THE HELL OF LOVE

Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean's abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism.

I certainly have neither strength nor courage sufficient to accompany the reader into the lower regions of the amorous hell. If you have already passed your thirtieth year, you[Pg 187] surely must have among the memories of your past some half hour of desperation and some sleepless night which make you shudder only by recalling them; you must have suffered certain torments, compared to which Dante's infernal region will seem blooming flower-beds to you, and you must imagine that nature rarely torments one man with all the tortures of the amorous passion. In human nature some sorrows make the heart incapable of suffering certain others, and the morbid rage of jealous pride protects us against the bitter sob of a generous sorrow, just as the chaste reserve of a modest nature deprives us of the possibility of suffering the ardent thirst for certain pleasures.

If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.

Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: "I would have her dead rather than belonging to another—a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful." And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizes[Pg 188] no greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar. Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives, hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.

But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy that was ours and an infinity of sorrow that is ours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are so cowardly as to live,—then we may look upon suicide as the[Pg 189] supreme joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.

In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse is buried there—but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.

I feel very sure that many who weep for love, either because their love is not returned or because they fear deception—if they have not already been deceived—or because of[Pg 190] their bitter disappointment when they found that they had burned their incense to an idol of clay or a statue of marble, will repute my description exaggerated, yet it is nevertheless a pallid picture of a sorrow which pen of man will never be able to portray from nature, but succeed only in divining from afar. To many death, the absolute evil, in the presence of which every hope perishes, seems preferable to the torture that threatens life yet does not kill, which opens the wounds and hinders the work done by nature to heal them. I wish that these gentlemen may never have the opportunity of making the cruel comparison for themselves, of experiencing the effects of an assimilated anatomy of two great sorrows, one of which is termed death, the other desperation. If they truly love, may they die earlier than their beloved! This is the sweetest blessing that I can offer them from the pages of my book.

Love is a passion so fervid and so deep that we must not wonder if it has abrupt convulsions and sudden swoons. Accustomed to dwell always in lofty regions, to have but extreme voluptuousness for nourishment, to vibrate with the highest notes of sentiment and the delirium of the senses, it may instantaneously become possessed, when it least expects it, by unreasonable fears, idiotic suspicions, inexplicable restlessness. By this I do not mean diffidence, jealousy, disgust, weary libertinism, or bitter disappointments, but a vague and shapeless fog that invades the heart which, by feeling too deeply, has become languid and congeals the nerves exhausted from excessive quivering. It is an indefinable hysteria which from a slight disorder may develop into a most intense bitterness.

An immense love, whatever the source of the heart from which it springs forth, is always followed by the shadow of an infinite fear. You adore your child; you have left him for five minutes on the lawn or in your garden, intent on filling his little cart with sand; he was as rosy and fresh as the flowers near him; as bright as the sun that gilded his curly locks. Now, while you are seated at your table, you have wished to call him, I know not why, perhaps to hear the[Pg 191] sweet sound of his silvery voice; and he does not answer you. You call him again, and again silence. He is utterly absorbed in the ponderous care of his wagon; but you, flying in a few seconds over a thousand miles of thought, have imagined that he was dead, that a snake had bitten him, that he had fallen in a swoon—who knows the fantastic visions that have passed through your mind! With your heart throbbing, your skin in a perspiration, you are afraid to rise and wish to defer for a moment the spectacle of a cruel loss. Of these and greater follies we are given a sad spectacle every day by that love of loves which alone was called by this name as the prince and god of all the amorous sentiments.

Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy on this planet.

In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linn?us concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: "Clamando misere amat." For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious,............