CHAPTER LIX

WERTHER AND DON JUAN

Among young people, when they have done with mocking at some poor lover, and he has left the room, the conversation generally ends by discussing the question, whether it is better to deal with women like Mozart's Don Juan or like Werther. The contrast would be more exact, if I had said Saint-Preux, but he is so dull a personage, that in making him their representative, I should be wronging feeling hearts.

Don Juan's character requires the greater number of useful and generally esteemed virtues--admirable daring, resourcefulness, vivacity, a cool head, a witty mind, etc.

The Don Juans have great moments of bitterness and a very miserable old age--but then most men do not reach old age.

The lover plays a poor rôle in the drawing-room in the evening, because to be a success and a power among women a man must show just as much keenness on winning them as on a game of billiards. As everybody knows that the lover has a great interest in life, he exposes himself, for all his cleverness, to mockery. Only, next morning he wakes, not to be in a bad temper until something piquant or something nasty turns up to revive him, but to dream of her he loves and build castles in the air for love to dwell in.

Love _à la_ Werther opens the soul to all the arts, to all sweet and romantic impressions, to the moonlight, to the beauty of the forest, to the beauty of pictures--in a word, to the feeling and enjoyment of the beautiful,

[Pg 255] under whatever form it be found, even under the coarsest cloak. It causes man to find happiness even without riches.[1] Such souls, instead of growing weary like Mielhan, Bezenval, etc., go mad, like Rousseau, from an excess of sensibility. Women endowed with a certain elevation of soul, who, after their first youth, know how to recognise love, both where it is and what it is, generally escape the Don Juan--he is remarkable in their eyes rather by the number than the quality of his conquests. Observe, to the prejudice of tender hearts, that publicity is as necessary to Don Juan's triumph as secrecy is to Werther's. Most of the men who make women the business of their life are born in the lap of luxury; that is to say, they are, as a result of their education and the example set by everything that surrounded them in youth, hardened egoists.[2]

The real Don Juan even ends by looking on women as the enemy, and rejoicing in their misfortunes of every sort.

On the other hand, the charming Duke delle Pignatelle showed us the proper way to find happiness in pleasures,

[Pg 256] even without passion. "I know that I like a woman," he told me one evening, "when I find myself completely confused in her company, and don't know what to say to her." So far from letting his self-esteem be put to shame or take its revenge for these embarrassing moments, he cultivated them lovingly as the source of his happiness. With this charming young man gallant-love was quite free from the corroding influence of vanity; his was a shade of true love, pale, but innocent and unmixed; and he respected all women, as charming beings, towards whom we are far from just. (February 20, 1820.)

As a man does not choose himself a temperament, that is to say, a soul, he cannot play a part above him. J. J. Rousseau and the Duc de Richelieu might have tried in vain; for all their cleverness, they could never have exchanged their fortunes with respect to women. I could well believe that the Duke never had moments such as those that Rousseau experienced in the park de la Chevrette with Madame d'Houdetot; at Venice, when listening to the music of the _Scuole_; and at Turin at the feet of Madame Bazile. But then he never had to blush at the ridicule that overwhelmed Rousseau in his affair with Madame de Larnage, remorse for which pursued him during the rest of his life.

A Saint-Preux's part is sweeter and fills up every moment of existence, but it must be owned that that of a Don Juan is far more brilliant. Saint-Preux's tastes may change at middle age: solitary and retired, and of pensive habits, he takes a back place on the stage of life, while Don Juan realises the magnificence of his reputation among men, and could yet perhaps please a woman of feeling by making sincerely the sacrifice of his libertine's tastes.

After all the reasons offered so far, on both sides of the question, the balance still seems to be even. What makes me think that the Werthers are the happier, is

[Pg 257] that Don Juan reduces love to the level of an ordinary affair. Instead of being able, like Werther, to shape realities to his desires, he finds, in love, desires which are imperfectly satisfied by cold reality, just as in ambition, avarice or other passions. Instead of losing himself in the enchanting reveries of crystallisation, he thinks, like a general, of the success of his manoeuvres[3] and, in a word, he kills love, instead of enjoying it more keenly than other men, as ordinary people imagine.

This seems to me unanswerable. And there is another reason, which is no less so in my eyes, though, thanks to the malignity of Providence, we must pardon men for not recognising it. The habit of justice is, to my thinking, apart from accidents, the most assured way of arriving at happiness--and a Werther is no villain.[4]

To be happy in crime, it is absolutely necessary to have no remorse. I do not know whether such a creature can exist;[5] I have never seen him. I would bet that the affair of Madame Michelin disturbed the Duc de Richelieu's nights.

One ought either to have absolutely no sympathy or be able to put the human race to death--which is impossible.[6]

People who only know love from novels will experience

[Pg 258] a natural repugnance in reading these words in favour of virtue in love. The reason is that, by the laws of the novel, the portraiture of a virtuous love is essentially tiresome and uninteresting. Thus the sentiment of virtue seems from a distance to neutralise that of love, and the words "a virtuous love" seem synonymous with a feeble love. But all this comes from weakness in the art of painting, and has nothing to do with passion such as it exists in nature.[7]

I beg to be allowed to draw a picture of my most intimate friend.

Don Juan renounces all the duties which bind him to the rest of men. In the great market of life he is a dishonest merchant, who is always buying and never paying. The idea of equality inspires the same rage in him as water in a man with hydrophobia; it is for this reason that pride of birth goes so well with the character of Don Juan. With the idea of the equality of rights disappears that of justice, or, rather, if Don Juan is sprung from an illustrious family, such common ideas have never come to him. I could easily believe that a man with an historic name is sooner disposed than another to set fire to the town in order to get his egg cooked.[8] We must excuse him; he is so possessed with

[Pg 259] self-love that he comes to the point of losing all idea of the evil he causes, and of seeing no longer anything in the universe capable of joy or sorrow except himself. In the fire of youth, when passion fills our own hearts with the pulse of life and keeps us from mistrust of others, Don Juan, all senses and apparent happiness, applauds himself for thinking only of himself, while he sees other men pay their sacrifices to duty. He imagines that he has found out the great art of living. But, in the midst of his triumph, while still scarcely thirty years of age, he perceives to his astonishment that life is wanting, and feels a growing disgust for what were all his pleasures. Don Juan told me at Thorn, in an access of melancholy: "There are not twenty different sorts of women, and once you have had two or three of each sort, satiety sets in." I answered: "It is only imagination that can for ever escape satiety. Each woman inspires a different interest, and, what is more, if chance throws the same woman in your way two or three years earlier or later in the course of life, and if chance means you to love, you can love the same woman in different manners. But a woman of gentle heart, even when she loved you, would produce in you, because of her pretensions to equality, only irritation to your pride. Your way of having women kills all the other pleasures of life; Werther's increases them a hundredfold."

This sad tragedy reaches the last act. You see Don Juan in old age, turning on this and that, never on himself, as the cause of his own satiety. You see him, tormented by a consuming poison, flying from this to that in a continual change of purpose. But, however brilliant the appearances may be, in the end he only changes one misery for another. He tries the boredom of inaction, he tries the boredom of excitement--there is nothing else for him to choose.

At last he discovers the fatal truth and confesses it to himself; henceforward he is reduced for all his enjoyment

[Pg 260] to making display of his power, and openly doing evil for evil's sake. In short, 'tis the last degree of settled gloom; no poet has dared give us a faithful picture of it--the picture, if true, would strike horror. But one may hope that a man, above the ordinary, will retrace his steps along this fatal path; for at the bottom of Don Juan's character there is a contradiction. I have supposed him a man of great intellect, and great intellect leads us to the discovery of virtue by the road that runs to the temple of glory.[9]

La Rochefoucauld, who, however, was a master of self-love, and who in real life was nothing but a silly man of letters,[10] says(267): "The pleasure of love consists in loving, and a man gets more happiness from the passion he feels than from the passion he inspires."

Don Juan's happiness consists in vanity, based, it is true, on circumstances brought about by great intelligence and activity; but he must feel that the most inconsiderable general who wins a battle, the most inconsiderable prefect who keeps his department in order, realises a more signal enjoyment than his own. The Duc de Nemours' happiness when Madame de Clèves tells him that she loves him, is, I imagine, above Napoleon's happiness at Marengo.

Love _à la_ Don Juan is a sentiment of the same kind as a taste for hunting. It is a desire for activity which must be kept alive by divers objects and by putting a man's talents continually to the test.

Love _à la_ Werther is like the feeling of a schoolboy writing a tragedy--and a thousand times better; it is a new goal, to which everything in life is referred and which changes the face of everything. Passion-love casts all nature in its sublimer aspects before the eyes of a

[Pg 261] man, as a novelty invented but yesterday. He is amazed that he has never seen the singular spectacle that is now discovered to his soul. Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most passionate interest.[11] A lover sees the woman he loves on the horizon of every landscape he comes across, and, while he travels a hundred miles to go and catch a glimpse of her for an instant, each tree, each rock speaks to him of her in a different manner and tells him something new about her. Instead of the tumult of this magic spectacle, Don Juan finds that external objects have for him no value apart from their degree of utility, and must be made amusing by some new intrigue.

Love _à la_ Werther has strange pleasures; after a year or two, the lover has now, so to speak, but one heart with her he loves; and this, strange to say, even independent of his success in love--even under a cruel mistress. Whatever he does, whatever he sees, he asks himself: "What would she say if she were with me? What would I say to her about this view of Casa-Lecchio?" He speaks to her, he hears her answer, he smiles at her fun. A hundred miles from her, and under the weight of her anger, he surprises himself, reflecting: "Léonore was very gay that night." Then he wakes up: "Good God!" he says to himself with a sigh, "there are madmen in Bedlam less mad than I."

"You make me quite impatient," said a friend of mine, to whom I read out this remark: "you are continually opposing the passionate man to the Don Juan, and that is not the point in dispute. You would be right, if a man could provide himself with passion at will. But what about indifference--what is to be done then?"--Gallant-love without horrors. Its horrors always come from a little soul, that needs to be reassured as to its own merit.

