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Honore de Balzac - Analytical Studies

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Analytical Studies





Sparkling with truth as they are, these lines probably filled with
light the dungeon, in the depths of which Mirabeau wrote them; and the
keen observation which they bear witness to, although prompted by the
most stormy of his passions, has none the less influence even now in
solving the social problem on which we are engaged. In fact, a
marriage sealed under the auspices of the religious scrutiny which
assumes the existence of love, and subjected to the atmosphere of that
disenchantment which follows on possession, ought naturally to be the
most firmly-welded of all human unions.

A woman then ought never to reproach her husband for the legal right,
in virtue of which she belongs to him. She ought not to find in this
compulsory submission any excuse for yielding to a lover, because some
time after her marriage she has discovered in her own heart a traitor
whose sophisms seduce her by asking twenty times an hour, "Wherefore,
since she has been given against her will to a man whom she does not
love, should she not give herself, of her own free-will, to a man whom
she does love." A woman is not to be tolerated in her complaints
concerning faults inseparable from human nature. She has, in advance,
made trial of the tyranny which they exercise, and taken sides with
the caprices which they exhibit.

A great many young girls are likely to be disappointed in their hopes
of love!--But will it not be an immense advantage to them to have
escaped being made the companions of men whom they would have had the
right to despise?

Certain alarmists will exclaim that such an alteration in our manners
would bring about a public dissoluteness which would be frightful;
that the laws, and the customs which prompt the laws, could not after
all authorize scandal and immorality; and if certain unavoidable
abuses do exist, at least society ought not to sanction them.

It is easy to say, in reply, first of all, that the proposed system
tends to prevent those abuses which have been hitherto regarded as
incapable of prevention; but, the calculations of our statistics,
inexact as they are, have invariably pointed out a widely prevailing
social sore, and our moralists may, therefore, be accused of
preferring the greater to the lesser evil, the violation of the
principle on which society is constituted, to the granting of a
certain liberty to girls; and dissoluteness in mothers of families,
such as poisons the springs of public education and brings unhappiness
upon at least four persons, to dissoluteness in a young girl, which
only affects herself or at the most a child besides. Let the virtue of
ten virgins be lost rather than forfeit this sanctity of morals, that
crown of honor with which the mother of a family should be invested!
In the picture presented by a young girl abandoned by her betrayer,
there is something imposing, something indescribably sacred; here we
see oaths violated, holy confidences betrayed, and on the ruins of a
too facile virtue innocence sits in tears, doubting everything,
because compelled to doubt the love of a father for his child. The
unfortunate girl is still innocent; she may yet become a faithful
wife, a tender mother, and, if the past is mantled in clouds, the
future is blue as the clear sky. Shall we not find these tender tints
in the gloomy pictures of loves which violate the marriage law? In the
one, the woman is the victim, in the other, she is a criminal. What
hope is there for the unfaithful wife? If God pardons the fault, the
most exemplary life cannot efface, here below, its living
consequences. If James I was the son of Rizzio, the crime of Mary
lasted as long as did her mournful though royal house, and the fall of
the Stuarts was the justice of God.

But in good faith, would the emancipation of girls set free such a
host of dangers?

It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be
deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of
girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition
of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about
seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and
mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable
world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires
which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which
prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely
ever confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.

If she were free, an education free from prejudices would arm her
against the love of the first comer. She would, like any one else, be
very much better able to meet dangers of which she knew, than perils
whose extent had been concealed from her. And, moreover, is it
necessary for a girl to be any the less under the watchful eye of her
mother, because she is mistress of her own actions? Are we to count as
nothing the modesty and the fears which nature has made so powerful in
the soul of a young girl, for the very purpose of preserving her from
the misfortune of submitting to a man who does not love her? Again,
what girl is there so thoughtless as not to discern, that the most
immoral man wishes his wife to be a woman of principle, as masters
desire their servants to be perfect; and that, therefore, her virtue
is the richest and the most advantageous of all possessions?

