RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF LOVE

"Love me! You must love me!" This is a cry of sorrow that often man utters, and oftener a forsaken woman; but it generally is a vain cry. To demand love as a right is one of the greatest follies; it is like asking poetry of the slave of thought, or expecting to find the perfumes of the rose and the cedar in the frigid zones that glaciate the head and the feet of our planet. Lovers, however, have always the right to hurl into space another cry of sorrow: "You must not betray me!" Better to snatch from one's hand the cup of love and shatter it into a thousand pieces than stealthily to pour into it the poison of betrayal or the wormwood of indifference. Love bursts forth spontaneously from the human heart, and draws all its beauty and strength from the infinite freedom of the horizon in which it moves. The laws that govern it are as simple as the simplest law of elementary physics: to attract, to unite, to render love for love, sweetness for sweetness, to give joy to those who give us so much joy, make happy those who make us happy: such is its law. If love were only a contact of hearts and thoughts; if, having ascended to heaven, you have descended from it without an angel; if in your embraces you have not rekindled the torch of life, greet each other as friends, bless the happy hours that your love has conceded you, and preserve in the most precious casket and among the dearest things the memory of the time that is no more. Never close a day of paradise with a blasphemy or a remorse; the tears of regret for what you have lost can be the dew of a summer night that tempers the ardor of the enamored corollas; but your tears should not be cursed by a lie, a betrayal, an insult.

[Pg 220]

The only right—that of not being deceived—has its counterpart in a very simple duty—that of making oneself beloved. You cannot command love, but through beauty of form, quickness of mind, voluptuous grace of movements or virtues of the heart you have awakened the affection of affections; if you know how to preserve it, you will be loved forever. On the very first page of every code of love, at the beginning of every gospel of two lovers, I would always write this sentence: "Not to be loved is always a great fault." And you will find this sentence written in a hundred different forms in the pages of my book.

Ask the most fortunate of women if she has not often felt impelled to reconquer a love that threatened to fly away. She jealously conceals the numberless stratagems with which she warmed the tepid, aroused the sleeping, caused the wearied to smile, made hungry and thirsty him who had the happy misfortune of overgorging himself at the banquet of voluptuousness. Man is, by nature, polygamous, more unfaithful, more brutal, more capricious, more licentious than woman, and it is her duty to make him monogamous, faithful, constantly tender and modestly virile. If it is true that man attacks and conquers, it is also very true that nature assigns to woman the more difficult task of keeping the conquest, of being the vestal of that fire which man has nearly always been the first to kindle. This is perhaps the most common formula that expresses the different missions which man and woman have in love. To us to kindle the fire, to our companion to keep it burning.

By all that you hold most sacred on earth, do not be so brutal as to record the embrace among the rights and duties of love. This is written in the code, and is daily repeated by those B?otians for whom love is but the union of male and female. Voluptuousness should be inebriating foam that floats on the quivering wave of passion and overflows and falls irresistibly into those abysses where man loses the consciousness of existence and believes in the infinite; it cannot be a feast ordered for a stated hour, much less a tribute exacted with the rudeness of a tax collector. How many[Pg 221] delicate loves were extinguished by the sacrilegious hand of an arrogant desire, which would assume the air of command and tread the ground with the iron boot of an alleged right! No; the embrace is not a right and much less a duty: it is a unanimous consent of two powerful energies that seek each other through infinite space and, suavely struggling against each other, die together in an ocean of sweetness.

Sincerity and fidelity, which are after all an identical thing and constitute the entire code of love, should never be on the lips of two lovers, and the words right and duty should be debarred from the amorous vocabulary. Who ever loses his time in discussing the beauties of the sun? Who doubts that air is necessary to live? When certain things begin to be discussed, they are already in serious danger of being lost; and if a continuous, vexatious investigation should at every hour cast the shadow of doubt upon the faithfulness of one's companion, the latter would have the right of feeling wretchedly loved or at least cruelly loved. I do not fear sudden anger between two lovers, or the querulous and tender lamentations; but I have a deep horror of every question about right and duty. When these discourses appear on the horizon, I always see at the same time dark clouds massing; I see looming up the horns of Balzac's tawny moon.

Are the rights of love equal in man and woman? No! a thousand times no! I say so in a loud voice and after the first white hairs and a wide experience permit me to believe that I speak without anger or love. No; the sin of infidelity is not the same in Adam and in Eve: in the latter it is a hundred times greater. As a right and before the courts all parties are equal, but man and woman differ too greatly to be punished in the same measure. If the code is one, the jurors are a thousand; many are the accusers, many the lawyers; and the sentence of amorous betrayal has already been pronounced by all civilized nations and always in the same manner. This unanimous consent was not imposed by the arrogance of men, who alone were the legislators before the courts and judges in the forum of public opinion. No;[Pg 222] this unanimous consent was dictated by a deep consciousness of social necessities, by a more profound and subtler justice that descends into the inmost recess of things to find the roots of that awkward and superficial justice which asserts that all men are equal before the law. How false this dogma is can be sufficiently proved by the history of the jury system, one of the institutions on which our century seems to pride itself.

From man society exacts a hundred different and difficult virtues: he must give his blood for his country and the sweat of his brow for his family and for society; he must be strong, ambitious; he must not allow himself to be corrupted by gold or the seductions of vanity. A physician, he must throw himself into the inglorious and tremendous battle of epidemic; a soldier, he must hold his head high in the face of murderous fire; a lawyer, he must resist the temptations of gold and ambition; a statesman, he must fight against himself, against his family, for the welfare of his country. Defender of the weak, of the shipwrecked, of the poor, natural defender of the female half of the human species and of all the individuals who are of no value to society, he is a warrior perpetually under arms, and should he neglect one of his duties, he is branded as a coward; society despises him, woman does not want him, everyone ignores him.

Woman, on the contrary, can be a coward in the face of fire, of work, of contagion, and of all the battles of life; she can be ignorant and timorous and still be loved and esteemed by all; for in her weakness approaches grace, and it is so sweet to us to............