To continue.--The Don Juans must find great difficulty

[Pg 262] in agreeing with what I was saying just now of this state of the soul. Besides the fact that they can neither see nor feel this state, it gives too great a blow to their vanity. The error of their life is expecting to win in a fortnight what a timid lover can scarcely obtain in six months. They base their reckoning on experience got at the expense of those poor devils, who have neither the soul to please a woman of feeling by revealing its ingenuous workings, nor the necessary wit for the part of a Don Juan. They refuse to see that the same prize, though granted by the same woman, is not the same thing.

L'homme prudent sans cesse se méfie. C'est pour cela que des amants trompeurs Le nombre est grand. Les dames que l'on prie Font soupirer longtemps des serviteurs Qui n'ont jamais été faux de leur vie. Mais du trésor qu'elles donnent enfin Le prix n'est su que du cœur qui le goûte; Plus on l'achète et plus il est divin: Le los d'amour ne vaut pas ce qu'il coûte.[12]

(Nivernais, _Le Troubadour Guillaume de la Tour_, III, 342.)

Passion-love in the eyes of a Don Juan may be compared to a strange road, steep and toilsome, that begins, 'tis true, amidst delicious copses, but is soon lost among sheer rocks, whose aspect is anything but inviting to the eyes of the vulgar. Little by little the road penetrates into the mountain-heights, in the midst of a dark forest, where the huge trees, intercepting the daylight with their shaggy tops that seem to touch the sky, throw a kind of horror into souls untempered by dangers.

[Pg 263] After wandering with difficulty, as in an endless maze, whose multiple turnings try the patience of our self-love, on a sudden we turn a corner and find ourselves in a new world, in the delicious valley of Cashmire of Lalla Rookh. How can the Don Juans, who never venture along this road, or at most take but a few steps along it, judge of the views that it offers at the end of the journey?...

* * * * *

So you see inconstancy is good:

"Il me faut du nouveau, n'en fût-il plus au monde."[13]

Very well, I reply, you make light of oaths and justice, and what can you look for in inconstancy? Pleasure apparently.

But the pleasure to be got from a pretty woman, desired a fortnight and loved three months, is different from the pleasure to be found in a mistress, desired three years and loved ten.

If I do not insert the word "always" the reason is that I have been told old age, by altering our organs, renders us incapable of loving; myself, I don't believe it. When your mistress has become your intimate friend, she can give you new pleasures, the pleasures of old age. 'Tis a flower that, after it has been a rose in the morning--the season of flowers--becomes a delicious fruit in the evening, when the roses are no longer in season.[14]

A mistress desired three years is really a mistress in every sense of the word; you cannot approach her without trembling; and let me tell the Don Juans that a man who trembles is not bored. The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fear.

The evil of inconstancy is weariness; the evil of passion is despair and death. The cases of despair are noted and become legend. No one pays attention to the

[Pg 264] weary old libertines dying of boredom, with whom the streets of Paris are lined.

"Love blows out more brains than boredom." I have no doubt of it: boredom robs a man of everything, even the courage to kill himself.

There is a certain type of character which can find pleasure only in variety. A man who cries up Champagne at the expense of Bordeaux is only saying, with more or less eloquence: "I prefer Champagne."

Each of these wines has its partisans, and they are all right, so long as they quite understand themselves, and run after the kind of happiness best suited to their organs[15] and their habits. What ruins the case for inconstancy is that all fools range themselves on that side from lack of courage.

But after all, everyone, if he will take the trouble to look into himself, has his ideal, and there always seems to me something a little ridiculous in wanting to convert your neighbour.

[1] See the first volume of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_. I should say every volume, if Saint-Preux had happened to have the ghost of a character, but he was a real poet, a babbler without resolution, who had no courage until he had made a peroration--yes, a very dull man. Such men have an immense advantage, in not upsetting feminine pride, and in never giving their mistress a fright. Weigh the word well; it contains perhaps the whole secret of the success of dull men with distinguished women. Nevertheless love is only a passion in so far as it makes one forget one's self-love. Thus they do not completely know love, these women, who, like L., ask of it the pleasures of pride. Unconsciously, they are on the same level as the prosaic man, the object of their contempt, who in love seeks love plus vanity. And they too, they want love and pride; but love goes out with flaming cheeks; he is the proudest of despots; he will be all, or nothing.

[2] See a certain page of André Chénier (Works, p. 370); or rather look at life, though that's much harder. "In general, those whom we call patricians are much further than other men from loving anything," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (_Meditations_.)

[3] Compare Lovelace and Tom Jones.

[4] See the _Vie privée du duc de Richelieu_, nine volumes in 8vo. Why, at the moment that an assassin kills a man, does he not fall dead at his victim's feet? Why is there illness? And, if there is illness, why does not a Troistaillons die of the colic? Why does Henry IV reign twenty-one years and Lewis XV fifty-nine? Why is not the length of life in exact proportion to the degree of virtue in each man? These and other "infamous questions," English philosophers will say there is certainly no merit in posing; but there would be some merit in answering them otherwise than with insults and "cant."

[5] Note Nero after the murder of his mother, in Suetonius, and yet with what a fine lot of flattery was he surrounded.

[6] Cruelty is only a morbid kind of sympathy. Power is, after love, the first source of happiness, only because one believes oneself to be in a position to command sympathy.

[7] If you offer the spectator a picture of the sentiment of virtue side by side with the sentiment of love, you will find that you have represented a heart divided between two sentiments. In novels the only good of virtue is to be sacrificed; _vide_ Julie d'Étanges.

[8] _Vide_ Saint-Simon, _fausse couche_ of the Duchesse de Bourgoyne; and Madame de Motteville, _passim_: That princess, who was surprised to find that other women had five fingers on their hands like herself; that Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of Lewis XIII, who found it quite easy to understand why his favourites went to the scaffold just to please him. Note, in 1820, these fine gentlemen putting forward an electoral law that may bring back your Robespierres into France, etc., etc. And observe Naples in 1799. (I leave this note written in 1820. A list of the great nobles in 1778, with notes on their morals, compiled by General Laclos, seen at Naples in the library of the Marchese Berio--a very scandalous manuscript of more than three hundred pages.)

[9] The character of the young man of the privileged classes in 1820 is pretty correctly represented by the brave Bothwell of _Old Mortality_.

[10] See Memoirs of de Retz and the unpleasant minute he gave the coadjutor at the Parliament between two doors.

[11] Vol. 1819. Honeysuckle on the slopes.

[12] [A prudent man continually mistrusts himself. 'Tis the reason why the number of false lovers is great. The women whom men worship, make their servants, who have never been false in their life, sigh a long time. But the value of the prize that they give them in the end, can only be known to the heart that tastes it; the greater the cost, the more divine it is. The praises of love are not worth its pains.--Tr.]

[13] [I must have novelty, even if there were none left in the world.--Tr. ]

[14] See the Memoirs of Collé--his wife.

[15] Physiologists, who understand our organs, tell you: "Injustice, in the relations of social life, produces harshness, diffidence and misery."

[Pg 265]

## BOOK III

[Pg 266] [Pg 267] SCATTERED FRAGMENTS

Under this title, which I would willingly have made still more modest, I have brought together, without excessive severity, a selection made from three or four hundred playing cards, on which I found a few lines scrawled in pencil. That which, I suppose, must be called the original manuscript, for want of a simpler name, was in many places made up of pieces of paper of all sizes, written on in pencil, and joined together by Lisio with sealing-wax, to save him the trouble of copying them afresh. He told me once that nothing he ever noted down seemed to him worth the trouble of recopying an hour later. I have entered so fully into all this in the hope that it may serve as an excuse for repetitions.

I

Everything can be acquired in solitude, except character.

II

1821. Hatred, love and avarice, the three ruling passions at Rome, and with gambling added, almost the only ones.

At first sight the Romans seem ill-natured, but they are only very much on their guard and blessed with an imagination which flares up at the least suggestion.

If they give a gratuitous proof of ill-nature, it is the case of a man, gnawed by fear, and testing his gun to reassure himself.

[Pg 268] III

If I were to say, as I believe, that good-nature is the keynote of the Parisian's character, I should be very frightened of having offended him.--"I won't be good!"

IV

A proof of love comes to light, when all the pleasures and all the pains, which all the other passions and wants of man can produce, in a moment cease working.

V

Prudery is a kind of avarice--the worst of all.

VI

To have a solid character is to have a long and tried experience of life's disillusions and misfortunes. Then it is a question of desiring constantly or not at all.

VII

Love, such as it exists in smart society, is the love of battle, the love of gambling.

VIII

Nothing kills gallant love like gusts of passion-love from the other side. (Contessina L. Forlì--1819).

IX

A great fault in women, and the most offensive of all to a man a little worthy of that name: The public, in matters of feeling, never soars above mean ideas, and women make the public the supreme judge of their lives--even the most distinguished women, I maintain, often unconsciously, and even while believing and saying the contrary. (Brescia, 1819).

[Pg 269] X

Prosaic is a new word, which once I thought absurd, for nothing could be colder than our poetry. If there has been any warmth in France for the last fifty years, it is assuredly to be found in its prose.

But anyhow, the little Countess L---- used the word and I like writing it.

The definition of prosaic is to be got from _Don Quixote_, and "the complete contrast of Knight and Squire." The Knight tall and pale; the Squire fat and fresh. The former all heroism and courtesy; the latter all selfishness and servility. The former always full of romantic and touching fancies; the latter a model of worldly wisdom, a compendium of wise saws. The one always feeding his soul on dreams of heroism and daring; the other ruminating some really sensible scheme in which, never fear, he will take into strict account all the shameful, selfish little movements the human heart is prone to.

At the very moment when the former should be brought to his senses by the non-success of yesterday's dreams, he is already busy on his castles in Spain for to-day.

You ought to have a prosaic husband and to choose a romantic lover.

Marlborough had a prosaic soul: Henry IV, in love at fifty-five with a young princess, who could not forget his age, a romantic heart.[1]

There are fewer prosaic beings among the nobility than in the middle-class.

This is the fault of trade, it makes people prosaic.

[1] Dulaure, _History of Paris_.

Silent episode in the queen's apartment the evening of the flight of the Princesse de Condé: the ministers transfixed to the wall and mute, the King striding up and down.