After all, what is the question before us? For what do you think we
are stipulating? We are making a claim for five or six hundred
thousand maidens, protected by their instinctive timidity, and by the
high price at which they rate themselves; they understand how to
defend themselves, just as well as they know how to sell themselves.
The eighteen millions of human beings, whom we have excepted from this
consideration, almost invariably contract marriages in accordance with
the system which we are trying to make paramount in our system of
manners; and as to the intermediary classes by which we poor bimana
are separated from the men of privilege who march at the head of a
nation, the number of castaway children which these classes, although
in tolerably easy circumstances, consign to misery, goes on increasing
since the peace, if we may believe M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, one of
the most courageous of those savants who have devoted themselves to
the arid yet useful study of statistics. We may guess how deep-seated
is the social hurt, for which we propound a remedy, if we reckon the
number of natural children which statistics reveal, and the number of
illicit adventures whose evidence in high society we are forced to
suspect. But it is difficult here to make quite plain all the
advantages which would result from the emancipation of young girls.
When we come to observe the circumstances which attend a marriage,
such as our present manners approve of, judicious minds must
appreciate the value of that system of education and liberty, which we
demand for young girls, in the name of reason and nature. The
prejudice which we in France entertain in favor of the virginity of
brides is the most silly of all those which still survive among us.
The Orientals take their brides without distressing themselves about
the past and lock them up in order to be more certain about the
future; the French put their daughters into a sort of seraglio
defended by their mothers, by prejudice, and by religious ideas, and
give the most complete liberty to their wives, thus showing themselves
much more solicitous about a woman's past than about her future. The
point we are aiming at is to bring about a reversal of our system of
manners. If we did so we should end, perhaps, by giving to faithful
married life all the flavor and the piquancy which women of to-day
find in acts of infidelity.

But this discussion would take us far from our subject, if it led us
to examine, in all its details, the vast improvement in morals which
doubtless will distinguish twentieth century France; for morals are
reformed only very gradually! Is it not necessary, in order to produce
the slightest change, that the most daring dreams of the past century
become the most trite ideas of the present one? We have touched upon
this question merely in a trifling mood, for the purposes of showing
that we are not blind to its importance, and of bequeathing also to
posterity the outline of a work, which they may complete. To speak
more accurately there is a third work to be composed; the first
concerns courtesans, while the second is the physiology of pleasure!

"When there are ten of us, we cross ourselves."

In the present state of our morals and of our imperfect civilization,
a problem crops up which for the moment is insoluble, and which
renders superfluous all discussion on the art of choosing a wife; we
commend it, as we have done all the others, to the meditation of
philosophers.


PROBLEM.

It has not yet been decided whether a wife is forced into infidelity
by the impossibility of obtaining any change, or by the liberty which
is allowed her in this connection.

Moreover, as in this work we pitch upon a man at the moment that he is
newly married, we declare that if he has found a wife of sanguine
temperament, of vivid imagination, of a nervous constitution or of an
indolent character, his situation cannot fail to be extremely serious.

A man would find himself in a position of danger even more critical if
his wife drank nothing but water [see the Meditation entitled
_Conjugal Hygiene_]; but if she had some talent for singing, or if she
were disposed to take cold easily, he should tremble all the time; for
it must be remembered that women who sing are at least as passionate
as women whose mucous membrane shows extreme delicacy.

Again, this danger would be aggravated still more if your wife were
less than seventeen; or if, on the other hand, her general complexion
were pale and dull, for this sort of woman is almost always
artificial.

But we do not wish to anticipate here any description of the terrors
which threaten husbands from the symptoms of unhappiness which they
read in the character of their wives. This digression has already
taken us too far from the subject of boarding schools, in which so
many catastrophes are hatched, and from which issue so many young
girls incapable of appreciating the painful sacrifices by which the
honest man who does them the honor of marrying them, has obtained
opulence; young girls eager for the enjoyments of luxury, ignorant of
our laws, ignorant of our manners, claim with avidity the empire which
their beauty yields them, and show themselves quite ready to turn away
from the genuine utterances of the heart, while they readily listen to
the buzzing of flattery.

This Meditation should plant in the memory of all who read it, even
those who merely open the book for the sake of glancing at it or
distracting their mind, an intense repugnance for young women educated
in a boarding school, and if it succeeds in doing so, its services to
the public will have already proved considerable.



MEDITATION VII.

OF THE HONEYMOON.

If our meditations prove that it is almost impossible for a married
woman to remain virtuous in France, our enumeration of the celibates
and the predestined, our remarks upon the education of girls, and our
rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife
will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after
indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is
laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the
laws, in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of
our minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. A
single point still claims our observation, and that is the first
onslaught of the evil we are confronting.

We reach this first question on approaching the high problems
suggested by the honeymoon; and although we find here the starting
point of all the phenomena of married life, it appears to us to be the
brilliant link round which are clustered all our observations, our
axioms, our problems, which have been scattered deliberately among the
wise quips which our loquacious meditations retail. The honeymoon
would seem to be, if we may use the expression, the apogee of that
analysis to which we must apply ourselves, before engaging in battle
our two imaginary champions.

