Bay of Naples in a
position half-way down to the sea, still more picturesque than that of
Naples itself, but where no one reads the _Miroir_.

When we are to see in the evening the woman we love, the suspense, the
expectation of so great a happiness makes every moment, which separates
us from it, unbearable.

A devouring fever makes us take up and lay aside twenty different
occupations. We look every moment at our watch--overjoyed when we see
that we have managed to pass ten minutes without looking at the time.
The hour so longed-for strikes at last, and when we are at her door
ready to knock--we would be glad not to find her in. It is only on
reflexion that we would be sorry for it. In a word, the suspense before
seeing her produces an unpleasant effect.

There you have one of the things which make good folk say that love
drives men silly.

The reason is that the imagination, violently withdrawn from dreams of
delight in which every step forward brings happiness, is brought back
face to face with severe reality.

The gentle soul knows well that in the combat which is to begin the
moment he sees her, the least inadvertency, the least lack of attention
or of courage will be paid for by a defeat, poisoning, for a long time
to come, the dreams of fancy and of passion, and humiliating to a man's
pride, if he try to find consolation outside the

[Pg 73]
sphere of passion. He says to himself: "I hadn't the wit, I hadn't
the pluck"; but the only way to have pluck before the loved one is by
loving her a little less.

It is a fragment of attention, torn by force with so much trouble
from the dreams of crystallisation, which allows the crowd of things
to escape us during our first words with the woman we love--things
which have no sense or which have a sense contrary to what we mean--or
else, what is still more heartrending, we exaggerate our feelings and
they become ridiculous in our own eyes. We feel vaguely that we are
not paying enough attention to our words and mechanically set about
polishing and loading our oratory. And, also, it is impossible to hold
one's tongue--silence would be embarrassing and make it still less
possible to give one's thoughts to her. So we say in a feeling way a
host of things that we do not feel, and would be quite embarrassed to
repeat, obstinately keeping our distance from the woman before us, in
order more really to be with her. In the early hours of my acquaintance
with love, this oddity which I felt within me, made me believe that I
did not love.

I understand cowardice and how recruits, to be delivered of their fear,
throw themselves recklessly into the midst of the fire. The number of
silly things I have said in the last two years, in order not to hold my
tongue, makes me mad when I think of them.

And that is what should easily mark in a woman's eyes the difference
between passion-love and gallantry, between the gentle soul and the
prosaic.[1]

In these decisive moments the one gains as much as the other loses: the
prosaic soul gets just the degree of warmth which he ordinarily wants,
while excess of feeling drives mad the poor gentle heart, who, to crown
his troubles, really means to hide his madness. Completely taken up
with keeping his own transports in check, he is miles away from the
self-possession necessary in order to seize opportunities,

[Pg 74]
and leaves in a muddle after a visit, in which the prosaic soul would
have made a great step forward. Directly it is a question of advancing
his too violent passion, a gentle being with pride cannot be eloquent
under the eye of the woman whom he loves: the pain of ill-success is
too much for him. The vulgar being, on the contrary, calculates nicely
the chances of success: he is stopped by no foretastes of the suffering
of defeat, and, proud of that which makes him vulgar, laughs at the
gentle soul, who, with all the cleverness he may have, is never quite
enough at ease to say the simplest things and those most certain to
succeed. The gentle soul, far from being able to grasp anything by
force, must resign himself to obtaining nothing except through the
_charity_ of her whom he loves. If the woman one loves really has
feelings, one always has reason to regret having wished to put pressure
on oneself in order to make love to her. One looks shame-faced, looks
chilly, would look deceitful, did not passion betray itself by other
and surer signs. To express what we feel so keenly, and in such detail,
at every moment of the day, is a task we take upon our shoulders
because we have read novels; for if we were natural, we would never
undertake anything so irksome. Instead of wanting to speak of what we
felt a quarter of an hour ago, and of trying to make of it a general
and interesting topic, we would express simply the passing fragment of
our feelings at the moment. But no! we put the most violent pressure
upon ourselves for a worthless success, and, as there is no evidence of
actual sensation to back our words, and as our memory cannot be working
freely, we approve at the time of things to say--and say them--comical
to a degree that is more than humiliating.

When at last, after an hour's trouble, this extremely painful effort
has resulted in getting away from the enchanted gardens of the
imagination, in order to enjoy quite simply the presence of what you
love, it often happens--that you've got to take your leave.

[Pg 75]
All this looks like extravagance, but I have seen better still. A
woman, whom one of my friends loved to idolatry, pretending to take
offence at some or other want of delicacy, which I was never allowed
to learn, condemned him all of a sudden to see her only twice a month.
These visits, so rare and so intensely desired, meant an attack of
madness, and it wanted all Salviati's strength of character to keep it
from being seen by outward signs.

From the very first, the idea of the visit's end is too insistent for
one to be able to take pleasure in the visit. One speaks a great deal,
deaf to one's own thoughts, saying often the contrary of what one
thinks. One embarks upon discourses which have got suddenly to be cut
short, because of their absurdity--if one manage to rouse oneself and
listen to one's thoughts within. The effort we make is so violent that
we seem chilly. Love hides itself in its excess.

Away from her, the imagination was lulled by the most charming
dialogues: there were transports the most tender and the most touching.
And thus for ten days or so you think you have the courage to speak;
but two days before what should have been our day of happiness, the
fever begins, and, as the terrible instant draws near, its force
redoubles.

Just as you come into her _salon_, in order not to do or say some
incredible piece of nonsense, you clutch in despair at the resolution
of keeping your mouth shut and your eyes on her--in order at least to
be able to remember her face. Scarcely before her, something like a
kind of drunkenness comes over your eyes; you feel driven like a maniac
to do strange actions; it is as if you had two souls--one to act and
the other to blame your actions. You feel, in a confused way, that to
turn your strained attention to folly would temporarily refresh the
blood, and make you lose from sight the end of the visit and the misery
of parting for a fortnight.

[Pg 76]
If some bore be there, who tells a pointless story, the poor lover, in
his inexplicable madness, as if he were nervous of losing moments so
rare, becomes all attention. That hour, of which he drew himself so
sweet a picture, passes like a flash of lightning and yet he feels,
with unspeakable bitterness, all the little circumstances which show
how much a stranger he has become to her whom he loves. There he is in
the midst of indifferent visitors and sees himself the only one who
does not know her life of these past days, in all its details. At last
he goes: and as he coldly says good-bye, he has the agonising feeling
of two whole weeks before another meeting. Without a doubt he would
suffer less never to see the object of his love again. It is in the
style, only far blacker, of the Duc de Policastro, who every six months
travelled a hundred leagues to see for a quarter of an hour at Lecce a
beloved mistress guarded by a jealous husband.

Here you can see clearly Will without influence upon Love.

Out of all patience with one's mistress and oneself, how furious the
desire to bury oneself in indifference! The only good of such visits is
to replenish the treasure of crystallisation.

Life for Salviati was divided into periods of two weeks, which took
their colour from the last evening he had been allowed to see Madame
----. For example, he was in the seventh heaven of delight the 21st of
May, and the 2nd of June he kept away from home, for fear of yielding
to the temptation of blowing out his brains.

I saw that evening how badly novelists have drawn the moment of
suicide. Salviati simply said to me: "I'm thirsty, I must take this
glass of water." I did not oppose his resolution, but said good-bye:
then he broke down.

Seeing the obscurity which envelops the discourse of lovers, it would
not be prudent to push too far conclusions drawn from an isolated
detail of their conversation.

[Pg 77]
They give a fair glimpse of their feelings only in sudden
expressions--then it is the cry of the heart. Otherwise it is from the
complexion of the bulk of what is said that inductions are to be drawn.
And we must remember that quite often a man, who is very moved, has no
time to notice the emotion of the person who is the cause of his own.

[1] The word was one of Léonore's.

[Pg 78]
                              CHAPTER XXV

                           THE INTRODUCTION

To see the subtlety and sureness of judgment with which women grasp
certain details, I am lost in admiration: but a moment later, I see
them praise a blockhead to the skies, let themselves be moved to tears
by a piece of insipidity, or weigh gravely a fatuous affectation, as if
it were a telling characteristic. I cannot conceive such simplicity.
There must be some general law in all this, unknown to me.

Attentive to one merit in a man and absorbed by one detail, women feel
it deeply and have no eyes for the rest. All the nervous fluid is used
up in the enjoyment of this quality: there is none left to see the
others.

I have seen the most remarkable men introduced to very clever women;
it was always a particle of bias which decided the effect of the first
inspection.

If I may be allowed a familiar detail, I shall tell the story how
charming Colonel L. B---- was to be introduced to Madame de Struve of
Koenigsberg--she a most distinguished woman. "_Farà colpo?_"[1]--we
asked each other; and a wager was made as a result. I go up to
Madame de Struve, and tell her the Colonel wears his ties two days
running--the second he turns them--she could notice on his tie the
creases downwards. Nothing more palpably untrue!

As I finish, the dear fellow is announced. The silliest little Parisian
would have made more effect. Observe that Madame de Struve was one who
could love. She is

[Pg 79]
also a respectable woman and there could have been no question of
gallantry between them.

Never were two characters more made for each other. People blamed
Madame de Struve for being romantic, and there was nothing could touch
L. B. but virtue carried to the point of the romantic. Thanks to her,
he had a bullet put through him quite young.

It has been given to women admirably to feel the fine shades of
affection, the most imperceptible variations of the human heart, the
lightest movements of susceptibility.

In this regard they have an organ which in us is missing: watch them
nurse the wounded.

But, perhaps, they are equally unable to see what mind consists in--as
a moral composition. I have seen the most distinguished women charmed
with a clever man, who was not myself, and, at the same time and almost
with the same word, admire the biggest fools. I felt caught like a
connoisseur, who sees the loveliest diamonds taken for paste, and paste
preferred for being more massive.

And so I concluded that with women you have to risk everything. Where
General Lassale came to grief, a captain with moustaches and heavy
oaths succeeded.[2] There is surely a whole side in men's merit which
escapes them. For myself, I always come back to physical laws. The
nervous fluid spends itself in men through the brain and in women
through the heart: that is why they are more sensitive. Some great and
obligatory work, within the profession we have followed all our life,
is our consolation, but for them nothing can console but distraction.

Appiani, who only believes in virtue as a last resort, and with whom
this evening I went routing out ideas (exposing meanwhile those of this
chapter) answered:--

"The force of soul, which Eponina used with heroic

[Pg 80]
devotion, to keep alive her husband in a cavern underground and to keep
him from sinking into despair, would have helped her to hide from him a
lover, if they had lived at Rome in peace. Strong souls must have their
nourishment."

[1] [Will he impress her?--Tr.]

[2] Posen, 1807.