[Pg 270] XI

Nothing so interesting as passion: for there everything is unforeseen, and the principal is the victim. Nothing so flat as gallantry, where everything is a matter of calculation, as in all the prosaic affairs of life.

XII

At the end of a visit you always finish by treating a lover better than you meant to. (L., _November 2nd_, 1818).

XIII

In spite of genius in an upstart, the influence of rank always makes itself felt. Think of Rousseau losing his heart to all the "ladies" he met, and weeping tears of rapture because the Duke of L----, one of the dullest courtiers of the period, deigns to take the right side rather than the left in a walk with a certain M. Coindet, friend of Rousseau! (L., _May 3rd_, 1820.)

XIV

Women's only educator is the world. A mother in love does not hesitate to appear in the seventh heaven of delight, or in the depth of despair, before her daughters aged fourteen or fifteen. Remember that, under these happy skies, plenty of women are quite nice-looking till forty-five, and the majority are married at eighteen.

Think of La Valchiusa saying yesterday of Lampugnani: "Ah, that man was made for me, he could love, ... etc., etc," and so on in this strain to a friend--all before her daughter, a little thing of fourteen or fifteen, very much on the alert, and whom she also took with her on the more than friendly walks with the lover in question.

Sometimes girls get hold of sound rules of conduct, For examples take Madame Guarnacci, addressing her two daughters and two men, who have never called on

[Pg 271] her before. For an hour and a half she treats them to profound maxims, based on examples within their own knowledge (that of La Cercara in Hungary), on the precise point at which it is right to punish with infidelity a lover who misbehaves himself. (Ravenna, _January 23rd_, 1820.)

XV

The sanguine man, the true Frenchman (Colonel M----) instead of being tormented by excess of feeling, like Rousseau, if he has a rendezvous for the next evening at seven, sees everything, right up to the blessed moment, through rosy spectacles. People of this kind are not in the least susceptible to passion-love; it would upset their sweet tranquillity. I will go so far as to say that perhaps they would find its transports a nuisance, or at all events be humiliated by the timidity it produces.

XVI

Most men of the world, through vanity, caution or disaster, let themselves love a woman freely only after intimate intercourse.

XVII

With very gentle souls a woman needs to be easy-going in order to encourage crystallisation.

XVIII

A woman imagines that the voice of the public is speaking through the mouth of the first fool or the first treacherous friend who claims to be its faithful interpreter to her.

XIX

There is a delicious pleasure in clasping in your arms a woman who has wronged you grievously, who has been

[Pg 272] your bitter enemy for many a day, and is ready to be so again. Good fortune of the French officers in Spain, 1812.

XX

Solitude is what one wants, to relish one's own heart and to love; but to succeed one must go amongst men, here, there and everywhere.

XXI

"All the observations of the French on love are well written, carefully and without exaggeration, but they bear only on light affections," said that delightful person, Cardinal Lante.

XXII

In Goldoni's comedy, the _Innamorati_, all the workings of passion are excellent; it is the very repulsive meanness of style and thought which revolts one. The contrary is true of a French comedy.

XXIII

The youth of 1822: To say "serious turn of mind, active disposition" means "sacrifice of the present to the future." Nothing develops the soul like the power and the habit of making such sacrifices. I foresee the probability of more great passions in 1832 than in 1772.

XXIV

The choleric temperament, when it does not display itself in too repulsive a form, is one perhaps most apt of all to strike and keep alive the imagination of women. If the choleric temperament does not fall among propitious surroundings, as Lauzun in Saint-Simon (Memoirs), the difficulty is to grow used to it. But

[Pg 273] once grasped by a woman, this character must fascinate her: yes, even the savage and fanatic Balfour (_Old Mortality_). For women it is the antithesis of the prosaic.

XXV

In love one often doubts what one believes most strongly (La R., 355). In every other passion, what once we have proved, we no longer doubt.

XXVI

Verse was invented to assist the memory. Later it was kept to increase the pleasure of reading by the sight of the difficulty overcome. Its survival nowadays in dramatic art is a relic of barbarity. Example: the Cavalry Regulations put into verse by M. de Bonnay.

XXVII

While this jealous slave feeds his soul on boredom, avarice, hatred and other such poisonous, cold passions, I spend a night of happiness dreaming of her--of her who, through mistrust, treats me badly.

XXVIII

It needs a great soul to dare have a simple style. That is why Rousseau put so much rhetoric into the _Nouvelle Héloïse_--which makes it unreadable for anyone over thirty.

XXIX

"The greatest reproach we could possibly make against ourselves is, certainly, to have let fade, like the shadowy phantoms produced by sleep, the ideas of honour and justice, which from time to time well up in our hearts." (_Letter from Jena, March_, 1819.)

[Pg 274] XXX

A respectable woman is in the country and passes an hour in the hot-house with her gardener. Certain people, whose views she has upset, accuse her of having found a lover in this gardener. What answer is there?

Speaking absolutely, the thing is possible. She could say: "My character speaks for me, look at my behaviour throughout life"--only all this is equally invisible to the eyes of the ill-natured who won't see, and the fools who can't. (Salviati, Rome, _July 23rd_, 1819.)

XXXI

I have known a man find out that his rival's love was returned, and yet the rival himself remain blinded to the fact by his passion.

XXXII

The more desperately he is in love, the more violent the pressure a man is forced to put upon himself, in order to risk annoying the woman he loves by taking her hand.

XXXIII

Ludicrous rhetoric but, unlike that of Rousseau, inspired by true passion. (Memoirs of M. de Mau..., _Letter of S----_.)

XXXIV

NATURALNESS

I saw, or I thought I saw, this evening the triumph of naturalness in a young woman, who certainly seems to me to possess a great character. She adores, obviously, I think, one of her cousins and must have confessed to herself the state of her heart. The cousin is in love with her, but as she is very serious with him, thinks she does not like him, and lets himself be fascinated by the marks

[Pg 275] of preference shown him by Clara, a young widow and friend of Mélanie. I think he will marry her. Mélanie sees it and suffers all that a proud heart, struggling involuntarily with a violent passion, is capable of suffering. She has only to alter her ways a little; but she would look upon it as a piece of meanness, the consequences of which would affect her whole life, to depart one instant from her natural self.

XXXV

Sappho saw in love only sensual intoxication or physical pleasure made sublime by crystallisation. Anacreon looked for sensual and intellectual amusement. There was too little security in Antiquity for people to find leisure for passion-love.

XXXVI

The foregoing fact fully justifies me in rather laughing at people who think Homer superior to Tasso. Passion-love did exist in the time of Homer, and at no great distance from Greece.

XXXVII

Woman with a heart, if you wish to know whether the man you adore loves you with passion-love, study your lover's early youth. Every man of distinction in the early days of his life is either a ridiculous enthusiast or an unfortunate. A man easy to please, of gay and cheerful humour, can never love with the passion your heart requires.

Passion I call only that which has gone through long misfortunes, misfortunes which novels take good care not to depict--what's more they can't!

[Pg 276] XXXVIII

A bold resolution can change in an instant the most extreme misfortune into quite a tolerable state of things. The evening of a defeat, a man is retreating in hot haste, his charger already spent. He can hear distinctly the troop of cavalry galloping in pursuit. Suddenly he stops, dismounts, recharges his carbine and pistols, and makes up his mind to defend himself. Straightway, instead of having death, he has a cross of the Legion of Honour before his eyes.

XXXIX

Basis of English habits. About 1730, while we already had Voltaire and Fontenelle, a machine was invented in England to separate the grain, after threshing, from the chaff. It worked by means of a wheel, which gave the air enough movement to blow away the bits of chaff. But in that biblical country the peasants pretended that it was wicked to go against the will of Divine Providence, and to produce an artificial wind like this, instead of begging Heaven with an ardent prayer for enough wind to thresh the corn and waiting for the moment appointed by the God of Israel. Compare this with French peasants.[1]

[1] For the actual state of English habits, see the Life of Mr. Beattie, written by an intimate friend. The reader will be edified by the profound humility of Mr. Beattie, when he receives ten guineas from an old Marchioness in order to slander Hume. The trembling aristocracy relies on the bishops with incomes of £200,000, and pays in money and honour so-called liberal writers to throw mud at Chénier. (_Edinburgh Review_, 1821.)

The most disgusting cant leaks through on all sides. Everything except the portrayal of primitive and energetic feelings is stifled by it: impossible to write a joyous page in English.

XL

No doubt about it--'tis a form of madness to expose oneself to passion-love. In some cases, however, the cure

[Pg 277] works too energetically. American girls in the United States are so saturated and fortified with reasonable ideas, that in that country love, the flower of life, has deserted youth. At Boston a girl can be left perfectly safely alone with a handsome stranger--in all probability she's thinking of nothing but her marriage settlement.

XLI

In France men who have lost their wives are melancholy; widows, on the contrary, merry and light-hearted. There is a proverb current among women on the felicity of this state. So there must be some inequality in the articles of union.

XLII

People who are happy in their love have an air of profound preoccupation, which, for a Frenchman, is the same as saying an air of profound gloom. (Dresden, 1818.)

XLIII

The more generally a man pleases, the less deeply can he please.

XLIV

As a result of imitation in the early years of life, we contract the passions of our parents, even when these very passions poison our life. (L.'s pride.)

XLV

The most honourable source of feminine pride is a woman's fear of degrading herself in her lover's eyes by some hasty step or some action that he may think unwomanly.

[Pg 278] XLVI

Real love renders the thought of death frequent, agreeable, unterrifying, a mere subject of comparison, the price we are willing to pay for many a thing.

XLVII

How often have I exclaimed for all my bravery: "If anyone would blow out my brains, I'd thank him before I expired, if there were time." A man can only be brave, with the woman he loves, by loving her a little less. (S., _February_, 1820.)

XLVIII

"I could never love!" a young woman said to me. "Mirabeau and his letters to Sophie have given me a disgust for great souls. Those fatal letters impressed me like a personal experience."

Try a plan which you never read of in novels; let two years' constancy assure you, before intimate intercourse, of your lover's heart.