The expression _honeymoon_ is an Anglicism, which has become an idiom
in all languages, so gracefully does it depict the nuptial season
which is so fugitive, and during which life is nothing but sweetness
and rapture; the expression survives as illusions and errors survive,
for it contains the most odious of falsehoods. If this season is
presented to us as a nymph crowned with fresh flowers, caressing as a
siren, it is because in it is unhappiness personified and unhappiness
generally comes during the indulgence of folly.

The married couple who intend to love each other during their whole
life have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or
rather its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do
not understand death. But the consideration of this happiness is not
germane to our book; and for our readers marriage is under the
influence of two moons, the honeymoon and the Red-moon. This last
terminates its course by a revolution, which changes it to a crescent;
and when once it rises upon a home its light there is eternal.

How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love
each other?

How can it set, when once it has risen?

Have all marriages their honeymoon?

Let us proceed to answer these questions in order.

It is in this connection that the admirable education which we give to
girls, and the wise provisions made by the law under which men marry,
bear all their fruit. Let us examine the circumstances which precede
and attend those marriages which are least disastrous.

The tone of our morals develops in the young girl whom you make your
wife a curiosity which is naturally excessive; but as mothers in
France pique themselves on exposing their girls every day to the fire
which they do not allow to scorch them, this curiosity has no limit.

Her profound ignorance of the mysteries of marriage conceals from this
creature, who is as innocent as she is crafty, a clear view of the
dangers by which marriage is followed; and as marriage is incessantly
described to her as an epoch in which tyranny and liberty equally
prevail, and in which enjoyment and supremacy are to be indulged in,
her desires are intensified by all her interest in an existence as yet
unfulfilled; for her to marry is to be called up from nothingness into
life!

If she has a disposition for happiness, for religion, for morality,
the voices of the law and of her mother have repeated to her that this
happiness can only come to her from you.

Obedience if it is not virtue, is at least a necessary thing with her;
for she expects everything from you. In the first place, society
sanctions the slavery of a wife, but she does not conceive even the
wish to be free, for she feels herself weak, timid and ignorant.

Of course she tries to please you, unless a chance error is committed,
or she is seized by a repugnance which it would be unpardonable in you
not to divine. She tries to please because she does not know you.

In a word, in order to complete your triumph, you take her at a moment
when nature demands, often with some violence, the pleasure of which
you are the dispenser. Like St. Peter you hold the keys of Paradise.

I would ask of any reasonable creature, would a demon marshal round
the angel whose ruin he had vowed all the elements of disaster with
more solicitude than that with which good morals conspire against the
happiness of a husband? Are you not a king surrounded by flatterers?

This young girl, with all her ignorance and all her desires, committed
to the mercy of a man who, even though he be in love, cannot know her
shrinking and secret emotions, will submit to him with a certain sense
of shame, and will be obedient and complaisant so long as her young
imagination persuades her to expect the pleasure or the happiness of
that morrow which never dawns.

In this unnatural situation social laws and the laws of nature are in
conflict, but the young girl obediently abandons herself to it, and,
from motives of self-interest, suffers in silence. Her obedience is a
speculation; her complaisance is a hope; her devotion to you is a sort
of vocation, of which you reap the advantage; and her silence is
generosity. She will remain the victim of your caprices so long as she
does not understand them; she will suffer from the limitations of your
character until she has studied it; she will sacrifice herself without
love, because she believed in the show of passion you made at the
first moment of possession; she will no longer be silent when once she
has learned the uselessness of her sacrifices.

And then the morning arrives when the inconsistencies which have
prevailed in this union rise up like branches of a tree bent down for
a moment under a weight which has been gradually lightened. You have
mistaken for love the negative attitude of a young girl who was
waiting for happiness, who flew in advance of your desires, in the
hope that you would go forward in anticipation of hers, and who did
not dare to complain of the secret unhappiness, for which she at first
accused herself. What man could fail to be the dupe of a delusion
prepared at such long range, and in which a young innocent woman is at
once the accomplice and the victim? Unless you were a divine being it
would be impossible for you to escape the fascination with which
nature and society have surrounded you. Is not a snare set in
everything which surrounds you on the outside and influences you
within? For in order to be happy, is it not necessary to control the
impetuous desires of your senses? Where is the powerful barrier to
restrain her, raised by the light hand of a woman whom you wish to
please, because you do not possess? Moreover, you have caused your
troops to parade and march by, when there was no one at the window;
you have discharged your fireworks whose framework alone was left,
when your guest arrived to see them. Your wife, before the pledges of
marriage, was like a Mohican at the Opera: the teacher becomes
listless, when the savage begins to understand.


LVI.
In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each
other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once
it is passed.