[Pg 81]
                             CHAPTER XXVI

                              OF MODESTY

In Madagascar, a woman exposes without a thought what is here most
carefully hidden, but would die of shame sooner than show her arm.
Clearly three-quarters of modesty come from example. It is perhaps the
one law, daughter of civilisation, which produces only happiness.

People have noticed that birds of prey hide themselves to drink; the
reason being that, obliged to plunge their head in the water, they are
at that moment defenceless. After a consideration of what happens at
Tahiti,[1] I see no other natural basis for modesty.

Love is the miracle of civilisation. There is nothing but a physical
love of the coarsest kind among savage or too barbarian peoples.

And modesty gives love the help of imagination--that is, gives it life.

Modesty is taught little girls very early by their mothers with such
jealous care, that it almost looks like fellow-feeling; in this way
women take measures in good time for the happiness of the lover to come.

There can be nothing worse for a timid, sensitive woman than the
torture of having, in the presence of a man, allowed herself something
for which she thinks she ought to blush; I am convinced that a woman
with a

[Pg 82]
little pride would sooner face a thousand deaths. A slight liberty,
which touches a soft corner in the lover's heart, gives her a moment
of lively pleasure.[2] If he seem to blame it, or simply not to enjoy
it to the utmost, it must leave in the soul an agonising doubt. And
so a woman above the common sort has everything to gain by being very
reserved in her manner. The game is not fair: against the chance of
a little pleasure or the advantage of seeming a little more lovable,
a woman runs the risk of a burning remorse and a sense of shame,
which must make even the lover less dear. An evening gaily passed, in
care-devil thoughtless fashion, is dearly paid for at the price. If a
woman fears she has made this kind of mistake before her lover, he must
become for days together hateful in her sight. Can one wonder at the
force of a habit, when the lightest infractions of it are punished by
such cruel shame?

As for the utility of modesty--she is the mother of love: impossible,
therefore, to doubt her claims. And for the mechanism of the
sentiment--it's simple enough. The soul is busy feeling shame instead
of busy desiring. You deny yourself desires and your desires lead to
actions.

Evidently every woman of feeling and pride--and, these two things being
cause and effect, one can hardly go without the other--must fall into
ways of coldness, which the people whom they disconcert call prudery.

The accusation is all the more specious because of the extreme
difficulty of steering a middle course: a woman has only to have little
judgment and a lot of pride, and very soon she will come to believe
that in modesty one cannot go too far. In this way, an Englishwoman
takes it as an insult, if you pronounce before her the name of certain
garments. An Englishwoman must be very careful, in the country, not to
be seen in the evening

[Pg 83]
leaving the drawing-room with her husband; and, what is still more
serious, she thinks it an outrage to modesty, to show that she
is enjoying herself a little in the presence of anyone _but_ her
husband.[3] It is perhaps due to such studied scrupulousness that the
English, a people of judgment, betray signs of such boredom in their
domestic bliss. Theirs the fault--why so much pride?[4]

To make up for this--and to pass straight from Plymouth to Cadiz and
Seville--I found in Spain that the warmth of climate and passions
caused people to overlook a little the necessary measure of restraint.
The very tender caresses, which I noticed could be given in public, far
from seeming touching, inspired me with feelings quite the reverse:
nothing is more distressing.

We must expect to find incalculable the force of habits, which
insinuate themselves into women under the pretext of modesty. A common
woman, by carrying modesty to extremes, feels she is getting on a level
with a woman of distinction.

Such is the empire of modesty, that a woman of feeling betrays her
sentiments for her lover sooner by deed than by word.

The prettiest, richest and most easy-going woman of Bologna has just
told me, how yesterday evening a fool of a Frenchman, who is here
giving people a strange idea of his nation, thought good to hide under
her bed. Apparently he did not want to waste the long string of absurd
declarations, with which he has been pestering her for a month. But the
great man should have had more presence of mind. He waited all right
till Madame M---- sent away her maid and had got to bed, but he had not
the patience to give the household time to go to sleep. She seized hold
of the bell and had him thrown

[Pg 84]
out ignominiously, in the midst of the jeers and cuffs of five or six
lackeys. "And if he had waited two hours?" I asked her. "I should have
been very badly off. 'Who is to doubt,' he would have said, 'that I am
here by your orders?'"[5]

After leaving this pretty woman's house, I went to see a woman more
worthy of being loved than any I know. Her extremely delicate nature is
something greater, if possible, than her touching beauty. I found her
alone, told the story of Madame M---- and we discussed it. "Listen,"
was what she said; "if the man, who will go as far as that, was lovable
in the eyes of that woman beforehand, he'll have her pardon, and, all
in good time, her love." I own I was dumbfounded by this unexpected
light thrown on the recesses of the human heart. After a short silence
I answered her--"But will a man, who loves, dare go to such violent
extremities?"

There would be far less vagueness in this chapter had a woman written
it. Everything relating to women's haughtiness or pride, to their
habits of modesty and its excesses, to certain delicacies, for the most
part dependent wholly on associations of feelings,[6] which cannot
exist for men, and often delicacies not founded on Nature--all these
things, I say, can only find their way here so far as it is permissible
to write from hearsay.

A woman once said to me, in a moment of philosophical frankness,
something which amounts to this:--

"If ever I sacrificed my liberty, the man whom I should happen to
favour would appreciate still more my

[Pg 85]
affection, by seeing how sparing I had always been of favours--even
of the slightest." It is out of preference for this lover, whom
perhaps she will never meet, that a lovable woman will offer a cold
reception to the man who is speaking to her at the moment. That is the
first exaggeration of modesty; that one can respect. The second comes
from women's pride. The third source of exaggeration is the pride of
husbands.

To my idea, this possibility of love presents itself often to the fancy
of even the most virtuous woman--and why not? Not to love, when given
by Heaven a soul made for love, is to deprive yourself and others of a
great blessing. It is like an orange-tree, which would not flower for
fear of committing a sin. And beyond doubt a soul made for love can
partake fervently of no other bliss. In the would-be pleasures of the
world it finds, already at the second trial, an intolerable emptiness.
Often it fancies that it loves Art and Nature in its grander aspects,
but all they do for it is to hold out hopes of love and magnify it, if
that is possible; until, very soon, it finds out that they speak of a
happiness which it is resolved to forego.

The only thing I see to blame in modesty is that it leads to
untruthfulness, and that is the only point of vantage, which light
women have over women of feeling. A light woman says to you: "As soon,
my friend, as you attract me, I'll tell you and I'll be more delighted
than you; because I have a great respect for you."

The lively satisfaction of Constance's cry after her lover's victory!
"How happy I am, not to have given myself to anyone, all these eight
years that I've been on bad terms with my husband!"

However comical I find the line of thought, this joy seems to me full
of freshness.

Here I absolutely must talk about the sort of regrets, felt by a
certain lady of Seville who had been deserted by her lover. I ought to
remind the reader that, in love.

[Pg 86]
everything is a sign, and, above all, crave the benefit of a little
indulgence for my style.[7]

As a man, I think my eye can distinguish nine points in modesty.

1. Much is staked against little; hence extreme reserve; hence often
affectation. For example, one doesn't laugh at what amuses one the
most. Hence it needs a great deal of judgment to have just the right
amount of modesty.[8] That is why many women have not enough in
intimate gatherings, or, to put it more exactly, do not insist on the
stories told them being sufficiently disguised, and only drop their
veils according to the degree of their intoxication or recklessness.[9]

Could it be an effect of modesty and of the deadly dullness it must
impose on many women, that the majority of them respect nothing in a
man so much as impudence? Or do they take impudence for character?

2. Second law: "My lover will think the more of me for it."

3. Force of habit has its way, even at the moments of greatest passion.

4. To the lover, modesty offers very flattering pleasures; it makes him
feel what laws are broken for his sake.

5. And to women it offers more intoxicating pleasures, which, causing
the fall of a strongly established habit, throw the soul into greater
confusion. The Comte de Valmont finds himself in a pretty woman's
bedroom at

[Pg 87]
midnight. The thing happens every week to him; to her perhaps every
other year. Thus continence and modesty must have pleasures infinitely
more lively in store for women.[10]

6. The drawback of modesty is that it is always leading to falsehood.

7. Excess of modesty, and its severity, discourages gentle and timid
hearts from loving[11]--just those made for giving and feeling the
sweets of love.

8. In sensitive women, who have not had several lovers, modesty is a
bar to ease of manner, and for this reason they are rather apt to let
themselves be led by those friends, who need reproach themselves with
no such failing.[12] They go into each particular case, instead of
falling back blindly on habit. Delicacy and modesty give their actions
a touch of restraint; by being natural they make

[Pg 88]
themselves appear unnatural; but this awkwardness is akin to heavenly
grace.

If familiarity in them sometimes resembles tenderness, it is because
these angelic souls are coquettes without knowing it. They are
disinclined to interrupt their dreams, and, to save themselves the
trouble of speaking and finding something both pleasant and polite to
say to a friend (which would end in being nothing but polite), they
finish by leaning tenderly on his arm.[13]

9. Women only dare be frank by halves; which is the reason why they
very rarely reach the highest, when they become authors, but which also
gives a grace to their shortest note. For them to be frank means going
out without a _fichu_. For a man nothing more frequent than to write
absolutely at the dictate of his imagination, without knowing where he
is going.

                               _Résumé_

The usual fault is to treat woman as a kind of man, but more generous,
more changeable and with whom, above all, no rivalry is possible. It is
only too easy to forget that there are two new and peculiar laws, which
tyrannise over these unstable beings, in conflict with all the ordinary
impulses of human nature--I mean:--

Feminine pride and modesty, and those often inscrutable habits born of
modesty.

[1] See the Travels of Bougainville, Cook, etc. In some animals, the
female seems to retract at the moment she gives herself. We must expect
from comparative anatomy some of the most important revelations about
ourselves.

[2] Shows one's love in a new way.

[3] See the admirable picture of these tedious manners at the end of
_Corinne_; and Madame de Staël has made a flattering portrait.

[4] The Bible and Aristocracy take a cruel revenge upon people who
believe that duty is everything.

[5] I am advised to suppress this detail--"You take me for a very
doubtful woman, to dare tell such stories in my presence."

[6] Modesty is one of the sources of taste in dress: by such and such
an arrangement, a woman engages herself in a greater or less degree.
This is what makes dress lose its point in old age.

A provincial, who puts up to follow the fashion in Paris, engages
herself in an awkward way, which makes people laugh. A woman coming
to Paris from the provinces ought to begin by dressing as if she were
thirty.

[7] P. 84, note 5.