XLIX

Ridicule scares love. Ridicule is impossible in Italy: what's good form in Venice is odd at Naples--consequently nothing's odd in Italy. Besides, nothing that gives pleasure is found fault with. 'Tis this that does away with the fool's honour and half the farce.

L

Children command by tears, and if people do not attend to their wishes, they hurt themselves on purpose. Young women are piqued from a sense of honour.

[Pg 279] LI

'Tis a common reflection, but one for that reason easily forgotten, that every day sensitive souls become rarer, cultured minds commoner.

LII

FEMININE PRIDE

I have just witnessed a striking example--but on mature consideration I should need fifteen pages to give a proper idea of it. If I dared, I would much rather note the consequences; my eyes have convinced me beyond the possibility of doubt. But, no, it is a conviction I must give up all idea of communicating, there are too many little details. Such pride is the opposite of French vanity. So far as I can remember, the only work, in which I have seen a sketch of it, is that part of Madame Roland's Memoirs, where she recounts the petty reasonings she made as a girl. (Bologna, _April 18th_, 2 a.m.)

LIII

In France, most women make no account of a young man until they have turned him into a coxcomb. It is only then that he can flatter their vanity. (Duclos.)

LIV

Zilietti said to me at midnight (at the charming Marchesina R...'s): "I'm not going to dine at San Michele (an inn). Yesterday I said some smart things--I was joking with Cl...; it might make me conspicuous."

Don't go and think that Zilietti is either a fool or a coward. He is a prudent and very rich man in this happy land. (Modena, 1820.)

[Pg 280] LV

What is admirable in America is the government, not society. Elsewhere government does the harm. At Boston they have changed parts, and government plays the hypocrite, in order not to shock society.

LVI

Italian girls, if they love, are entirely given over to natural inspiration. At the very most all that can aid them is a handful of excellent maxims, which they have picked up by listening at the keyhole. As if fate had decreed that everything here should combine to preserve naturalness, they read no novels--and for this reason, that there are none. At Geneva or in France, on the contrary, a girls falls in love at sixteen in order to be a heroine, and at each step, almost at each tear, she asks herself: "Am I not just like Julie d'Étanges? "

LVII

The husband of a young woman adored by a lover, whom she treats unkindly and scarcely allows to kiss her hand, has, at the very most, only the grossest physical pleasure, where the lover would find the charms and transports of the keenest happiness that exists on earth.

LVIII

The laws of the imagination are still so little understood, that I include the following estimate, though perhaps it is all quite wrong.

I seem to distinguish two sorts of imagination:--

1. Imagination like Fabio's, ardent, impetuous, inconsiderate, leading straight to action, consuming itself, and already languishing at a delay of twenty-four hours. Impatience is its prime characteristic; it becomes enraged against that which it cannot obtain. It sees all

[Pg 281] exterior objects, but they only serve to inflame it. It assimilates them to its own substance, and converts them straight away to the profit of passion.

2. Imagination which takes fire slowly and little by little, but which loses in time the perception of exterior objects, and comes to find occupation and nourishment in nothing but its own passion. This last sort of imagination goes quite easily with slowness, or even scarcity, of ideas. It is favourable to constancy. It is the imagination of the greater part of those poor German girls, who are dying of love and consumption. That sad spectacle, so frequent beyond the Rhine, is never met with in Italy.

LIX

Imaginative habits. A Frenchman is really shocked by eight changes of scenery in one act of a tragedy. Such a man is incapable of pleasure in seeing Macbeth. He consoles himself by damning Shakespeare.

LX

In France the provinces are forty years behind Paris in all that regards women. A. C., a married woman, tells me that she only liked to read certain parts of Lanzi's Memoirs. Such stupidity is too much for me; I can no longer find a word to say to her. As if that were a book one _could_ put down!

Want of naturalness--the great failing in provincial women.

Their effusive and gracious gestures; those who play the first fiddle in the town are worse than the others.

LXI

Goethe, or any other German genius, esteems money at what it's worth. Until he has got an income of six thousand francs, he must think of nothing but his

[Pg 282] banking-account. After that he must never think of it again. The fool, on his side, does not understand the advantage there is of feeling and thinking like Goethe. All his life he feels in terms of money and thinks of sums of money. It is owing to this support from both sides, that the prosaic in this world seem to come off so much better than the high-minded.

LXII

In Europe, desire is inflamed by constraint; in America it is dulled by liberty.

LXIII

A mania for discussion has got hold of the younger generation and stolen it from love. While they are considering whether Napoleon was of service to France, they let the age of love speed past. Even with those who mean to be young, it is all affectation--a tie, a spur, their martial swagger, their all-absorbing self--and they forget to cast a glance at the girl who passes by so modestly and cannot go out more than once a week through want of means.

LXIV

I have suppressed a chapter on Prudery, and others as well.

I am happy to find the following passage in Horace Walpole's Memoirs:

_The Two Elizabeths_. Let us compare the daughters of two ferocious men, and see which was sovereign of a civilised nation, which of a barbarous one. Both were Elizabeths. The daughter of Peter (of Russia) was absolute, yet spared a competitor and a rival; and thought the person of an empress had sufficient allurements for as many of her subjects as she chose to honour with the

[Pg 283] communication. Elizabeth of England could neither forgive the claim of Mary Stuart nor her charms, but ungenerously imprisoned her (as George IV did Napoleon[1]) when imploring protection, and, without the sanction of either despotism or law, sacrificed many to her great and little jealousy. Yet this Elizabeth piqued herself on chastity; and while she practised every ridiculous art of coquetry to be admired at an unseemly age, kept off lovers whom she encouraged, and neither gratified her own desires nor their ambition. Who can help preferring the honest, open-hearted barbarian empress? (Lord Orford's Memoirs.)

[1] [Added, of course, by Stendhal.--Tr.]

LXV

Extreme familiarity may destroy crystallisation. A charming girl of sixteen fell in love with a handsome youth of the same age, who never failed one evening to pass under her window at nightfall. Her mother invites him to spend a week with them in the country--a desperate remedy, I agree. But the girl was romantic, and the youth rather dull: after three days she despised him.

LXVI

Ave Maria--twilight in Italy, the hour of tenderness, of the soul's pleasures and of melancholy--sensation intensified by the sound of those lovely bells.

Hours of pleasure, which only in memory touch the senses.... (Bologna, _April 17th_, 1817.)

LXVII

A young man's first love-affair on entering society is ordinarily one of ambition. He rarely declares his love for a sweet, amiable and innocent young girl. How tremble before her, adore her, feel oneself in the presence of a divinity? Youth must love a being whose qualities lift him up in his own eyes. It is in the decline of life

[Pg 284] that we sadly come back to love the simple and the innocent, despairing of the sublime. Between the two comes true love, which thinks of nothing but itself.

LXVIII

The existence of great souls is not suspected. They hide away; all that is seen is a little originality. There are more great souls than one would think.

LXIX

The first clasp of the beloved's hand--what a moment that is! The only joy to be compared to it is the ravishing joy of power--which statesmen and kings make pretence of despising. This joy also has its crystallisation, though it demands a colder and more reasonable imagination. Think of a man whom, a quarter of an hour ago, Napoleon has called to be a minister.

LXX

The celebrated Johannes von Müller(54) said to me at Cassel in 1808--Nature has given strength to the North and wit to the South.

LXXI

Nothing more untrue than the maxim: No man is a hero before his valet. Or, rather, nothing truer in the monarchic sense of the word hero--the affected hero, like Hippolytus in _Phèdre_. Desaix, for example, would have been a hero even before his valet (it's true I don't know if he had one), and a still greater hero for his valet than for anyone else. Turenne and Fénelon might each have been a Desaix, but for "good form" and the necessary amount of force.

[Pg 285] LXXII

Here is blasphemy. I, a Dutchman, dare say this: the French possess neither the true pleasures of conversation nor the true pleasures of the theatre; instead of relaxation and complete unrestraint, they mean hard labour. Among the sources of fatigue which hastened on the death of Mme. de Staël I have heard counted the strain of conversation during her last winter.[1]

[1] Memoirs of Marmontel, Montesquieu's conversation.

LXXIII

The degree of tension of the nerves in the ear, necessary to hear each note, explains well enough the physical part of one's pleasure in music.

LXXIV

What degrades rakish women is the opinion, which they share with the public, that they are guilty of a great sin.

LXXV

In an army in retreat, warn an Italian soldier of a danger which it is no use running--he'll almost thank you and he'll carefully avoid it. If, from kindness, you point out the same danger to a French soldier, he'll think you're defying him--his sense of honour is piqued, and he runs his head straight against it. If he dared, he'd like to jeer at you. (Gyat, 1812.)

LXXVI

In France, any idea that can be explained only in the very simplest terms is sure to be despised, even the most useful. The Monitorial system(43), invented by a Frenchman, could never catch on. It is exactly the opposite in Italy.

[Pg 286] LXXVII

Suppose you are passionately in love with a woman and that your imagination has not run dry. One evening she is tactless enough to say, looking at you tenderly and abashed: "Er--yes--come to-morrow at midday; I shall be in to no one but you." You cannot sleep; you cannot think of anything; the morning is torture. At last twelve o'clock strikes, and every stroke of the clock seems to clash and clang on your heart.

LXXVIII

In love, to share money is to increase love, to give it is to kill love.

You are putting off the present difficulty, and the odious fear of want in the future; or rather you are sowing the seeds of policy, of the feeling of being two.--You destroy sympathy.

LXXIX

Court ceremonies involuntarily call to mind scenes from Aretine--the way the women display their bare shoulders, like officers their uniform, and, for all their charms, make no more sensation!

There you see what in a mercenary way all will do to win a man's approval; there you see a whole world acting without morality and, what's more, without passion. All this added to the presence of the women with their very low dresses and their expression of malice, greeting with a sardonic smile everything but selfish advantage payable in the hard cash of solid pleasures--why! it gives the idea of scenes from the Bagno. It drives far away all doubts suggested by virtue or the conscious satisfaction of a heart at peace with itself. Yet I have seen the feeling of isolation amidst all this dispose gentle hearts to love. (_Mars at the Tuileries_, 1811.)