This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is
encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of
her married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which
begins to be so attractive as soon as it shows love to be in harmony
with duty, is called the honeymoon. How can it last long between two
beings who are united for their whole life, unless they know each
other perfectly? If there is one thing which ought to cause
astonishment it is this, that the deplorable absurdities which our
manners heap up around the nuptial couch give birth to so few hatreds!
But that the life of the wise man is a calm current, and that of the
prodigal a cataract; that the child, whose thoughtless hands have
stripped the leaves from every rose upon his pathway, finds nothing
but thorns on his return, that the man who in his wild youth has
squandered a million, will never enjoy, during his life, the income of
forty thousand francs, which this million would have provided--are
trite commonplaces, if one thinks of the moral theory of life; but new
discoveries, if we consider the conduct of most men. You may see here
a true image of all honeymoons; this is their history, this is the
plain fact and not the cause that underlies it.

But that men endowed with a certain power of thought by a privileged
education, and accustomed to think deliberately, in order to shine in
politics, literature, art, commerce or private life--that these men
should all marry with the intention of being happy, of governing a
wife, either by love or by force, and should all tumble into the same
pitfall and should become foolish, after having enjoyed a certain
happiness for a certain time,--this is certainly a problem whose
solution is to be found rather in the unknown depths of the human
soul, than in the quasi physical truths, on the basis of which we have
hitherto attempted to explain some of these phenomena. The risky
search for the secret laws, which almost all men are bound to violate
without knowing it, under these circumstances, promises abundant glory
for any one even though he make shipwreck in the enterprise upon which
we now venture to set forth. Let us then make the attempt.

In spite of all that fools have to say about the difficulty they have
had in explaining love, there are certain principles relating to it as
infallible as those of geometry; but in each character these are
modified according to its tendency; hence the caprices of love, which
are due to the infinite number of varying temperaments. If we were
permitted never to see the various effects of light without also
perceiving on what they were based, many minds would refuse to believe
in the movement of the sun and in its oneness. Let the blind men cry
out as they like; I boast with Socrates, although I am not as wise as
he was, that I know of naught save love; and I intend to attempt the
formulation of some of its precepts, in order to spare married people
the trouble of cudgeling their brains; they would soon reach the limit
of their wit.

Now all the preceding observations may be resolved into a single
proposition, which may be considered either the first or last term in
this secret theory of love, whose statement would end by wearying us,
if we did not bring it to a prompt conclusion. This principle is
contained in the following formula:


LVII.
Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in
proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the
obstacles which the accidents of social life put in the way of your
happiness.


If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps
will not last more than three nights. Where must we seek for the
causes of this law? I do not know. If you cast your eyes around you,
you will find abundant proof of this rule; in the vegetable world the
plants which take the longest time to grow are those which promise to
have the longest life; in the moral order of things the works produced
yesterday die to-morrow; in the physical world the womb which
infringes the laws of gestation bears dead fruit. In everything, a
work which is permanent has been brooded over by time for a long
period. A long future requires a long past. If love is a child,
passion is a man. This general law, which all men obey, to which all
beings and all sentiments must submit, is precisely that which every
marriage infringes, as we have plainly shown. This principle has given
rise to the love tales of the Middle Ages; the Amadises, the
Lancelots, the Tristans of ballad literature, whose constancy may
justly be called fabulous, are allegories of the national mythology
which our imitation of Greek literature nipped in the bud. These
fascinating characters, outlined by the imagination of the
troubadours, set their seal and sanction upon this truth.


LVIII.
We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting
in proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost
us.


All our meditations have revealed to us about the basis of the
primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is
at the same time the principle and the result of the law.


LIX.
In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.


This last principle is so self-evident that we will not attempt to
demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to us
of some importance. The writer who said: "Everything is true, and
everything is false," announced a fact which the human intellect,
naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really
seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds
that contemplate them. This fact may be detailed as follows:

There cannot be found, in all creation, a single law which is not
counterbalanced by a law exactly contrary to it; life in everything is
maintained by the equilibrium of two opposing forces. So in the
present subject, as regards love, if you give too much, you will not
receive enough. The mother who shows her children her whole tenderness
calls forth their ingratitude, and ingratitude is occasioned, perhaps,
by the impossibility of reciprocation. The wife who loves more than
she is loved must necessarily be the object of tyranny. Durable love
is that which always keeps the forces of two human beings in
equilibrium. Now this equilibrium may be maintained permanently; the
one who loves the more ought to stop at the point of the one who loves
the less. And is it not, after all the sweetest sacrifice that a
loving heart can make, that love should so accommodate itself as to
adjust the inequality?

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