[8] See the tone of society at Geneva, above all in the "best"
families--use of a Court to correct the tendency towards prudery by
laughing at it--Duclos telling stories to Madame de Rochefort--"Really,
you take us for too virtuous." Nothing in the world is so nauseous as
modesty not sincere.

[9] "Ah, my dear Fronsac, there are twenty bottles of champagne between
the story, that you're beginning to tell us, and our talk at this time
of day."

[10] It is the story of the melancholy temperament and the sanguine.
Consider a virtuous woman (even the mercenary virtue of certain of the
faithful--virtue to be had for a hundredfold reward in Paradise) and
a blasé debauchee of forty. Although the Valmont(13) of the _Liaisons
Dangereuses_ is not as far gone as that, the Présidente de Tourvel(13)
is happier than he all the way through the book: and if the author,
with all his wit, had had still more, that would have been the moral of
his ingenious novel.

[11] Melancholy temperament, which may be called the temperament of
love. I have seen women, the most distinguished and the most made for
love, give the preference, for want of sense, to the prosaic, sanguine
temperament. (Story of Alfred, Grande Chartreuse, 1810.)

I know no thought which incites me more to keep what is called bad
company.

(Here poor Visconti loses himself in the clouds.)

Fundamentally all women are the same so far as concerns the movements
of the heart and passion: the forms the passions take are different.
Consider the difference made by greater fortune, a more cultivated
mind, the habit of higher thoughts, and, above all, (and more's the
pity) a more irritable pride.

Such and such a word irritates a princess, but would not in the very
least shock an Alpine shepherdess. Only, once their anger is up, the
passion works in princess and shepherdess the same). (The Editor's only
note.)

[12] M.'s remark.

[13] Vol. _Guarna_.

[Pg 89]
                             CHAPTER XXVII

                              THE GLANCE

This is the great weapon of virtuous coquetry. With a glance, one may
say everything, and yet one can always deny a glance; for it cannot be
repeated textually.

This reminds me of Count G----, the Mirabeau of Rome. The delightful
little government of that land has taught him an original way of
telling stories by a broken string of words, which say everything--and
nothing. He makes his whole meaning clear, but repeat who will his
sayings word for word, it is impossible to compromise him. Cardinal
Lante told him he had stolen this talent from women--yes, and
respectable women, I add. This roguery is a cruel, but just, reprisal
on man's tyranny.

[Pg 90]
                            CHAPTER XXVIII

                           OF FEMININE PRIDE

All their lives women hear mention made by men of things claiming
importance--large profits, success in war, people killed in duels,
fiendish or admirable revenges, and so on. Those of them, whose heart
is proud, feel that, being unable to reach these things, they are not
in a position to display any pride remarkable for the importance of
what it rests on. They feel a heart beat in their breast, superior
by the force and pride of its movements to all which surrounds them,
and yet they see the meanest of men esteem himself above them. They
find out, that all their pride can only be for little things, or at
least for things, which are without importance except for sentiment,
and of which a third party cannot judge. Maddened by this desolating
contrast between the meanness of their fortune and the conscious worth
of their soul, they set about making their pride worthy of respect by
the intensity of its fits or by the relentless tenacity with which they
hold by its dictates. Before intimate intercourse women of this kind
imagine, when they see their lover, that he has laid siege to them.
Their imagination is absorbed in irritation at his endeavours, which,
after all, cannot do otherwise than witness to his love--seeing that
he does love. Instead of enjoying the feelings of the man of their
preference, their vanity is up in arms against him; and it comes to
this, that, with a soul of the tenderest, so long as its sensibility is
not centred on a special object, they have only to love, in

[Pg 91]
order, like a common flirt, to be reduced to the barest vanity.

A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times
for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of
pride--for the opening or shutting of a door. Therein lies their point
of honour. Well! Napoleon came to grief rather than yield a village.

I have seen a quarrel of this kind last longer than a year. It was a
woman of the greatest distinction who sacrificed all her happiness,
sooner than give her lover the chance of entertaining the slightest
possible doubt of the magnanimity of her pride. The reconciliation
was the work of chance, and, on my friend's side, due to a moment of
weakness, which, on meeting her lover, she was unable to overcome.
She imagined him forty miles away, and found him in a place, where
certainly he did not expect to see her. She could not hide the first
transports of delight; her lover was more overcome than she; they
almost fell at each other's feet and never have I seen tears flow so
abundantly--it was the unlooked-for appearance of happiness. Tears are
the supreme smile.

The Duke of Argyll gave a fine example of presence of mind, in not
drawing Feminine Pride into a combat, in the interview he had at
Richmond with Queen Caroline.[1] The more nobility in a woman's
character, the more terrible are these storms--

        As the blackest sky
    Foretells the heaviest tempest.

                                    (_Don Juan_.)

Can it be that the more fervently, in the normal course of life, a
woman delights in the rare qualities of her lover, the more she tries,
in those cruel moments, when sympathy seems turned to the reverse, to
wreak her vengeance on what usually she sees in him superior

[Pg 92]
to other people? She is afraid of being confounded with them.

It is a precious long time since I read that boring _Clarissa_; but I
think it is through feminine pride that she lets herself die, and does
not accept the hand of Lovelace.

Lovelace's fault was great; but as she did love him a little, she could
have found pardon in her heart for a crime, of which the cause was love.

Monime, on the contrary, seems to me a touching model of feminine
delicacy. What cheek does not blush with pleasure to hear from the lips
of an actress worthy of the part:--

    That fatal love which I had crushed and conquered,

    Your wiles detected, and I cannot now
    Disown what I confess'd; you cannot raze
    Its memory; the shame of that avowal,
    To which you forced me, will abide for ever
    Present before my mind, and I should think
    That you were always of my faith uncertain.
    The grave itself to me were less abhorrent
    Than marriage bed shared with a spouse, who took
    Cruel advantage of my simple trust,
    And, to destroy my peace for ever, fann'd
    A flame that fired my cheek for other love
    Than his.[2]

I can picture to myself future generations saying: "So that's what
Monarchy[3] was good for--to produce that sort of character and their
portrayal by great artists. "

And yet I find an admirable example of this delicacy even in the
republics of the Middle Ages; which seems to destroy my system of the
influence of governments on the passions, but which I shall cite in
good faith.

[Pg 93]
The reference is to those very touching verses of Dante:

    Deh! quando tu sarai tomato al mondo

    Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;
    Siena mi fè; disfecemi Maremma;
    Salsi colui, che inanellata pria
    Disposando, m'avea con la sua gemma.

                     _Purgatorio_, Cant. V.[4]

The woman, who speaks with so much restraint, had suffered in secret
the fate of Desdemona, and, by a word, could make known her husband's
crime to the friends, whom she had left on earth.

Nello della Pietra won the hand of Madonna Pia(14), sole heiress of the
Tolomei, the richest and noblest family of Sienna. Her beauty, which
was the admiration of Tuscany, sowed in her husband's heart the seed
of jealousy, which, envenomed by false reports and suspicions ever and
anon rekindled, led him to a heinous project. It is difficult, at this
hour, to decide whether his wife was altogether innocent, but Dante
represents her as such.

Her husband carried her off into the fens of Volterra, famous then, as
now, for the effects of the _aria cattiva_. Never would he tell his
unhappy wife the reason of her exile in so dangerous a place. His pride
did not deign to utter complaint or accusation. He lived alone with her
in a deserted tower, the ruins of which by the edge of the sea I have
been myself to visit. There he never broke his scornful silence, never
answered his young wife's questions, never listened to her prayers.
Coldly he waited at her side for the pestilential air to have its
effect. The exhalations of these morasses were not long in withering
those features--the loveliest, it is said,

[Pg 94]
which, in that century, the world had seen. In a few months she died.
Some chroniclers of those remote times report that Nello used the
dagger to hasten her end. She died in the fens in some horrible way;
but the kind of death was a mystery even to her contemporaries. Nello
della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which
he never broke.

Nothing nobler and more delicate than the way in which young la Pia
addresses Dante. She wishes to be recalled to the memory of the
friends, whom she had left on earth so young; and yet, telling who she
is and giving the name of her husband, she will not allow herself the
slightest complaint against a piece of cruelty unheard of, but for the
future irreparable; she only points out that he knows the story of her
death.

This constancy in pride's revenge is not met, I think, except in the
countries of the South.

In Piedmont I happened to be the involuntary witness of something very
nearly parallel; though at the time I did not know the details. I was
sent with twenty-five dragoons into the woods along the Sesia, to
intercept contraband. Arriving in the evening at this wild and desolate
spot, I caught sight between the trees of the ruins of an old castle.
I went up to it and to my great surprise--it was inhabited. I found
within a nobleman of the country, of sinister appearance, a man six
foot high and forty years old. He gave me two rooms with a bad grace.
I passed my time playing music with my quartermaster; after some days,
we discovered that our friend kept a woman in the background, whom
we used to call Camille, laughingly; but we were far from suspecting
the fearful truth. Six weeks later she was dead. I had the morbid
curiosity to see her in the coffin, paying a monk, who was watching, to
introduce me into the chapel towards midnight, under pretext of going
to sprinkle holy water. There I found one of those superb faces, which
are beautiful even in the arms of death;

[Pg 95]
she had a large aquiline nose--the nobility and delicacy of its outline
I shall never forget. Then I left that deadly spot. Five years later,
a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation
as King of Italy(15), I had the whole story told me. I learnt that the
jealous husband, Count ----, had found one morning fastened to his
wife's bed an English watch, belonging to a young man of the small town
in which they lived. That very day he carried her off to the ruined
castle in the midst of the woods of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra,
he never uttered a single word. If she made him any request, he coldly
and silently presented to her the English watch, which he carried
always with him. Almost three years passed, spent thus alone with her.
At last she died of despair, in the flower of life. Her husband tried
to put a knife into the proprietor of the watch, missed him, passed on
to Genoa, took ship and no one has heard of him since. His property has
been divided.

As for these women with feminine pride, if you take their injuries with
a good grace, which the habits of a military life make easy, you annoy
these proud souls; they take you for a coward, and very soon become
outrageous. Such lofty characters yield with pleasure to men whom they
see overbearing with other men. That is, I fancy, the only way--you
must often pick a quarrel with your neighbour in order to avoid one
with your mistress.

One day Miss Cornel, the celebrated London actress, was surprised by
the unexpected appearance of the rich colonel, whom she found useful.
She happened to be with a little lover, whom she just liked--and
nothing more. "Mr. So-and-so," says she in great confusion to the
colonel, "has come to see the pony I want to sell." "I am here for
something very different," put in proudly the little lover who was
beginning to bore her, but whom, from the moment of that answer, she
started

[Pg 96]
to love again madly.[5] Women of that kind sympathise with their
lover's haughtiness, instead of exercising at his expense their own
disposition to pride.