[Pg 287] LXXX

A soul taken up with bashfulness and the effort to suppress it, is incapable of pleasure. Pleasure is a luxury--to enjoy it, security is essential and must run no risks.

LXXXI

A test of love in which mercenary women cannot disguise their feelings.--"Do you feel real delight in reconciliation or is it only the thought of what you'll gain by it?"

LXXXII

The poor things who fill La Trappe(55) are wretches who have not had quite enough courage to kill themselves. I except, of course, the heads, who find pleasure in being heads.

LXXXIII

It is a misfortune to have known Italian beauty: you lose your sensibility. Out of Italy, you prefer the conversation of men.

LXXXIV

Italian prudence looks to the preservation of life, and this allows free play to the imagination. (Cf. a version of the death of Pertica the famous comic actor, December 24th, 1821.) On the other hand, English prudence, wholly relative to the gain and safe-keeping of just enough money to cover expenses, demands detailed and everyday exactitude, and this habit paralyses the imagination. Notice also how enormously it strengthens the conception of duty.

LXXXV

The immense respect for money, which is the first and foremost vice of Englishmen and Italians, is less felt

[Pg 288] in France and reduced to perfectly rational limits in Germany.

LXXXVI

French women, having never known the happiness of true passion, are anything but exacting over internal domestic happiness and the everyday side of life. (_Compiègne_.)

LXXXVII

"You talk to me of ambition for driving away boredom," said Kamensky: "but all the time I used to gallop a couple of leagues every evening, for the pleasure of seeing the Princess at Kolich, I was on terms of intimacy with a despot whom I respected, who had my whole good fortune in his power and the satisfaction of all my possible desires."

LXXXVIII

Pretty contrast! On the one hand--perfection in the little niceties of worldly wisdom and of dress, great kindliness, want of genius, daily cult of a thousand and one petty observances, and incapacity for three days' attention to the same event: on the other--puritan severity, biblical cruelty, strict probity, timid, morbid self-love and universal cant! And yet these are the two foremost nations of the world.

LXXXIX

As among princesses there has been an Empress Catherine II, why should a female Samuel Bernard(56), or a Lagrange(57) not appear among the middle-class?

XC

Alviza calls this an unpardonable want of refinement--to dare to make love by letter to a woman you adore and who looks at you tenderly, but declares that she can never love you.

[Pg 289] XCI

It was a mistake of the greatest philosopher that France has had, not to have stayed in some Alpine solitude, in some remote abode, thence to launch his book on Paris without ever coming there himself(58). Seeing Helvétius so simple and straightforward, unnatural, hot-house people like Suard, Marmontel or Diderot could never imagine they had a great philosopher before them. They were perfectly honest in their contempt for his profound reason. First of all, it was simple--a fault unpardonable in France; secondly, the author, not, of course, his book, was lowered in value by this weakness--the extreme importance he attached to getting what in France is called glory, to being, like Balzac, Voiture or Fontenelle, the fashion among his contemporaries.

Rousseau had too much feeling and too little logic, Buffon, in his Botanical Garden, was too hypocritical, and Voltaire too paltry to be able to judge the principle of Helvétius.

Helvétius was guilty of a little slip in calling this principle _interest_, instead of giving it a pretty name like _pleasure_;[1] but what are we to think of a nation's literature, which shows its sense by letting itself be led astray by a fault so slight?

The ordinary clever man, Prince Eugene of Savoy for example, finding himself in the position of Regulus, would have stayed quietly at Rome, and even laughed at the stupidity of the Carthaginian Senate. Regulus goes back to Carthage. Prince Eugene would have been prosecuting his own interest, and in exactly the same way Regulus was prosecuting his.

All through life a noble spirit is seeing possibilities

[Pg 290] of action, of which a common spirit can form no idea. The very second the possibility of that action becomes visible to the noble spirit, it is its interest thus to act.

If this noble spirit did not perform the action, which it has just perceived, it would despise itself--it would be unhappy. Man's duties are in the ratio of his moral range. The principle of Helvétius holds good, even in the wildest exaltations of love, even in suicide. It is contrary to his nature, it is an impossibility for a man not to do, always and at any moment you choose to take, that which is possible and which gives him most pleasure at that moment to do.

[1] Torva leoena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam; Florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella. .... Trahit sua quemque voluptas. (Virgil, Eclogue II.)

XCII

To have firmness of character means to have experienced the influence of others on oneself. Therefore others are necessary.

XCIII

ANCIENT LOVE

No posthumous love-letters of Roman ladies have been printed. Petronius has written a charming book, but it is only debauch that he has painted.

For love at Rome, apart from Virgil's story of Dido[1] and his second Eclogue, we have no evidence more precise than the writings of the three great poets, Ovid, Tibullus and Propertius.

Now, Parny's _Elegies_ or Colardeau's _Letter of Héloïse to Abelard_ are pictures of a very imperfect and vague kind, if you compare them to some of the letters in the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, to those of the Portuguese Nun, of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, of Mirabeau's Sophie, of Werther, etc., etc.

[Pg 291] Poetry, with its obligatory comparisons, its mythology in which the poet doesn't believe, its dignity of style _à la_ Louis XIV, and all its superfluous stock of ornaments called poetical, is very inferior to prose when it comes to a question of giving a clear and precise idea of the working of the heart. And, in this class of writing, clearness alone is effective.

Tibullus, Ovid and Propertius had better taste than our poets; they have painted love such as it was to be found among the proud citizens of Rome: moreover, they lived under Augustus, who, having shut the temple of Janus, sought to debase these citizens to the condition of the loyal subjects of a monarchy.

The mistresses of these three great poets were coquettes, faithless and venal women; in their company the poets only sought physical pleasure, and never, I should think, caught a glimpse of the sublime sentiments[2] which, thirteen centuries later, stirred the heart of the gentle Héloïse.

I borrow the following passage from a distinguished man of letters,[3] and one who knows the Latin poets much better than I do:--

The brilliant genius of Ovid, the rich imagination of Propertius, the impressionable heart of Tibullus, doubtless inspired them with verses of a different flavour, but all, in the same manner, they loved women of much the same kind. They desire, they triumph, they have fortunate rivals, they are jealous, they quarrel and make it up; they are faithless in their turn, they are forgiven; and they recover their happiness only to be ruffled by the return of the same mischances.

Corinna is married. The first lessons that Ovid gives her are to teach her the address with which to deceive her husband: the signs they are to make each other before him and in society,

[Pg 292] so that they can understand each other and be understood only by themselves. Enjoyment quickly follows; afterwards quarrels, and, what you wouldn't expect from so gallant a man as Ovid, insults and blows; then excuses, tears and forgiveness. Sometimes he addresses himself to subordinates--to the servants, to his mistress' porter, who is to open to him at night, to a cursed old beldam who corrupts her and teaches her to sell herself for gold, to an old eunuch who keeps watch over her, to a slave-girl who is to convey the tablets in which he begs for a rendezvous. The rendezvous is refused: he curses his tablets, that have had such sorry fortune. Fortune shines brighter: he adjures the dawn not to come to interrupt his happiness.

Soon he accuses himself of numberless infidelities, of his indiscriminate taste for women. A moment after, Corinna is herself faithless; he cannot bear the idea that he has given her lessons from which she reaps the profit with someone else. Corinna in her turn is jealous; she abuses him like a fury rather than a gentle woman; she accuses him of loving a slave-girl. He swears that there is nothing in it and writes to the slave--yet everything that made Corinna angry was true. But how did she get to know of it? What clue had led to their betrayal? He asks the slave-girl for another rendezvous. If she refuse him, he threatens to confess everything to Corinna. He jokes with a friend about his two loves and the trouble and pleasure they give him. Soon after, it is Corinna alone that fills his thoughts. She is everything to him. He sings his triumph, as if it were his first victory. After certain incidents, which for more than one reason we must leave in Ovid, and others, which it would be too long to recount, he discovers that Corinna's husband has become too lax. He is no longer jealous; our lover does not like this, and threatens to leave the wife, if the husband does not resume his jealousy. The husband obeys him but too well; he has Corinna watched so closely, that Ovid can no longer come to her. He complains of this close watch, which he had himself provoked--but he will find a way to get round it. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to succeed therein. Corinna's infidelities begin again and multiply; her intrigues become so public, that the only boon that Ovid can crave of her, is that she will take some trouble to deceive him, and show a little less obviously what she really is. Such were the morals of Ovid and his mistress, such is the character of their love.

Cynthia is the first love of Propertius, and she will be his last.

[Pg 293] No sooner is he happy, but he is jealous. Cynthia is too fond of dress; he begs her to shun luxury and to love simplicity. He himself is given up to more than one kind of debauch. Cynthia expects him; he only comes to her at dawn, leaving a banquet in his cups. He finds her asleep; it is a long time before she wakes, in spite of the noise he makes and even of his kisses; at last she opens her eyes and reproaches him as he deserves. A friend tries to detach him from Cynthia; he gives his friend a eulogy of her beauty and talents. He is threatened with losing her; she goes off with a soldier; she means to follow the army; she will expose herself to every danger in order to follow her soldier. Propertius does not storm; he weeps and prays heaven for her happiness. He will never leave the house she has deserted; he will look out for strangers who have seen her, and will never leave off asking them for news of Cynthia. She is touched by love so great. She deserts the soldier and stays with the poet. He gives thanks to Apollo and the Muses; he is drunk with his happiness. This happiness is soon troubled by a new access of jealousy, interrupted by separation and by absence. Far from Cynthia, he can only think of her. Her past infidelities make him fear for news. Death does not frighten him, he only fears to lose Cynthia; let him be but certain that she will be faithful and he will go down without regret to the grave.

