THE VIRGIN

Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.

Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still seemed little to avaricious[Pg 80] and cruel nature; and when your "yes" is answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for defeat,—there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you: "There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, because the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!" And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of voluptuousness.

And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!—mine for the first time!—mine forever!"[Pg 81] Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison, in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.

There is a unit for all the series, there is a virgin for all human things: to be the first means to be vastly different from being the second. Now, nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical fact that tremendous unit which is called the first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous, avaricious, gives thanks to Nature for having come and borne testimony to the purity of a woman, and blesses her for having known how to bind a covenant of faith which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Longobards used to give the morgincap to the bride immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, the prize of virginity, often equaled the fourth part of the husband's estate. Some shrewd spouses (adds the malicious historian) had the good sense of stipulating beforehand the conditions of a gift which they were too sure of not deserving. However, although we are not Longobards, we promise to all our young girls a morgincap to induce them to guard intact, until the supreme day of the official first love, the sacred will. This morgincap is a husband; it is the esteem, the veneration, the adoration of all. With that veil intact, you are a saint, a virgin, an angel; the goal of all desires; you may entertain the most foolish ambitions; you may become a queen tomorrow. If that flimsy veil is rent, you are young, beautiful, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a human female. The temple has been violated, the idol overthrown, the priests have fled, hurling anathemas and invoking the vengeance of their god upon the head of the victim. What a tangle of mysteries and injustices! I really feel as if I were in the world of exorcism and necromancy!

The poet finds not one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, the destinies of the lives of future[Pg 82] beings marked from the first kiss, all spasm and sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its crepuscules one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world: such is the virgin of the poet.

And the moralist, too, finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The protection of virtue consecrated by a material defense, a kind admonition that love will lead us to a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the bride given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious pledge of future faith, of everlasting domestic happiness,—there is the virgin of the theologian.

But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet and scoffs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ must have its function; every effect must have its cause; every "why" must be answered by a "because." The virgin is for me an inceptive angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still brutally coupled in us: the organs of love and the organs of a bodily function. The more the living beings elevate themselves, the more they subdivide their labors; and in a creature higher than we, love will certainly have a determined and reserved ground. From the "cloaca maxima" we have arrived at two smaller ones; a step further, and we shall have three organs and three apparatus; one of the greatest physical disgraces of our body will be eliminated.

A virgin is a creature who does a great deal more of good than evil, and very few among the men, if asked to vote for or against her, would blackball her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical of them would side with us. Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery and a sanctum sanctorum help to elevate and revive idolatry. And is not love the greatest of idolatries?

A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love us much, or at least she must desire an embrace much, to descend from the pedestal of the idol[Pg 83] and come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the vulgar ground of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, and the fascination of primiti?, and of being the first teacher of the art of love, centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first embrace. Even the dreadful trepidation of finding the temple violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness, of which, at very short intervals, we sound the somber sorrows, the ineffable delights. And a woman, too, who knows that she is a virgin will fathom the immensity of her sacrifice, and if she has the fortune of finding it equal to the immensity of her affection she feels one of the greatest ecstasies that can vibrate simultaneously nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She had already given her heart and all her affections to her god; today she gives him the seal which attests the possession of her entire self; and divides with her companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires. An angel yesterday, she allows her lover to tear away her wings and becomes again a woman in order to be a wife, a friend, a mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns on the altar of love the niveous robe of the vestal and cries, sobbing with joy and sorrow: "I am thine, all thine! Is there anything more that I can give thee? Tell me and I will give it to thee. I have clipped my wings, that thou mayst carry me aloft on the wings of thy genius; I have burned my temple, that I may live only in the temple of thy heart; I have forsworn the religion of my dreams, that I may be nothing but thy companion. Do not deceive me; I was thy virgin, and I shall be only thy wife. Have an immense love, an immense sympathy for me!"

And yet, we must say it to cause some one who will read these pages to turn pale with animosity, there are m............