The character of the Duc de Lauzun (that of 1660[6]), if they can
forgive the first day its want of grace, is very fascinating for
such women, and perhaps for all women of distinction. Grandeur on a
higher plane escapes them; they take for coldness the calm gaze which
nothing escapes, but which a detail never disturbs. Have I not heard
women at the Court of Saint-Cloud maintain that Napoleon had a dry and
prosaic character?[7] A great man is like an eagle: the higher he rises
the less he is visible, and he is punished for his greatness by the
solitude of his soul.

From feminine pride arises what women call want of refinement. I fancy,
it is not at all unlike what kings call _lèse majesté_, a crime all the
more dangerous, because

[Pg 97]
one slips into it without knowing. The tenderest lover may be accused
of wanting refinement, if he is not very sharp, or, what is sadder, if
he dares give himself up to the greatest charm of love--the delight of
being perfectly natural with the loved one and of not listening to what
he is told.

These are the sort of things, of which a well-born heart could have no
inkling; one must have experience, in order to believe in them; for
we are misled by the habit of dealing justly and frankly with our men
friends.

It is necessary to keep in mind incessantly that we have to do with
beings, who can, however wrongly, think themselves inferior in vigour
of character, or, to put it better, can think that others believe they
are inferior.

Should not a woman's true pride reside in the power of the feeling
she inspires? A maid of honour to the queen and wife of Francis I was
chaffed about the fickleness of her lover, who, it was said, did not
really love her. A little time after, this lover had an illness and
reappeared at Court--dumb. Two years later, people showing surprise one
day that she still loved him, she turned to him, saying: "Speak." And
he spoke.

[1] _The Heart of Midlothian_.

[2] Racine, _Mithridates_, Act IV, Sc. 4. [From the Metrical English
version of R. B. Boswell. (Bohn's Standard Library.--Tr.)]

[3] Monarchy without charter and without chambers.

[4] Ah! when you are returned to the world of the living, give me a
passing thought. I am la Pia. Sienna gave me life, death took me in our
fens. He who, wedding me, gave me his ring, knows my story.

[5] I always come back from Miss Cornel's full of admiration and
profound views on the passions laid bare. Her very imperious way of
giving orders to her servants has nothing of despotism in it: she
merely sees with precision and rapidity what has to be done.

Incensed against me at the beginning of the visit, she thinks no more
about it at the end. She tells me in detail of the economy of her
passion for Mortimer. "I prefer seeing him in company than alone with
me." A woman of the greatest genius could do no better, for she has
the courage to be perfectly natural and is unhampered by any theory.
"I'm happier an actress than the wife of a peer."--A great soul whose
friendship I must keep for my enlightenment.

[6] Loftiness and courage in small matters, but a passionate care for
these small matters.--The vehemence of the choleric temperament.--His
behaviour towards Madame de Monaco (Saint-Simon, V. 383) and adventure
under the bed of Madame de Montespan while the king was there.--Without
the care for small matters, this character would remain invisible to
the eye of women.

[7] When Minna Troil heard a tale of woe or of romance, it was
then her blood rushed to her cheeks and showed plainly how warm it
beat, notwithstanding the generally serious, composed and retiring
disposition which her countenance and demeanour seemed to exhibit.
(_The Pirate_, Chap. III.)

Souls like Minna Troil, in whose judgment ordinary circumstances are
not worth emotion, by ordinary people are thought cold.

[Pg 98]
                             CHAPTER XXIX

                          OF WOMEN'S COURAGE

 I tell thee, proud Templar, that not in thy fiercest battles hast thou
 displayed more of thy vaunted courage than has been shewn by women,
 when called upon to suffer by affection or duty. (_Ivanhoe_.)

I remember meeting the following phrase in a book of history: "All
the men lost their head: that is the moment when women display an
incontestable superiority."

Their courage has a reserve which that of their lover wants; he acts
as a spur to their sense of worth. They find so much pleasure in being
able, in the fire of danger, to dispute the first place for firmness
with the man, who often wounds them by the proudness of his protection
and his strength, that the vehemence of that enjoyment raises them
above any kind of fear, which at the moment is the man's weak point.
A man, too, if the same help were given him at the same moment, would
show himself superior to everything; for fear never resides in the
danger, but in ourselves.

Not that I mean to depreciate women's courage--I have seen them, on
occasions, superior to the bravest men. Only they must have a man to
love. Then they no longer feel except through him; and so the most
obvious and personal danger becomes, as it were, a rose to gather in
his presence.[1]

I have found also in women, who did not love, intrepidity,

[Pg 99]
the coldest, the most surprising and the most exempt from nerves.

It is true, I have always imagined that they are so brave, only because
they do not know the tiresomeness of wounds!

As for moral courage, so far superior to the other, the firmness of a
woman who resists her love is simply the most admirable thing, which
can exist on earth. All other possible marks of courage are as nothing
compared to a thing so strongly opposed to nature and so arduous.
Perhaps they find a source of strength in the habit of sacrifice, which
is bred in them by modesty.

Hard on women it is that the proofs of this courage should always
remain secret and be almost impossible to divulge.

Still harder that it should always be employed against their own
happiness: the Princesse de Clèves would have done better to say
nothing to her husband and give herself to M. de Nemours.

Perhaps women are chiefly supported by their pride in making a fine
defence, and imagine that their lover is staking his vanity on having
them--a petty and miserable idea. A man of passion, who throws himself
with a light heart into so many ridiculous situations, must have a lot
of time to be thinking of vanity! It is like the monks who mean to
catch the devil and find their reward in the pride of hair-shirts and
macerations.

I should think that Madame de Clèves would have repented, had she come
to old age,--to the period at which one judges life and when the joys
of pride appear in all their meanness. She would have wished to have
lived like Madame de la Fayette.[2]

[Pg 100]
I have just re-read a hundred pages of this essay: and a pretty poor
idea I have given of true love, of love which occupies the entire
soul, fills it with fancies, now the happiest, now heart-breaking--but
always sublime--and makes it completely insensible to all the rest
of creation. I am at a loss to express what I see so well; I have
never felt more painfully the want of talent. How bring into relief
the simplicity of action and of character, the high seriousness, the
glance that reflects so truly and so ingenuously the passing shade
of feeling, and above all, to return to it again, that inexpressible
_What care I?_ for all that is not the woman we love? A yes or a no
spoken by a man in love has an _unction_ which is not to be found
elsewhere, and is not found in that very man at other times. This
morning (August 3rd) I passed on horseback about nine o'clock in front
of the lovely English garden of Marchese Zampieri, situated on the
last crests of those tree-capped hills, on which Bologna rests, and
from which so fine a view is enjoyed over Lombardy rich and green--the
fairest country in the world. In a copse of laurels, belonging to the
Giardino Zampieri, which dominates the path I was taking, leading to
the cascade of the Reno at Casa Lecchio, I saw Count Delfante. He was
absorbed in thought and scarcely returned my greeting, though we had
passed the night together till two o'clock in the morning. I went to
the cascade, I crossed the Reno; after which, passing again, at least
three hours later, under the copse of the Giardino Zampieri, I saw him
still there. He was precisely in the same position, leaning against a
great pine, which rises above the copse of laurels--but this detail I
am afraid will be found too simple and pointless. He came up to me with
tears in his eyes, asking me not to go telling people of his trance.
I was touched, and suggested retracing my steps and going with him to
spend the day in the country. At the end of two hours he had told me
everything. His is a fine soul,

[Pg 101]
but oh! the coldness of these pages, compared to his story.

Furthermore, he thinks his love is not returned--which is not my
opinion. In the fair marble face of the Contessa Ghigi, with whom we
spent the evening, one can read nothing. Only now and then a light and
sudden blush, which she cannot check, just betrays the emotions of
that soul, which the most exalted feminine pride disputes with deeper
emotions. You see the colour spread over her neck of alabaster and as
much as one catches of those lovely shoulders, worthy of Canova. She
somehow finds a way of diverting her black and sombre eyes from the
observation of those, whose penetration alarms her woman's delicacy;
but last night, at something which Delfante was saying and of which she
disapproved, I saw a sudden blush spread all over her. Her lofty soul
found him less worthy of her.

But when all is said, even if I were mistaken in my conjectures on
the happiness of Delfante, vanity apart, I think him happier than I,
in my indifference, although I am in a thoroughly happy position, in
appearance and in reality.

Bologna, _August 3rd_, 1818.

[1] Mary Stuart speaking of Leicester, after the interview with
Elizabeth, where she had just met her doom. (Schiller.)

[2] It is well known that that celebrated woman was the author,
probably in company with M. de la Rochefoucauld, of the novel, _La
Princesse de Clèves_, and that the two authors passed together in
perfect friendship the last twenty years of their life. That is exactly
love _à l'Italienne_.

[Pg 102]
                              CHAPTER XXX

                   A PECULIAR AND MOURNFUL SPECTACLE

Women with their feminine pride visit the iniquities of the fools upon
the men of sense, and those of the prosaic, prosperous and brutal upon
the noble-minded. A very pretty result--you'll agree!

The petty considerations of pride and worldly proprieties are the
cause of many women's unhappiness, for, through pride, their parents
have placed them in their abominable position. Destiny has reserved
for them, as a consolation far superior to all their misfortunes, the
happiness of loving and being loved with passion, when suddenly one
fine day they borrow from the enemy this same mad pride, of which they
were the first victims--all to kill the one happiness which is left
them, to work their own misfortune and the misfortune of him, who loves
them. A friend, who has had ten famous intrigues (and by no means
all one after another), gravely persuades them that if they fall in
love, they will be dishonoured in the eyes of the public, and yet this
worthy public, who never rises above low ideas, gives them generously a
lover a year; because that, it says, "is the thing." Thus the soul is
saddened by this odd spectacle: a woman of feeling, supremely refined
and an angel of purity, on the advice of a low t----, runs away from
the boundless, the only happiness which is left to her, in order to
appear in a dress of dazzling white, before a great fat brute of a
judge, whom everyone knows has been blind a hundred years, and who
bawls out at the top of his voice: "She is dressed in black!"

[Pg 103]
                             CHAPTER XXXI

                  EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF SALVIATI

  Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit.
                   (_Propertius_, II, I.)

Bologna, _April 29th_, 1818.

Driven to despair by the misfortune to which love has reduced me, I
curse existence. I have no heart for anything. The weather is dull; it
is raining, and a late spell of cold has come again to sadden nature,
who after a long winter was hurrying to meet the spring.

Schiassetti, a half-pay colonel, my cold and reasonable friend, came to
spend a couple of hours with me "You should renounce your love."

"How? Give me back my passion for war."

"It is a great misfortune for you to have known her."