After more treachery, he fancies he is delivered from his love; but soon he is again in its bonds. He paints the most ravishing portrait of his mistress, her beauty, the elegance of her dress, her talents in singing, poetry and dancing; everything redoubles and justifies his love. But Cynthia, as perverse as she is captivating, dishonours herself before the whole town by such scandalous adventures that Propertius can no longer love her without shame. He blushes, but he cannot shake her off. He will be her lover, her husband; he will never love any but Cynthia. They part and come together again. Cynthia is jealous, he reassures her. He will never love any other woman. But in fact it is never one woman he loves--it is all women. He never has enough of them, he is insatiable of pleasure. To recall him to himself, Cynthia has to desert him yet again. Then his complaints are as vigorous as if he had never been faithless himself. He tries to escape. He seeks distraction in debauch.--Is he drunk as usual? He pretends that a troupe of loves meets him and brings him back to Cynthia's feet. Reconciliation is followed by more storms. Cynthia, at one

[Pg 294] of their supper parties, gets heated with wine like himself, upsets the table and hits him over the head. Propertius thinks this charming. More perfidy forces him at last to break his chains; he tries to go away; he means to travel in Greece; he completes all his plans for the journey, but he renounces the project--and all in order to see himself once more the butt of new outrages. Cynthia does not confine herself to betraying him; she makes him the laughing-stock of his rivals. But illness seizes her and she dies. She reproaches him with his faithlessness, his caprices and his desertion of her in her last moments, and swears that she herself, in spite of appearances, was always faithful.

Such are the morals and adventures of Propertius and his mistress; such in abstract is the history of their love. Such was the woman that a soul like Propertius was reduced to loving.

Ovid and Propertius were often faithless, but never inconstant. Confirmed libertines, they distribute their homage far and wide, but always return to take up the same chains again. Corinna and Cynthia have womankind for rivals, but no woman in particular. The Muse of these two poets is faithful, if their love is not, and no other names besides those of Corinna and of Cynthia figure in their verses. Tibullus, a tender lover and tender poet, less lively and less headlong in his tastes, has not their constancy. Three beauties are one after the other the objects of his love and of his verses. Delia is the first, the most celebrated and also the best beloved. Tibullus has lost his fortune, but he still has the country and Delia. To enjoy her amid the peaceful fields; to be able, at his ease, to press Delia's hand in his; to have her for his only mourner at his funeral--he makes no other prayers. Delia is kept shut up by a jealous husband; he will penetrate into her prison, in spite of any Argus and triple bolts. He will forget all his troubles in her arms. He falls ill and Delia alone fills his thoughts. He exhorts her to be always chaste, to despise gold, and to grant none but him the love she has granted him. But Delia does not follow his advice. He thought he could put up with her infidelity; but it is too much for him and he begs Delia and Venus for pity. He seeks in wine a remedy and does not find it; he can neither soften his regret nor cure himself of his love. He turns to Delia's husband, deceived like himself, and reveals to him all the tricks she uses to attract and see her lovers. If the husband does not know how to keep watch over her, let her be trusted to himself; he will manage right enough to ward

[Pg 295] the lovers off and to keep from their toils the author of their common wrongs. He is appeased and returns to her; he remembers Delia's mother who favoured their love; the memory of this good woman opens his heart once more to tender thoughts, and all Delia's wrongs are forgotten. But she is soon guilty of others more serious. She lets herself be corrupted by gold and presents; she gives herself to another, to others. At length Tibullus breaks his shameful chains and says good-bye to her for ever.

He passes under the sway of Nemesis and is no happier; she loves only gold and cares little for poetry and the gifts of genius. Nemesis is a greedy woman who sells herself to the highest bidder; he curses her avarice, but he loves her and cannot live unless she loves him. He tries to move her with touching images. She has lost her young sister; he will go and weep on her tomb and confide his grief to her dumb ashes. The shade of her sister will take offence at the tears that Nemesis causes to flow. She must not despise her anger. The sad image of her sister might come at night to trouble her sleep.... But these sad memories force tears from Nemesis--and at that price he could not buy even happiness. Neaera is his third mistress. He has long enjoyed her love; he only prays the gods that he may live and die with her; but she leaves him, she is gone; he can only think of her, she is his only prayer; he has seen in a dream Apollo, who announces to him that Neaera is unfaithful. He refuses to believe this dream; he could not survive his misfortune, and none the less the misfortune is there. Neaera is faithless; once more Tibullus is deserted. Such was his character and fortune, such is the triple and all unhappy story of his loves.

In him particularly there is a sweet, all-pervading melancholy, that gives even to his pleasures the tone of dreaminess and sadness which constitutes his charm. If any poet of antiquity introduced moral sensibility into love, it was Tibullus; but these fine shades of feeling which he expresses so well, are in himself; he expects no more than the other two to find them or engender them in his mistresses. Their grace, their beauty is all that inflames him; their favours all he desires or regrets; their perfidy, their venality, their loss, all that torments him. Of all these women, celebrated in the verses of three great poets, Cynthia seems the most lovable. The attraction of talent is joined to all the others; she cultivates singing and poetry; and yet all these talents, which were found

[Pg 296] not infrequently in courtesans of a certain standing, were of no avail--it was none the less pleasure, gold and wine which ruled her. And Propertius, who boasts only once or twice of her artistic tastes, in his passion for her is none the less seduced by a very different power!

These great poets are apparently to be numbered among the most tender and refined souls of their century--well! this is how they loved and whom. We must here put literary considerations on one side. I only ask of them evidence concerning their century; and in two thousand years a novel by Ducray-Duminil(59) will be evidence concerning the annals of ours.

[1] Mark Dido's look in the superb sketch by M. Guerin at the Luxembourg.

[2] Everything that is beautiful in the world having become a part of the beauty of the woman you love, you find yourself inclined to do everything in the world that is beautiful.

[3] Guinguené's _Histoire littéraire de l'Italie_ (Vol. II, p. 490.)

XCIII(b)

One of my great regrets is not to have been able to see Venice in 1760.[1] A run of happy chances had apparently united, in so small a space, both the political institutions and the public opinion that are most favourable to the happiness of mankind. A soft spirit of luxury gave everyone an easy access to happiness. There were no domestic struggles and no crimes. Serenity was seen on every face; no one thought about seeming richer than he was; hypocrisy had no point. I imagine it must have been the direct contrary to London in 1822.

[1] _Travels in Italy_ of the President de Brosses, _Travels_ of Eustace, Sharp, Smollett.

XCIV

If in the place of the want of personal security you put the natural fear of economic want, you will see that the United States of America bears a considerable resemblance to the ancient world as regards that passion, on which we are attempting to write a monograph.

In speaking of the more or less imperfect sketches of passion-love which the ancients have left us, I see that I have forgotten the Loves of Medea in the _Argonautica_(60).

[Pg 297] Virgil copied them in his picture of Dido. Compare that with love as seen in a modern novel--_Le Doyen de Killerine_, for example.

XCV

The Roman feels the beauties of Nature and Art with amazing strength, depth and justice; but if he sets out to try and reason on what he feels so forcibly, it is pitiful.

The reason may be that his feelings come to him from Nature, but his logic from government.

You can see at once why the fine arts, outside Italy, are only a farce; men reason better, but the public has no feeling.

XCVI

London, _November 20th_, 1821.

A very sensible man, who arrived yesterday from Madras, told me in a two hours' conversation what I reduce to the following few lines:--

This gloom, which from an unknown cause depresses the English character, penetrates so deeply into their hearts, that at the end of the world, at Madras, no sooner does an Englishman get a few days' holiday, than he quickly leaves rich and flourishing Madras and comes to revive his spirits in the little French town of Pondicherry, which, without wealth and almost without commerce, flourishes under the paternal administration of M. Dupuy. At Madras you drink Burgundy that costs thirty-six francs a bottle; the poverty of the French in Pondicherry is such that, in the most distinguished circles, the refreshments consist of large glasses of water. But in Pondicherry they laugh.

At present there is more liberty in England than in Prussia. The climate is the same as that of Koenigsberg, Berlin or Warsaw, cities which are far from being famous for their gloom. The working classes in these towns have less security and drink quite as little wine as in England; and they are much worse clothed.

[Pg 298] The aristocracies of Venice and Vienna are not gloomy.

I can see only one point of difference: in gay countries the Bible is little read, and there is gallantry. I am sorry to have to come back so often to a demonstration with which I am unsatisfied. I suppress a score of facts pointing in the same direction.

XCVII

I have just seen, in a fine country-house near Paris, a very good-looking, very clever, and very rich young man of less than twenty; he has been left there by chance almost alone, for a long time too, with a most beautiful girl of eighteen, full of talent, of a most distinguished mind, and also very rich. Who wouldn't have expected a passionate love-affair? Not a bit of it--such was the affectation of these two charming creatures that both were occupied solely with themselves and the effect they were to produce.

XCVIII

I am ready to agree that on the morrow of a great action a savage pride has made this people fall into all the faults and follies that lay open to it. But you will see what prevents me from effacing my previous praises of this representative of the Middle Ages.

The prettiest woman in Narbonne is a young Spaniard, scarcely twenty years old, who lives there very retired with her husband, a Spaniard also, and an officer on half-pay. Some time ago there was a fool whom this officer was obliged to insult. The next day, on the field of combat, the fool sees the young Spanish woman arrive. He begins a renewed flow of affected nothings:--

"No, indeed, it's shocking! How could you tell your wife about it? You see, she has come to prevent us fighting!" "I have come to bury you," she answered.

[Pg 299] Happy the husband who can tell his wife everything! The result did not belie this woman's haughty words. Her action would have been considered hardly the thing in England. Thus does false decency diminish the little happiness that exists here below.

XCIX

The delightful Donézan said yesterday: "In my youth, and well on in my career--for I was fifty in '89--women wore powder in their hair.

"I own that a woman without powder gives me a feeling of repugnance; the first impression is always that of a chamber-maid who hasn't had time to get dressed."

Here we have the one argument against Shakespeare and in favour of the dramatic unities.

While young men read nothing but La Harpe(61), the taste for great powdered _toupées_, such as the late Queen Marie Antoinette used to wear, can still last some years. I know people too, who despise Correggio and Michael Angelo, and, to be sure, M. Donézan was extremely clever.

C

Cold, brave, calculating, suspicious, contentious, for ever afraid of being attracted by anyone who might possibly be laughing at them in secret, absolutely devoid of enthusiasm, and a little jealous of people who saw great events with Napoleon, such was the youth of that age, estimable rather than lovable. They forced on the country that Right-Centre form of government-to-the-lowest-bidder. This temper in the younger generation was to be found even among the conscripts, each of whom only longed to finish his time.

All systems of education, whether given expressly or by chance, form men for a certain period in their life.

[Pg 300] The education of the age of Louis XV made twenty-five the finest moment in the lives of its pupils.[1]

It is at forty that the young men of this period will be at their best; they will have lost their suspiciousness and pretensions, and have gained ease and gaiety.

[1] M. de Francueil with too much powder: Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay.

CI

DISCUSSION BETWEEN AN HONEST MAN AND AN ACADEMIC

"In this discussion, the academic always saved himself by fixing on little dates and other similar errors of small importance; but the consequences and natural qualifications of things, these he always denied, or seemed not to understand: for example, that Nero was a cruel Emperor or Charles II a perjurer. Now, how are you to prove things of this kind, or, even if you do, manage not to put a stop to the general discussion or lose the thread of it?

"This, I have always remarked, is the method of discussion between such folk, one of whom seeks only the truth and advancement thereto, the other the favour of his master or his party and the glory of talking well. And I always consider it great folly and waste of time for an honest man to stop and talk with the said academics." (_Œuvres badines_ of Guy Allard de Voiron.)

CII

Only a small part of the art of being happy is an exact science, a sort of ladder up which one can be sure of climbing a rung per century--and that is the part which depends on government. (Still, this is only theory. I

[Pg 301] find the Venetians of 1770 happier than the people of Philadelphia to-day.)

For the rest, the art of being happy is like poetry; in spite of the perfecting of all things, Homer, two thousand seven hundred years ago, had more talent than Lord Byron.

Reading Plutarch with attention, I think I can see that men were happier in Sicily in the time of Dion than we manage to be to-day, although they had no printing and no iced punch!

I would rather be an Arab of the fifth century than a Frenchman of the nineteenth.

CIII

People go to the theatre, never for that kind of illusion which is lost one minute and found again the next, but for an opportunity of convincing their neighbour, or at least themselves, that they have read their La Harpe and are people who know what's good. It is an old pedant's pleasure that the younger generation indulges in.

CIV

A woman belongs by right to the man who loves her and is dearer to her than life.

CV

Crystallisation cannot be excited by an understudy, and your most dangerous rivals are those most unlike you.

CVI

In a very advanced state of society passion-love is as natural as physical love among savages. (M.)

[Pg 302] CVII

But for an infinite number of shades of feeling, to have a woman you adore would be no happiness and scarcely a possibility. (L., _October 7th._)

CVIII

Whence comes the intolerance of Stoic philosophers? From the same source as that of religious fanatics. They are put out because they are struggling against nature, because they deny themselves, and because it hurts them. If they would question themselves honestly on the hatred they bear towards those who profess a code of morals less severe, they would have to own that it springs from a secret jealousy of a bliss which they envy and have renounced, without believing in the rewards which would make up for this sacrifice. (Diderot.)

CIX

Women who are always taking offence might well ask themselves whether they are following a line of conduct, which they think really and truly is the road to happiness. Is there not a little lack of courage, mixed with a little mean revenge, at the bottom of a prude's heart? Consider the ill-humour of Madame de Deshoulières in her last days. (_Note by M. Lemontey._)(62).

CX

Nothing more indulgent than virtue without hypocrisy--because nothing happier; yet even Mistress Hutchinson might well be more indulgent.

CXI

Immediately below this kind of happiness comes that of a young, pretty and easy-going woman, with a conscience

[Pg 303] that does not reproach her. At Messina people used to talk scandal about the Contessina Vicenzella. "Well, well!" she would say, "I'm young, free, rich and perhaps not ugly. I wish the same to all the ladies of Messina!" It was this charming woman, who would never be more than a friend to me, who introduced me to the Abbé Melli's sweet poems in Sicilian dialect. His poetry is delicious, though still disfigured by mythology.

(Delfante.)

CXII

The public of Paris has a fixed capacity for attention--three days: after which, bring to its notice the death of Napoleon or M. Béranger(63) sent to prison for two months--the news is just as sensational, and to bring it up on the fourth day just as tactless. Must every great capital be like this, or has it to do with the good nature and light heart of the Parisian? Thanks to aristocratic pride and morbid reserve, London is nothing but a numerous collection of hermits; it is not a capital. Vienna is nothing but an oligarchy of two hundred families surrounded by a hundred and fifty thousand workpeople and servants who wait on them. No more is that a capital.--Naples and Paris, the only two capitals. (Extract from Birkbeck's _Travels_, p. 371.)

CXIII

According to common ideas, or reasonable-ideas, as they are called by ordinary people, if any period of imprisonment could possibly be tolerable, it would be after several years' confinement, when at last the poor prisoner is only separated by a month or two from the moment of his release. But the ways of crystallisation are otherwise. The last month is more painful than the last three years. In the gaol at Melun, M. d'Hotelans has seen several prisoners die of impatience within a few months of the day of release.

[Pg 304] CXIV

I cannot resist the pleasure of copying out a letter written in bad English by a young German woman. It proves that, after all, constant love exists, and that not every man of genius is a Mirabeau. Klopstock, the great poet, passes at Hamburg for having been an attractive person. Read what his young wife wrote to an intimate friend:

"After having seen him two hours, I was obliged to pass the evening in a company, which never had been so wearisome to me. I could not speak, I could not play; I thought I saw nothing but Klopstock; I saw him the next day and the following and we were very seriously friends. But the fourth day he departed. It was a strong hour the hour of his departure! He wrote soon after; from that time our correspondence began to be a very diligent one. I sincerely believed my love to be friendship. I spoke with my friends of nothing but Klopstock, and showed his letters. They raillied at me and said I was in love. I raillied then again, and said that they must have a very friendshipless heart, if they had no idea of friendship to a man as well as to a woman. Thus it continued eight months, in which time my friends found as much love in Klopstock's letters as in me. I perceived it likewise, but I would not believe it. At the last Klopstock said plainly that he loved; and I startled as for a wrong thing; I answered that it was no love, but friendship, as it was what I felt for him; we had not seen one another enough to love (as if love must have more time than friendship). This was sincerely my meaning, and I had this meaning till Klopstock came again to Hamburg. This he did a year after we had seen one another the first time. We saw, we were friends, we loved; and a short time after, I could even tell Klopstock that I loved. But we were obliged to part again, and wait two years for our wedding. My mother would not let me marry a stranger. I could marry then without

[Pg 305] her consent, as by the death of my father my fortune depended not on her; but this was a horrible idea for me; and thank heaven that I have prevailed by prayers! At this time knowing Klopstock, she loves him as her lifely son, and thanks God that she has not persisted. We married and I am the happiest wife in the world. In some few months it will be four years that I am so happy...." (_Correspondence of Richardson_, Vol. III, p. 147.)

CXV

The only unions legitimate for all time are those that answer to a real passion.

CXVI

To be happy with laxity of morals, one wants the simplicity of character that is found in Germany and Italy, but never in France. (The Duchess de C----)

CXVII

It is their pride that makes the Turks deprive their women of everything that can nourish crystallisation. I have been living for the last three months in a country where the titled folk will soon be carried just as far by theirs.

Modesty is the name given here by men to the exactions of aristocratic pride run mad. Who would risk a lapse of modesty? Here also, as at Athens, the intellectuals show a marked tendency to take refuge with courtesans--that is to say, with the women whom a scandal shelters from the need to affect modesty. (_Life of Fox._)

CXVIII

In the case of love blighted by too prompt a victory, I have seen in very tender characters crystallisation trying

[Pg 306] to form later. "I don't love you a bit," she says, but laughing.

CXIX

The present-day education of women--that odd mixture of works of charity and risky songs ("Di piacer mi balza il cor," in _La Gazza Ladra_)(64)--is the one thing in the world best calculated to keep off happiness. This form of education produces minds completely inconsequent. Madame de R----, who was afraid of dying, has just met her death through thinking it funny to throw her medicines out of the window. Poor little women like her take inconsequence for gaiety, because, in appearance, gaiety is often inconsequent. 'Tis like the German, who threw himself out of the window in order to be sprightly.

CXX

Vulgarity, by stifling imagination, instantly produces in me a deadly boredom. Charming Countess K----, showing me this evening her lovers' letters, which to my mind were in bad taste. (Forlì, _March 17th_, Henri.)

Imagination was not stifled: it was only deranged, and very soon from mere repugnance ceased to picture the unpleasantness of these dull lovers.

CXXI

METAPHYSICAL REVERIE

Belgirate, _26th October_, 1816.

Real passion has only to be crossed for it to produce apparently more unhappiness than happiness. This thought may not be true in the case of gentle souls, but it is absolutely proved in the case of the majority of men, and particularly of cold philosophers, who, as regards passion, live, one might say, only on curiosity and self-love.

I said all this to the Contessina Fulvia yesterday

[Pg 307] evening, as we were walking together near the great pine on the eastern terrace of Isola Bella. She answered: "Unhappiness makes a much stronger impression on a man's life than pleasure.

"The prime virtue in anything which claims to give us pleasure, is that it strikes hard.

"Might we not say that life itself being made up only of sensation, there is a universal taste in all living beings for the consciousness that the sensations of their life are the keenest that can be? In the North people are hardly alive--look at the slowness of their movements. The Italian's _dolce far niente_ is the pleasure of relishing one's soul and one's emotions, softly reclining on a divan. Such pleasure is impossible, if you are racing all day on horseback or in a drosky, like the Englishman or the Russian. Such people would die of boredom on a divan. There is no reason to look into their souls.

"Love gives the keenest possible of all sensations--and the proof is that in these moments of 'inflammation,' as physiologists would say, the heart is open to those 'complex sensations' which Helvétius, Buffon and other philosophers think so absurd. The other day, as you know, Luizina fell into the lake; you see, her eye was following a laurel leaf that had fallen from a tree on Isola-Madre (one of the Borromean Islands). The poor woman owned to me that one day her lover, while talking to her, threw into the lake the leaves of a laurel branch he was stripping, and said: 'Your cruelty and the calumnies of your friend are preventing me from turning my life to account and winning a little glory.'