I agree very nearly--so low-spirited and craven do I feel--so much has
melancholy taken possession of me to-day. We discuss what interest
can have led her friend to libel me, but find nothing but that old
Neapolitan proverb: "Woman, whom love and youth desert, a nothing
piques." What is certain is that that cruel woman is _enraged_ with
me--it is the expression of one of her friends. I could revenge myself
in a fearful way, but, against her hatred, I am without the smallest
means of defence. Schiassetti leaves me. I go out into the rain, not
knowing what to do with myself. My rooms, this drawing-room, which I
lived in during the first days of our acquaintance, and when I saw her
every evening, have become insupportable to me. Each engraving, each
piece of furniture, brings up again the

[Pg 104]
happiness I dreamed of in their presence--which now I have lost for
ever.

I tramped the streets through a cold rain: chance, if I can call it
chance, made me pass under her windows. Night was falling and I went
along, my eyes full of tears fixed on the window of her room. Suddenly
the curtains were just drawn aside, as if to give a glimpse into the
square, then instantly closed again. I felt within me a physical
movement about the heart. I was unable to support myself and took
refuge under the gateway of the next house. A thousand feelings crowd
upon my soul. Chance may have produced this movement of the curtains;
but oh! if it was her hand that had drawn them aside.

There are two misfortunes in the world: passion frustrated and the
"dead blank."

In love--I feel that two steps away from me exists a boundless
happiness, something beyond all my prayers, which depends upon nothing
but a word, nothing but a smile.

Passionless like Schiassetti, on gloomy days I see happiness nowhere, I
come to doubt if it exists for me, I fall into depression. One ought to
be without strong passions and have only a little curiosity or vanity.

It is two o'clock in the morning; I have seen that little movement of
the curtain; at six o'clock I paid some calls and went to the play, but
everywhere, silent and dreaming, I passed the evening examining this
question: "After so much anger with so little foundation (for after
all did I wish to offend her and is there a thing on earth which the
intention does not excuse?)--has she felt a moment of love?"

Poor Salviati, who wrote the preceding lines on his Petrarch, died a
short time after. He was the intimate friend of Schiassetti and myself;
we knew all his thoughts, and it is from him that I have all the
tearful part of this essay. He was imprudence incarnate; moreover,

[Pg 105]
the woman, for whom he went to such wild lengths, is the most
interesting creature that I have met. Schiassetti said to me: "But do
you think that that unfortunate passion was without advantages for
Salviati? To begin with, the most worrying of money troubles that can
be imagined came upon him. These troubles, which reduced him to a very
middling fortune after his dazzling youth, and would have driven him
mad with anger in any other circumstances, crossed his mind not once in
two weeks.

"And then--a matter of importance of a quite different kind for a mind
of his range--that passion is the first true course of logic, which
he ever had. That may seem peculiar in a man who has been at Court;
but the fact is explained by his extreme courage. For example, he
passed without winking the day of ----, the day of his undoing; he was
surprised then, as in Russia(16), not to feel anything extraordinary.
It is an actual fact, that his fear of anything had never gone so far
as to make him think about it for two days together. Instead of this
callousness, the last two years he was trying every minute to be brave.
Before he had never seen danger.

"When as a result of his imprudence and his faith in the generosity of
critics,[1] he had managed to get condemned to not seeing the woman he
was in love with, except twice a month, we would see him pass those
evenings, talking to her as if intoxicated with joy, because he had
been received with that noble frankness which he worshipped. He held
that Madame ---- and he were two souls without their like, who should
understand each other with a glance. It was beyond him to grasp that
she should pay the least attention to petty bourgeois comments, which
tried to make a criminal of him. The result of this fine confidence in
a woman, surrounded by his enemies, was to find her door closed to him.

"'With M----,' I used to say to him, 'you forget

[Pg 106]
your maxim--that you mustn't believe in greatness of soul, except in
the last extremity.'

"'Do you think,' he answered, 'that the world contains another heart
which is more suited to hers? True, I pay for this passionate way of
being, which Léonore, in anger, made me see on the horizon in the line
of the rocks of Poligny, with the ruin of all the practical enterprises
of my life--a disaster which comes from my lack of patient industry and
imprudence due to the force of momentary impressions.'" One can see the
touch of madness!

For Salviati life was divided into periods of a fortnight, which took
their hue from the last interview, which he had been granted. But
I noticed often, that the happiness he owed to a welcome, which he
thought less cold, was far inferior in intensity to the unhappiness
with which a hard reception overwhelmed him.[2] At times Madame
---- failed to be quite honest with him; and these are the only two
criticisms I ever dared offer him. Beyond the more intimate side of his
sorrow, of which he had the delicacy never to speak even to the friends
dearest to him and most devoid of envy, he saw in a hard reception
from Léonore the triumph of prosaic and scheming beings over the
open-hearted and the generous. At those times he lost faith in virtue
and, above all, in glory. It was his way to talk to his friends only
of sad notions, to which it is true his passion led up, but notions
capable besides of having some interest in the eyes of philosophy. I
was curious to observe that uncommon soul. Ordinarily passion-love is
found in people, a little simple in the German way.[3] Salviati, on the
contrary, was among the firmest and sharpest men I have known.

I seemed to notice that, after these cruel visits, he had

[Pg 107]
no peace until he had found a justification for Léonore's severities.
So long as he felt that she might have been wrong in ill-using him, he
was unhappy. Love, so devoid of vanity, I should never have thought
possible.

He was incessantly singing us the praises of love.

"If a supernatural power said to me: Break the glass of that watch and
Léonore will be for you, what she was three years ago, an indifferent
friend--really I believe I would never as long as I live have the
courage to break it." I saw in these discourses such signs of madness,
that I never had the courage to offer my former objections.

He would add: "Just as Luther's Reformation at the end of the Middle
Ages, shaking society to its base, renewed and reconstructed the world
on reasonable foundations, so is a generous character renewed and
retempered by love.

"It is only then, that he casts off all the baubles of life; without
this revolution he would always have had in him a pompous and
theatrical _something_. It is only since I began to love that I have
learnt to put greatness into my character--such is the absurdity of
education at our military academy.

"Although I behaved well, I was a child at the Court of Napoleon and at
Moscow. I did my duty, but I knew nothing of that heroic simplicity,
the fruit of entire and whole-hearted sacrifice. For example, it is
only this last year, that my heart takes in the simplicity of the
Romans in Livy. Once upon a time, I thought them cold compared to our
brilliant colonels. What they did for their Rome, I find in my heart
for Léonore. If I had the luck to be able to do anything for her, my
first desire would be to hide it. The conduct of a Regulus or a Decius
was something confirmed beforehand, which had no claim to surprise
them. Before I loved, I was small, precisely because I was tempted
sometimes to think myself great; I felt a certain effort, for which I
applauded myself.

[Pg 108]
"And, on the side of affection, what do we not owe to love? After
the hazards of early youth, the heart is closed to sympathy. Death
and absence remove our early companions, and we are reduced to
passing our life with lukewarm partners, measure in hand, for ever
calculating ideas of interest and vanity. Little by little all the
sensitive and generous region of the soul becomes waste, for want of
cultivation, and at less than thirty a man finds his heart steeled to
all sweet and gentle sensations. In the midst of this arid desert,
love causes a well of feelings to spring up, fresher and more abundant
even than that of earliest youth. In those days it was a vague hope,
irresponsible and incessantly distracted[4]--no devotion to one thing,
no deep and constant desire; the soul, at all times light, was athirst
for novelty and forgot to-day its adoration of the day before. But,
than the crystallisation of love nothing is more concentrated, more
mysterious, more eternally single in its object. In those days only
agreeable things claimed to please and to please for an instant: now
we are deeply touched by everything which is connected with the loved
one--even by objects the most indifferent. Arriving at a great town,
a hundred miles from that which Léonore lives in, I was in a state of
fear and trembling; at each street corner I shuddered to meet Alviza,
the intimate friend of Madame ----, although I did not know her. For me
everything took a mysterious and sacred tint. My heart beat fast, while
talking to an old scholar; for I could not hear without blushing the
name of the city gate, near which the friend of Léonore lives.

"Even the severities of the woman we love have an infinite grace, which
the most flattering moments in the company of other women cannot offer.
It is like the great shadows in Correggio's pictures, which far from
being, as in other painters, passages less pleasant, but necessary in
order to give effect to the lights and relief to the figures,

[Pg 109]
have graces of their own which charm and throw us into a gentle
reverie.[5]

"Yes, half and the fairest half of life is hidden from the man, who has
not loved with passion."

Salviati had need of the whole force of his dialectic powers, to hold
his own against the wise Schiassetti, who was always saying to him:
"You want to be happy, then be content with a life exempt from pains
and with a small quantity of happiness every day. Keep yourself from
the lottery of great passions."

"Then give me your curiosity," was Salviati's answer.

I imagine there were not a few days, when he would have liked to be
able to follow the advice of our sensible colonel; he made a little
struggle and thought he was succeeding; but this line of action was
absolutely beyond his strength. And yet what strength was in that soul!

A white satin hat, a little like that of Madame ----, seen in the
distance in the street, made his heart stop beating, and forced him
to rest against the wall. Even in his blackest moments, the happiness
of meeting her gave him always some hours of intoxication, beyond the
reach of all misfortune and all reasoning.[6] For the rest, at the time
of his death[7] his character had certainly contracted more than one
noble habit, after two years of

[Pg 110]
this generous and boundless passion; and, in so far at least, he judged
himself correctly. Had he lived, and circumstances helped him a little,
he would

[Pg 111]
have made a name for himself. Maybe also, just through his simplicity,
his merit would have passed on this earth unseen.

                         O lasso
    Quanti dolci pensier, quanto desio
    Menò costui al doloroso passo!
    Biondo era, e bello, e di gentile aspetto;
    Ma l'un de' cigli un colpo avea diviso.

                                        (_Dante._)[8]

[1] Sotto l'usbergo del sentirsi pura. [Under the shield of conscious
purity.--Tr.] (Dante, _Inf._, XXVIII, 117.)

[2] That is a thing which I have often seemed to notice in love--that
propensity to reap more unhappiness from what is unhappy than happiness
from what is happy.

[3] Don Carlos,(17) Saint-Preux,(17) Racine's _Hippolyte_ and _Bajazet_.

[4] Mordaunt Mertoun, _Pirate_, Vol. I.

[5] As I have mentioned Correggio, I will add that in the sketch of an
angel's head in the gallery of the museum at Florence, is to be seen
the glance of happy love, and at Parma in the Madonna crowned by Jesus
the downcast eyes of love.

[6]      Come what sorrow can
    It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
    That one short moment gives me in her sight.--(_Romeo and Juliet_.)

[7] Some days before the last he made a little ode, which has the merit
of expressing just the sentiments, which formed the subject of our
conversations:--.