"It is a peculiar and incomprehensible fact that, when some great passion has brought upon the soul moments of torture and extreme unhappiness, the soul comes to despise the happiness of a peaceful life, where everything seems framed to our desires. A fine country-house in a picturesque position, substantial means, a good wife, three pretty children, and friends charming

[Pg 308] and numerous--this is but a mere outline of all our host. General C----, possesses. And yet he said, as you know, he felt tempted to go to Naples and take the command of a guerilla band. A soul made for passion soon finds this happy life monotonous, and feels, perhaps, that it only offers him commonplace ideas. 'I wish,' C. said to you, 'that I had never known the fever of high passion. I wish I could rest content with the apparent happiness on which people pay me every day such stupid compliments, which, to put the finishing touch to, I have to answer politely.'"

I, a philosopher, rejoin: "Do you want the thousandth proof that we are not created by a good Being? It is the fact that pleasure does not make perhaps half as much impression on human life as pain...."[1] The Contessina interrupted me. "In life there are few mental pains that are not rendered sweet by the emotion they themselves excite, and, if there is a spark of magnanimity in the soul, this pleasure is increased a hundredfold. The man condemned to death in 1815 and saved by chance (M. de Lavalette(65), for example), if he was going courageously to his doom, must recall that moment ten times a month. But the coward, who was going to die crying and yelling (the exciseman, Morris, thrown into the lake, _Rob Roy_)--suppose him also saved by chance--can at most recall that instant with pleasure because he was _saved_, not for the treasures of magnanimity that he discovered with him, and that take away for the future all his fears."

I: "Love, even unhappy love, gives a gentle soul, for whom a thing imagined is a thing existent, treasures of this kind of enjoyment. He weaves sublime visions of happiness and beauty about himself and his beloved. How often has Salviati heard Léonore, with her enchanting

[Pg 309] smile, say, like Mademoiselle Mars in _Les Fausses Confidences_: 'Well, yes, I do love you!' No, these are never the illusions of a prudent mind."

Fulvia (raising her eyes to heaven): "Yes, for you and me, love, even unhappy love, if only our admiration for the beloved knows no limit, is the supreme happiness."

(Fulvia is twenty-three,--the most celebrated beauty of ... Her eyes were heavenly as she talked like this at midnight and raised them towards the glorious sky above the Borromean Islands. The stars seemed to answer her. I looked down and could find no more philosophical arguments to meet her. She continued:)

"And all that the world calls happiness is not worth the trouble. Only contempt, I think, can cure this passion; not contempt too violent, for that is torture. For you men it is enough to see the object of your adoration love some gross, prosaic creature, or sacrifice you in order to enjoy pleasures of luxurious comfort with a woman friend."

[1] See the analysis of the ascetic principle in Bentham, _Principles of Morals and Legislation_.

By giving oneself pain one pleases a _good_ Being.

CXXII

_To will_ means to have the courage to expose oneself to troubles; to expose oneself is to take risks--to gamble. You find military men who cannot exist without such gambling--that's what makes them intolerable in home-life.

CXXIII

General Teulié told me this evening that he had found out why, as soon as there were affected women in a drawing-room, he became so horribly dry and floored for ideas. It was because he was sure to be bitterly ashamed of having exposed his feelings with warmth before such creatures. General Teulié had to speak from his heart, though the talk were only of Punch and Judy; otherwise he had nothing to say. Moreover, I could see he never knew the conventional phrase about

[Pg 310] anything nor what was the right thing to say. That is really where he made himself so monstrously ridiculous in the eyes of affected women. Heaven had not made him for elegant society.

CXXIV

Irreligion is bad form at Court, because it is calculated to be contrary to the interests of princes: irreligion is also bad form in the presence of girls, for it would prevent their finding husbands. It must be owned that, if God exists, it must be nice for Him to be honoured from motives like these.

CXXV

For the soul of a great painter or a great poet, love is divine in that it increases a hundredfold the empire and the delight of his art, and the beauties of art are his soul's daily bread. How many great artists are unconscious both of their soul and of their genius! Often they reckon as mediocre their talent for the thing they adore, because they cannot agree with the eunuchs of the harem, La Harpe and such-like. For them even unhappy love is happiness.

CXXVI

The picture of first love is taken generally as the most touching. Why? Because it is the same in all countries and in all characters. But for this reason first love is not the most passionate.

CXXVII

Reason! Reason! Reason! That is what the world is always shouting at poor lovers. In 1760, at the most thrilling moment in the Seven Years' War, Grimm wrote: "... It is indubitable that the King of Russia, by yielding Silesia, could have prevented the war from

[Pg 311] ever breaking out. In so doing he would have done a very wise thing. How many evils would he have prevented! And what can there be in common between the possession of a province and the happiness of a king? Was not the great Elector a very happy and highly respected prince without possessing Silesia? It is also quite clear that a king might have taken this course in obedience to the precepts of the soundest reason, and yet--I know not how--that king would inevitably have been the object of universal contempt, while Frederick, sacrificing everything to the _necessity_ of keeping Silesia, has invested himself with immortal glory.

"Without any doubt the action of Cromwell's son was the wisest a man could take: he preferred obscurity and repose to the bother and danger of ruling over a people sombre, fiery and proud. This wise man won the contempt of his own time and of posterity; while his father, to this day, has been held a great man by the wisdom of nations.

"The _Fair Penitent_ is a sublime subject on the Spanish[1] stage, but spoilt by Otway and Colardeau in England and France. Calista has been dishonoured by a man she adores; he is odious from the violence of his inborn pride, but talent, wit and a handsome face--everything, in fact--combine to make him seductive. Indeed, Lothario would have been too charming could he have moderated these criminal outbursts. Moreover, an hereditary and bitter feud separates his family from that of the woman he loves. These families are at the head of two factions dividing a Spanish town during the horrors of the Middle Age. Sciolto, Calista's father, is the chief of the faction, which at the moment has the upper hand; he knows that Lothario has had the insolence to try to seduce his daughter. The weak Calista is weighed down by the torment of shame and passion. Her father has

[Pg 312] succeeded in getting his enemy appointed to the command of a naval armament that is setting out on a distant and perilous expedition, where Lothario will probably meet his death. In Colardeau's tragedy, he has just told his daughter this news. At his words Calista can no longer hide her passion:

O dieux! Il part!... Vous l'ordonnez!... Il a pu s'y résoudre?[2]

"Think of the danger she is placed in. Another word, and Sciolto will learn the secret of his daughter's passion for Lothario. The father is confounded and cries:--

Qu'entends-je? Me trompé-je? Où s'égarent tes voeux?[3]

"At this Calista recovers herself and answers:--

Ce n'est pas son exile, c'est sa mort que je veux, Qu'il périsse![4]

"By these words Calista stifles her father's rising suspicions; yet there is no deceit, for the sentiment she utters is true. The existence of a man, who has succeeded after winning her love in dishonouring her, must poison her life, were he even at the ends of the earth. His death alone could restore her peace of mind, if for unfortunate lovers peace of mind existed.... Soon after Lothario is killed and, happily for her, Calista dies.

"'There's a lot of crying and moaning over nothing!' say the chilly folk who plume themselves on being philosophers. 'Somebody with an enterprising and violent nature abuses a woman's weakness for him--that is nothing to tear our hair over, or at least there is nothing in Calista's troubles to concern us. She must console herself with having satisfied her lover, and she will not be the first woman of merit who has made the best of her misfortune in that way.'"[5]

[Pg 313] Richard Cromwell, the King of Prussia and Calista, with the souls given them by Heaven, could only find peace and happiness by acting as they did. The conduct of the two last is eminently unreasonable and yet it is those two that we admire. (Sagan, 1813.)

[1] See the Spanish and Danish romances of the thirteenth century. French taste would find them dull and coarse.

[2] [ "My God! He is gone.... You have sent him.... And he had the heart?"--Tr.]

[3] ["What do I hear? I am deceived? Where now are all your vows?"--Tr.]

[4] ["It is not his banishment I desire; it is his death. Let him die!"--Tr.]

[5] Grimm, Vol. III, p. 107.

CXXVIII

The likelihood of constancy when desire is satisfied can only be foretold from the constancy displayed, in spite of cruel doubts and jealousy and ridicule, in the days before intimate intercourse.

CXXIX

A woman is in despair at the death of her lover, who has been killed in the wars--of course she means to follow him. Now first make quite sure that it is not the best thing for her to do; then, if you decide it is not, attack her on the side of a very primitive habit of the human kind--the desire to survive. If the woman has an enemy, one may persuade her that her enemy has obtained a warrant for her imprisonment. Unless that threat only increases her desire of death, she may think about hiding herself in order to escape imprisonment. For three weeks she will lie low, escaping from refuge to refuge. She must be caught, but must get away after three days.

Then people must arrange for her to withdraw under a false name to some very remote town, as unlike as possible the one in which she was so desperately unhappy. But who is going to devote himself to the consolation of a being so unfortunate and so lost to friendship? (Warsaw, 1808).

CXXX

Academical wise-heads can see a people's habits in its language. In Italy, of all the countries in the world, the

[Pg 314] word love is least often spoken--always "amicizia" and "avvicinar" (_amicizia_ or friendship, for love; _avvicinar_, to approach, for courtship that succeeds).

CXXXI

A dictionary of music has never been achieved, nor even begun. It is only by chance that you find the phrase for: "I am angry" or "I love you," and the subtler feelings involved therein. The composer finds them only when passion, present in his heart or memory, dictates them to him. Well! that is why people, who spend the fire of youth studying instead of feeling, cannot be artists--the way _that_ works is perfectly simple.

CXXXII

In France far too much power is given to Women, far too little to Woman.

CXXXIII

The most flattering thing that the most exalted imagination could find to say to the generation now arising among us to take possession of life, of public opinion and of power, happens to be a piece of truth plainer than the light of day. This generation has nothing to _continue_, it has everything to _create_. Napoleon's great merit is to have left the road clear.

CXXXIV

I should like to be able to say something on consolation. Enough is not done to console.

The main principle is that you try to form a kind of crystallisation as remote as possible from the source of present suffering.

In order to discover an unknown principle, we must bravely face a little anatomy.

[Pg 315] If the reader will consult