               L'ULTIMO DI.
               Anacreontica.
                A ELVIRA.

    Vedi tu dove il rio
        Lambendo un mirto va,
        Là del riposo mio
        La pietra surgerà.
    Il passero amoroso,
        E il nobile usignuol
        Entro quel mirto ombroso
        Raccoglieranno il vol.
    Vieni, diletta Elvira,
        A quella tomba vien,
        E sulla muta lira,
        Appoggia il bianco sen.
    Su quella bruna pietra,
        Le tortore verran,
        E intorno alia mia cetra,
        Il nido intrecieran.
    E ogni anno, il di che offendere
        M'osasti tu infedel,
        Faro la su discendere
        La folgore del ciel.
    Odi d'un uom che muore
        Odi l'estremo suon
        Questo appassito fiore
        Ti lascio, Elvira, in don
    Quanto prezioso ei sia
        Saper tu il devi appien
        Il di che fosti mia,
        Te l'involai dal sen.
    Simbolo allor d'affetto
        Or pegno di dolor
        Torno a posarti in petto
        Quest' appassito fior.
    E avrai nel cuor scolpito
        Se crudo il cor non è,
        Come ti fu rapito,
        Come fu reso a te.--(_S. Radael._)*

* [Lo! where the passing stream laps round the myrtle-tree, raise
there the stone of my resting-place. The amorous sparrow and the noble
nightingale within the shade of that myrtle will rest from flight.
Come, beloved Elvira, come to that tomb and press my mute lyre to your
white bosom. Turtles shall perch on that dark stone and will twine
their nest about my harp. And every year on the day when you did dare
cruelly betray me, on this spot will I make the lightning of heaven
descend. Listen, listen to the last utterances of a dying man. This
faded flower, Elvira, is the gift I leave you. How precious it is you
must know full well: from your bosom I stole it the day you became
mine. Then it was a symbol of love; now as a pledge of suffering I
will put it back in your bosom--this faded flower. And you shall
have engraved on your heart, if a woman's heart you have, how it was
snatched from you, how it was returned.]

[8] "Poor wretch, how many sweet thoughts, what constancy brought him
to his last hour. He was fair and beautiful and gentle of countenance,
only a noble scar cut through one of his eyebrows."

[Pg 112]
                             CHAPTER XXXII

                        OF INTIMATE INTERCOURSE

The greatest happiness that love can give--'tis first joining your hand
to the hand of a woman you love.

The happiness of gallantry is quite otherwise--far more real, and far
more subject to ridicule.

In passion-love intimate intercourse is not so much perfect delight
itself, as the last step towards it.

But how depict a delight, which leaves no memories behind?

Mortimer returned from a long voyage in fear and trembling; he adored
Jenny, but Jenny had not answered his letters. On his arrival in
London, he mounts his horse and goes off to find her at her country
home. When he gets there, she is walking in the park; he runs up to
her, with beating heart, meets her and she offers him her hand and
greets him with emotion; he sees that she loves him. Roaming together
along the glades of the park, Jenny's dress became entangled in an
acacia bush. Later on Mortimer won her; but Jenny was faithless. I
maintain to him that Jenny never loved him and he quotes, as proof of
her love, the way in which she received him at his return from the
Continent; but he could never give me the slightest details of it. Only
he shudders visibly directly he sees an acacia bush: really, it is the
only distinct remembrance he succeeded in preserving of the happiest
moment of his life.[1]

A sensitive and open man, a former _chevalier_, confided

[Pg 113]
to me this evening (in the depth of our craft buffeted by a high sea
on the Lago di Garda[2]) the history of his loves, which I in my turn
shall not confide to the public. But I feel myself in a position to
conclude from them that the day of intimate intercourse is like those
fine days in May, a critical period for the fairest flowers, a moment
which can be fatal and wither in an instant the fairest hopes.

                   *       *       *       *       *[3]

_Naturalness_ cannot be praised too highly. It is the only coquetry
permissible in a thing so serious as love _à la_ Werther; in which a
man has no idea where he is going, and in which at the same time by a
lucky chance for virtue, that is his best policy. A man, really moved,
says charming things unconsciously; he speaks a language which he does
not know himself.

Woe to the man the least bit affected! Given he were in love, allow him
all the wit in the world, he loses three-quarters of his advantages.
Let him relapse for an instant into affectation--a minute later comes a
moment of frost.

The whole art of love, as it seems to me, reduces itself to saying
exactly as much as the degree of intoxication at the moment allows of,
that is to say in other terms, to listen to one's heart. It must not be
thought, that this is so easy; a man, who truly loves, has no longer
strength to speak, when his mistress says anything to make him happy.

[Pg 114]
Thus he loses the deeds which his words[4] would have given birth to.
It is better to be silent than say things too tender at the wrong
time, and what was in point ten seconds ago, is now no longer--in fact
at this moment it makes a mess of things. Every time that I used to
infringe this rule[5] and say something, which had come into my head
three minutes earlier and which I thought pretty, Léonore never failed
to punish me. And later I would say to myself, as I went away--"She is
right." This is the sort of thing to upset women of delicacy extremely;
it is indecency of sentiment. Like tasteless rhetoricians, they are
readier to admit a certain degree of weakness and coldness. There being
nothing in the world to alarm them but the falsity of their lover, the
least little insincerity of detail, be it the most innocent in the
world, robs them instantly of all delight and puts mistrust into their
heart.

Respectable women have a repugnance to what is vehement and unlooked
for--those being none the less characteristics of passion--and,
furthermore, that vehemence alarms their modesty; they are on the
defensive against it.

When a touch of jealousy or displeasure has occasioned some chilliness,
it is generally possible to begin subjects, fit to give birth to the
excitement favourable to love, and, after the first two or three
phrases of introduction, as long as a man does not miss the opportunity
of saying exactly what his heart suggests, the pleasure he will give to
his loved one will be keen. The fault of most men is that they want to
succeed in saying something, which they think either pretty or witty or
touching--instead of

[Pg 115]
releasing their soul from the false gravity of the world, until a
degree of intimacy and _naturalness_ brings out in simple language what
they are feeling at the moment. The man, who is brave enough for this,
will have instantly his reward in a kind of peacemaking.

It is this reward, as swift as it is involuntary, of the pleasure one
gives to the object of one's love, which puts this passion so far above
the others.

If there is perfect _naturalness_ between them, the happiness of two
individuals comes to be fused together.[6] This is simply the greatest
happiness which can exist, by reason of sympathy and several other laws
of human nature.

It is quite easy to determine the meaning of this word
_naturalness_--essential condition of happiness in love.

We call _natural_ that which does not diverge from an habitual way of
acting. It goes without saying that one must not merely never lie to
one's love, but not even embellish the least bit or tamper with the
simple outline of truth. For if a man is embellishing, his attention
is occupied in doing so and no longer answers simply and truly, as
the keys of a piano, to the feelings mirrored in his eye. The woman
finds it out at once by a certain chilliness within her, and she, in
her turn, falls back on coquetry. Might not here be found hidden the
cause why it is impossible to love a woman with a mind too far below
one's own--the reason being that, in her case, one can make pretence
with impunity, and, as that course is more convenient, one abandons
oneself to unnaturalness by force of habit? From that moment love is no
longer love; it sinks to the level of an ordinary transaction--the only
difference being that, instead of money, you get pleasure or flattery
or a mixture of both. It is hard not to feel a shade of contempt for a
woman, before whom one can with impunity act a part, and

[Pg 116]
consequently, in order to throw her over, one only needs to come across
something better in her line. Habit or vow may hold, but I am speaking
of the heart's desire, whose nature it is to fly to the greatest
pleasure.

To return to this word _natural_--natural and habitual are two
different things. If one takes these words in the same sense, it is
evident that the more sensibility in a man, the harder it is for him
to be natural, since the influence of _habit_ on his way of being and
acting is less powerful, and he himself is more powerful at each new
event. In the life-story of a cold heart every page is the same: take
him to-day or take him to-morrow, it is always the same dummy.

A man of sensibility, so soon as his heart is touched, loses all traces
of habit to guide his action; and how can he follow a path, which he
has forgotten all about?

He feels the enormous weight attaching to every word which he says to
the object of his love--it seems to him as if a word is to decide his
fate. How is he not to look about for the right word? At any rate,
how is he not to have the feeling that he is trying to say "the right
thing"? And then, there is an end of candour. And so we must give up
our claim to candour, that quality of our being, which never reflects
upon itself. We are the best we can be, but we feel what we are.

I fancy this brings us to the last degree of _naturalness_, to which
the most delicate heart can pretend in love.

A man of passion can but cling might and main, as his only refuge in
the storm, to the vow never to change a jot or tittle of the truth
and to read the message of his heart correctly. If the conversation
is lively and fragmentary, he may hope for some fine moments of
_naturalness_: otherwise he will only be perfectly natural in hours
when he will be a little less madly in love.

In the presence of the loved one, we hardly retain _naturalness_ even
in our movements, however deeply such habits are rooted in the muscles.
When I gave my

[Pg 117]
arm to Léonore, I always felt on the point of stumbling, and I wondered
if I was walking properly. The most one can do is never to be affected
willingly: it is enough to be convinced that want of _naturalness_ is
the greatest possible disadvantage, and can easily be the source of the
greatest misfortunes. For the heart of the woman, whom you love, no
longer understands your own; you lose that nervous involuntary movement
of sincerity, which answers the call of sincerity. It means the loss of
every way of touching, I almost said of winning her. Not that I pretend
to deny, that a woman worthy of love may see her fate in that pretty
image of the ivy, which "dies if it does not cling"--that is a law of
Nature; but to make your lover's happiness is none the less a step that
will decide your own. To me it seems that a reasonable woman ought not
to give in completely to her lover, until she can hold out no longer,
and the slightest doubt thrown on the sincerity of your heart gives her
there and then a little strength--enough at least to delay her defeat
still another day.[7]

Is it necessary to add that to make all this the last word in absurdity
you have only to apply it to gallant-love?

[1] _Life of Haydn_(18).

[2] 20 September, 1811.

[3] At the first quarrel Madame Ivernetta gave poor Bariac his _congé_.
Bariac was truly in love and this _congé_ threw him into despair; but
his friend Guillaume Balaon, whose life we are writing, was of great
help to him and managed, finally, to appease the severe Ivernetta.
Peace was restored, and the reconciliation was accompanied by
circumstances so delicious, that Bariac swore to Balaon that the hour
of the first favours he had received from his mistress had not been
as sweet as that of this voluptuous peacemaking. These words turned
Balaon's head; he wanted to know this pleasure, of which his friend had
just given him a description, etc. etc. (_Vie de quelques Troubadours_,
by Nivernois, Vol. I, p. 32.)

[4] It is this kind of timidity which is decisive, and which is proof
of passion-love in a clever man.

[5] Remember that, if the author uses sometimes the expression "I,"
it is an attempt to give the form of this essay a little variety. He
does not in the least pretend to fill the readers' ears with the story
of his own feelings. His aim is to impart, with as little monotony as
possible, what he has observed in others.

[6] Resides in exactly the same actions.

[7] Haec autem ad acerbam rei memoriam, amara quadam dulcedine,
scribere visum est--ut cogitem nihil esse debere quod amplius mihi
placeat in hac vita. (_Petrarch_, Ed. Marsand.) [These things, to be
a painful reminder, yet not without a certain bitter charm, I have
seen good to write--to remind me that nothing any longer can give me
pleasure in this life.--Tr.

15 January, 1819.

[Pg 118]
                            CHAPTER XXXIII

Always a little doubt to allay--that is what whets our appetite
every moment, that is what makes the life of happy love. As it is
never separated from fear, so its pleasures can never tire. The
characteristic of this happiness is its high seriousness.

[Pg 119]
                             CHAPTER XXXIV

                            OF CONFIDENCES

There is no form of insolence so swiftly punished as that which leads
you, in passion-love, to take an intimate friend into your confidence.
He knows that, if what you say is true, you have pleasures a thousand
times greater than he, and that your own make you despise his.

It is far worse between women--their lot in life being to inspire a
passion, and the _confidante_ having commonly also displayed her charms
for the advantage of the lover.

On the other hand, for anyone a prey to this fever, there is no moral
need more imperative than that of a friend, before whom to dilate on
the fearful doubts which at every instant beset his soul; for in this
terrible passion, always a thing imagined is a thing existent.

"A great fault in Salviati's character," he writes in 1817, "--in this
point how opposed to Napoleon's!--is that when, in the discussion of
interests in which passion is concerned, something is at last morally
proved, he cannot resolve to take that as a fact once and for all
established and as a point to start from. In spite of himself and
greatly to his hurt, he brings it again and again under discussion."
The reason is that, in the field of ambition, it is easy to be brave.
Crystallisation, not being subjected to the desire of the thing to be
won, helps to fortify our courage; in love it is wholly in the service
of the object against which our courage is wanted.

A woman may find an unfaithful friend, she also may find one with
nothing to do.

[Pg 120]
A princess of thirty-five,[1] with nothing to do and dogged by the need
of action, of intrigue, etc. etc., discontented with a lukewarm lover
and yet unable to hope to sow the seeds of another love, with no use to
make of the energy which is consuming her, with no other distraction
than fits of black humour, can very well find an occupation, that is
to say a pleasure, and a life's work, in accomplishing the misfortune
of a true passion--passion which someone has the insolence to feel for
another than herself, while her own lover falls to sleep at her side.

It is the only case in which hate produces happiness; the reason being
that it procures occupation and work.

Just at first, the pleasure of doing something, and, as soon as the
design is suspected by society, the prick of doubtful success add
a charm to this occupation. Jealousy of the friend takes the mask
of hatred for the lover; otherwise how would it be possible to hate
so madly a man one has never set eyes on? You cannot recognise the
existence of envy, or, first, you would have to recognise the existence
of merit; and there are flatterers about you who only hold their place
at Court by poking fun at your good friend.

The faithless _confidante_, all the while she is indulging in
villainies of the deepest dye, may quite well think herself solely
animated by the desire not to lose a precious friendship. A woman with
nothing to do tells herself that even friendship languishes in a heart
devoured by love and its mortal anxieties. Friendship can only hold its
own, by the side of love, by the exchange of confidences; but then what
is more odious to envy than such confidences?

The only kind of confidences well received between women are those
accompanied in all its frankness by a statement of the case such as
this:--"My dear friend, in this war, as absurd as it is relentless,
which the prejudices,

[Pg 121]
brought into vogue by our tyrants, wage upon us, you help me
to-day--to-morrow it will be my turn."[2]

Beyond this exception there is another--that of true friendship born in
childhood and not marred since by any jealousy...

The confidences of passion-love are only well received between
schoolboys in love with love, and girls eaten up with unemployed
curiosity and tenderness or led on perhaps by the instinct,[3] which
whispers to them that there lies the great business of their life, and
that they cannot look after it too early.

We have all seen little girls of three perform quite creditably the
duties of gallantry. Gallant-love is inflamed, passion-love chilled by
confidences.

Apart from the danger, there is the difficulty of confidences. In
passion-love, things one cannot express (because the tongue is too
gross for such subtleties) exist none the less; only, as these are
things of extreme delicacy, we are more liable in observing them to
make mistakes.

Also, an observer in a state of emotion is a bad observer; he won't
allow for chance.

Perhaps the only safe way is to make yourself your own confidant. Write
down this evening, under borrowed

[Pg 122]
names, but with all the characteristic details, the dialogue you had
just now with the woman you care for, and the difficulty which troubles
you. In a week, if it is passion-love, you will be a different man, and
then, rereading your consultation, you will be able to give a piece of
good advice to yourself.

In male society, as soon as there are more than two together, and envy
might make its appearance, politeness allows none but physical love
to be spoken of--think of the end of dinners among men. It is Baffo's
sonnets[4] that are quoted and which give such infinite pleasure;
because each one takes literally the praises and excitement of his
neighbour, who, quite often, merely wants to appear lively or polite.
The sweetly tender words of Petrarch or French madrigals would be out
of place.

[1] Venice, 1819.

[2] Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, Geliotte.

Prague, Klagenfurth, all Moravia, etc. etc. Their women are great wits
and their men are great hunters. Friendship is very common between the
women. The country enjoys its fine season in the winter; among the
nobles of the province a succession of hunting parties takes place,
each lasting from fifteen to twenty days. One of the cleverest of these
nobles said to me one day that Charles V had reigned legitimately over
all Italy, and that, consequently, it was all in vain for the Italians
to want to revolt. The wife of this good man read the Letters of Mlle.
de Lespinasse. (Znaym, 1816.)

[3] Important point. It seems to me that independent of their
education, which begins at eight or ten months, there is a certain
amount of instinct.

[4] The Venetian dialect boasts descriptions of physical love which
for vivacity leave Horace, Propertius, La Fontaine and all the poets
a hundred miles behind. M. Buratti of Venice is at the moment the
first satirical poet of our unhappy Europe. He excels above all in
the description of the physical grotesqueness of his heroes; and he
finds himself frequently in prison. (See _l'Elefanteide, l'Uomo, la
Strefeide._)

[Pg 123]
                             CHAPTER XXXV

                              OF JEALOUSY

When you are in love, as each new object strikes your eye or your
memory, whether crushed in a gallery and patiently listening to a
parliamentary debate, or galloping to the relief of an outpost under
the enemy's fire, you never fail to add a new perfection to the idea
you have of your mistress, or discover a new means (which at first
seems excellent) of winning her love still more.

Each step the imagination takes is repaid by a moment of sweet delight.
No wonder that existence, such as this, takes hold of one.

Directly jealousy comes into existence, this turn of feelings
continues in itself the same, though the effect it is to produce is
contrary. Each perfection that you add to the crown of your beloved,
who now perhaps loves someone else, far from promising you a heavenly
contentment, thrusts a dagger into your heart. A voice cries out: "This
enchanting pleasure is for my rival to enjoy."[1]

Even the objects which strike you, without producing this effect,
instead of showing you, as before, a new way of winning her love, cause
you to see a new advantage for your rival.

You meet a pretty woman galloping in the park[2]; your rival is famous
for his fine horses which can do ten miles in fifty minutes.

[Pg 124]
In this state, rage is easily fanned into life; you no longer
remember that in love possession is nothing, enjoyment everything.
You exaggerate the happiness of your rival, exaggerate the insolence
happiness produces in him, and you come at last to the limit of
tortures, that is to say to the extremest unhappiness, poisoned still
further by a lingering hope.

The only remedy is, perhaps, to observe your rival's happiness at close
quarters. Often you will see him fall peacefully asleep in the same
_salon_ as the woman, for whom your heart stops beating, at the mere
sight of a hat like hers some way off in the street.

To wake him up you have only to show your jealousy. You may have,
perhaps, the pleasure of teaching him the price of the woman who
prefers him to you, and he will owe to you the love he will learn to
have for her.

Face to face with a rival there is no mean--you must either banter with
him in the most off-hand way you can, or frighten him.

Jealousy being the greatest of all evils, endangering one's life will
be found an agreeable diversion. For then not all our fancies are
embittered and blackened (by the mechanism explained above)--sometimes
it is possible to imagine that one kills this rival.

According to this principle, that it is never right to add to the
enemy's forces, you must hide your love from your rival, and, under
some pretext of vanity as far as possible removed from love, say to
him very quietly, with all possible politeness, and in the calmest,
simplest tone: "Sir, I cannot think why the public sees good to make
little So-and-so mine; people are even good enough to believe that I am
in love with her. As for you, if you want her, I would hand her over
with all my heart, if unhappily there were not the risk of placing
myself into a ridiculous position. In six months, take her as much as
ever you like, but at the present moment, honour, such as people attach
(why, I don't know) to these things,

[Pg 125]
forces me to tell you, to my great regret, that, if by chance you have
not the justice to wait till your turn comes round, one of us must die."

Your rival is very likely a man without much passion, and perhaps a
man of much prudence, who once convinced of your resolution, will
make haste to yield you the woman in question, provided he can find
any decent pretext. For that reason you must give a gay tone to your
challenge, and keep the whole move hidden with the greatest secrecy.

What makes the pain of jealousy so sharp is that vanity cannot help you
to bear it. But, according to the plan I have spoken of, your vanity
has something to feed on; you can respect yourself for bravery, even if
you are reduced to despising your powers of pleasing.

If you would rather not carry things to such tragic lengths, you must
pack up and go miles away, and keep a chorus-girl, whose charms people
will think have arrested you in your flight.

Your rival has only to be an ordinary person and he will think you are
consoled.

Very often the best way is to wait without flinching, while he wears
himself out in the eyes of the loved one through his own stupidity.
For, except in a serious passion formed little by little and in early
youth, a clever woman does not love an undistinguished man for long.[3]
In the case of jealousy after intimate intercourse, there must follow
also apparent indifference or real inconstancy. Plenty of women,
offended with a lover whom they still love, form an attachment with
the man, of whom he has shown himself jealous, and the play becomes a
reality.[4]

I have gone into some detail, because in these moments of jealousy one
often loses one's head. Counsels, made in writing a long time ago, are
useful, and, the essential

[Pg 126]
thing being to feign calmness, it is not out of place in a
philosophical piece of writing, to adopt that tone.

As your adversaries' power over you consists in taking away from you or
making you hope for things, whose whole worth consists in your passion
for them, once manage to make them think you are indifferent, and
suddenly they are without a weapon.

If you have no active course to take, but can distract yourself in
looking for consolation, you will find some pleasure in reading
_Othello_; it will make you doubt the most conclusive appearances. You
will feast your eyes on these words:--

            Trifles light as air
    Seem to the jealous confirmations strong
    As proofs from Holy Writ.    (_Othello_, Act III.)

It is my experience that the sight of a fine sea is consoling.

 The morning which had arisen calm and bright gave a pleasant effect
 to the waste mountain view, which was seen from the castle on looking
 to the landward, and the glorious ocean crisped with a thousand
 rippling waves of silver extended on the other side in awful, yet
 complacent majesty to the verge of the horizon. With such scenes of
 calm sublimity the human heart sympathises even in its most disturbed
 moods, and deeds of honour and virtue are inspired by their majestic
 influence. (_The Bride of Lammermoor_, Chap. VII.)

I find this written by Salviati:--

 _July 20th_, 1818.--I often--and I think unreasonably--apply to life
 as a whole the feelings of a man of ambition or a good citizen, if he
 finds himself set in battle to guard the baggage or in any other post
 without danger or action. I should have felt regret at forty to have
 passed the age of loving without deep passion. I should have had that
 bitter and humiliating displeasure, to have found out too late that I
 had been fool enough to let life pass, without living.

 Yesterday I spent three hours with the woman I love and a rival, whom
 she wants to make me think she favours. Certainly,

[Pg 127]
 there were moments of bitterness, in watching her lovely eyes fixed
 on him, and, on my departure, there were wild transports from utter
 misery to hope. But what changes, what sudden lights, what swift
 thoughts, and, in spite of the apparent happiness of my rival, with
 what pride and what delight my love felt itself superior to his! I
 went away saying to myself: The most vile fear would bleach those
 cheeks at the least of the sacrifices, which my love would make for
 the fun of it, nay, with delight--for example, to put this hand into a
 hat and draw one of these two lots: "Be loved by her," the other--"Die
 on the spot." And this feeling in me is so much second nature, that it
 did not prevent me being amiable and talkative.

 If someone had told me all that two years ago, I should have laughed.

I find in the _Travels to the Source of the Missouri River ... in_
1804-6 of Captains Lewis and Clarke (p. 215):--

 The Ricaras are poor and generous; we stayed some time in three of
 their villages. Their women are more beautiful than those of the other
 tribes we came across; they are also not in the least inclined to let
 their lover languish. We found a new example of the truth that you
 only have to travel to find out that there is variety everywhere.
 Among the Ricaras, for a woman to grant her favours without the
 consent of her husband or her brother, gives great offence. But then
 the brothers and the husband are only too delighted to have the
 opportunity of showing this courtesy to their friends.

 There was a negro in our crew; he created a great sensation among a
 people who had never seen a man of his colour before. He was soon a
 favourite with the fair sex, and we noticed that the husbands, instead
 of being jealous, were overjoyed to see him come to visit them. The
 funny part was that the interior of the huts was so narrow that
 everything was visible.[5]

[1] Here you see one of love's follies; for this perfection, seen by
your eyes, is not one for him.

[2] Montaguola, 13th April, 1819.

[3] _La Princesse de Tarente_. Story by Scarron.

[4] As in the _Curieux-impertinent_, story by Cervantes.

[5] There ought to be instituted at Philadelphia an academy, whose sole
occupation would be the collection of materials for the study of man in
the savage state, instead of waiting till these curious peoples have
been exterminated.

I know quite well that such academies exist--but apparently regulated
in a way worthy of our academies in Europe. (Memoir and Discussion on
the Zodiac of Denderah at the Académie des Sciences of Paris, 1821.) I
notice that the academy of, I fancy, Massachusetts wisely charges a

[Pg 128]
member of the clergy (Mr. Jarvis) to make a report on the religion of
the savage. The priest, of course, refutes energetically an impious
Frenchman, called Volney. According to the priest, the savage has
the most exact and noble ideas of the Divinity, etc. If he lived in
England, such a report would bring the worthy academician a preferment
of three or four hundred pounds and the protection of all the noble
lords in the county. But in America! For the rest, the absurdity of
this academy reminds me of the free Americans, who set the greatest
store on seeing fine coats-of-arms painted on the panels of their
carriages; what upsets them is that, through their carriage-painter's
want of instruction, the blazoning is often wrong.

[Pg 129]
                             CHAPTER XXXVI

                       OF JEALOUSY--(continued)

Now for the woman suspected of inconstancy!

She leaves you, because you have discouraged crystallisation, but it is
possible that in her heart you have habit to plead for you.

She leaves you, because she is too sure of you. You have killed fear,
and there is nothing left to give birth to the little doubts of happy
love. Just make her uneasy, and, above all, beware of the absurdity of
protestations!

During all the time you have lived in touch with her, you will
doubtless have discovered what woman, in society or outside it, she is
most jealous or most afraid of. Pay court to that woman, but so far
from blazoning it about, do your best to keep it secret, and do your
best sincerely; trust to the eyes of anger to see everything and feel
everything. The strong aversion you will have felt for several months
to all women ought to make this easy.[1] Remember that in the position
you are in, everything is spoiled by a show of passion: avoid seeing
much of the woman you love, and drink champagne with the wits.

In order to judge of your mistress' love, remember:--

1. The more physical pleasure counts for in the basis of her love and
in what formerly determined her to yield, the more prone it is to
inconstancy, and, still more, to infidelity. This applies especially to
love in

[Pg 130]
which crystallisation has been favoured by the fire of sweet seventeen.

2. Two people in love are hardly ever equally in love:[2] passion-love
has its phases, during which now one, now the other is more
impassioned. Often, too, it is merely gallantry or vain love which
responds to passion-love, and it is generally the woman who is
carried away by passion. But whatever the love may be that either of
them feels, directly one of them is jealous, he insists on the other
fulfilling all the conditions of passion-love; vanity pretends to all
the claims of a heart that feels.

Furthermore, nothing wearies gallant-love like passion-love from the
other side.

Often a clever man, paying court to a woman, just sets her thinking
of love in a sentimental frame of mind. She receives this clever man
kindly for giving her this pleasure--he conceives hopes.

But one fine day that woman meets the man, who makes her feel what the
other has described.

I do not know what are the effects of a man's jealousy on the heart of
the woman he loves. Displayed by an admirer who wearies her, jealousy
must inspire a supreme disgust, and it may even turn to hatred, if
the man he is jealous of is nicer than the jealous one; for we want
jealousy, said Madame de Coulanges, only from those of whom we could be
jealous.

If the jealous one is liked, but has no real claims, his jealousy
may offend that feminine pride so hard to keep in humour or even to
recognise. Jealousy may please women of pride, as a new way of showing
them their power.

Jealousy can please as a new way of giving proof of love. It can also
offend the modesty of a woman who is over-refined.

[Pg 131]
It can please as a sign of the lover's hot blood--_ferrum est quod
amant_. But note that it is hot blood they love, and not courage _à la_
Turenne, which is quite compatible with a cold heart.

One of the consequences of crystallisation is that a woman can never
say "yes" to the lover, to whom she has been unfaithful, if she ever
means to make anything of him.

Such is the pleasure of continuing to enjoy the perfect image we have
formed of the object of our attachment, that until that fatal "yes"--

    L'on va chercher bien loin, plutot que de mourir,
    Quelque prétexte ami pour vivre et pour souffrir.

                                           (_André Chénier_.[3])

Everyone in France knows the anecdote of Mademoiselle de Sommery, who,
caught in flagrant delict by her lover, flatly denied the fact. On his
protesting, she replied: "Very well, I see you don't love me any more:
you believe what you see before what I tell you."

To make it up with an idol of a mistress, who has been unfaithful, is
to set yourself to undo with the point of a dagger a crystallisation
incessantly forming afresh. Love has got to die, and your heart will
feel the cruel pang of every stage in its agony.

It is one of the saddest dispositions of this passion and of life. You
must be strong enough to make it up only as friends.

[1] You compare the branch adorned with diamonds to the branch left
bare, and contrast adds sting to your memories.

[2] e. g. the love of Alfieri for that great English lady (Lady
Ligonier) who also philandered with her footman and prettily signed
herself Penelope. (_Vita_, Epoca III, Chaps. X and XI.)

[3] ["Sooner than die, we will go very far in search of some friendly
pretext to live and suffer."--Tr.]

[Pg 132]
                            CHAPTER XXXVII

                                ROXANA

As for women's jealousy--they are suspicious, they have infinitely more
at stake than we, they have made a greater sacrifice to love, have far
fewer means of distraction and, above all, far fewer means of keeping
a check on their lover's actions. A woman feels herself degraded by
jealousy; she thinks her lover is laughing at her, or, still worse,
making fun of her tenderest transports. Cruelty must tempt her--and
yet, legally, she cannot kill her rival!

For women, jealousy must be a still more abominable evil than it is for
men. It is the last degree of impotent rage and self-contempt[1] which
a heart can bear without breaking.

I know no other remedy for so cruel an evil, than the death of the
one who is the cause of it or of the one who suffers. An example of
French jealousy is the story of Madame de la Pommeraie in _Jacques le
Fataliste_(19).

La Rochefoucauld says: "We are ashamed of owning we are jealous, but
pride ourselves on having been and of being capable of jealousy."[2]
Poor woman dares not own even to having suffered this torture, so much
ridicule does it bring upon her. So painful a wound can never quite
heal up.

If cold reason could be unfolded before the fire of imagination with
the merest shade of success, I would say

[Pg 133]
to those wretched women, who are unhappy from jealousy: "There is a
great difference between infidelity in man and in you. In you, the
importance of the act is partly direct, partly symbolic. But, as an
effect of the education of our military schools, it is in man the
symbol of nothing at all. On the contrary, in women, through the effect
of modesty, it is the most decisive of all the symbols of devotion. Bad
habit makes it almost a necessity to men. During all our early years,
the example set by the so-called 'bloods' makes us set all our pride on
the number of successes of this kind--as the one and only proof of our
worth. For you, your education acts in exactly the opposite direction."

As for the value of an action as symbol--in a moment of anger I upset
a table on to the foot of my neighbour; that gives him the devil of a
pain, but can quite easily be fixed up--or again, I make as if to give
him a slap in the face....

The difference between infidelity in the two sexes is so real, that a
woman of passion may pardon it, while for a man that is impossible.

Here we have a decisive ordeal to show the difference between
passion-love and love from pique: infidelity in women all but kills the
former and doubles the force of the latter.

Haughty women disguise their jealousy from pride. They will spend long