THE COVENANTS OF LOVE

Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after having given themselves to each other, may in a single instant have created a family, perhaps a nation. In man, love is fecundation as well, but is, above all, the interweaving of two existences, a combination of new relations, a deep modification of the manner of existence for a man and a woman.

Even in the lowest races, even where morality is only interest defended by strength and sacrifice is a folly, where phantoms of religious sentiment scarcely exist, where they bury the old mother alive, or celebrate victories and vintage with a sea of blood; even there love is bound by a compact, silent or sworn. Prostitution also is a compact that may last an hour or a minute, but is always a compact. In any case, the sale and purchase of voluptuousness cannot found a family, a tribe, a people; and even the loosest libertine and the wildest savage feel other needs than that of fecundating a female: they feel the necessity of loving a woman. And to love does not mean to unite the members of two bodies in a single knot, but to possess each other a long time, and to desire, to defend, to protect each other; it means to hold oneself responsible to nature for the weakness of one creature and the violence of another, for the future of the being whom we have procreated together and brought into the world.

Woman, when fecundated, is for nine months weaker and more vulnerable; the woman who is in travail is a wounded creature; the woman who nurses can neither flee nor defend[Pg 228] herself, and the man-child is for a long time defenseless and very weak. The man, then, who has loved a companion even for one day becomes for a long time her friend and protector without ceasing to be her lover. This is the simplest form of the nuptial compact, which is found in many of the lower nations. While the savage female leans affectionately and confidingly on the male who has made her fruitful, he often finds himself to be a man when his companion cannot be a woman, and he then fecundates other females, who are added to his possessions and whom he protects with the same devotion and affection with which he protects and defends the first woman who was his. The very weak man can have but one female, or he must often do without her, because the strong men have more than one and the very strong have many, who often dwell merrily under one roof without being in the least jealous of one another. A polygamy limited to a few females is the most common form of human society in the lower races, and our organism is so imbued with this custom that even in the highest forms of civilization, where morality and religion do not lend their valid support, monogamy slips and falls, to give place to a polygamy more or less acknowledged or concealed.

We, however, must occupy ourselves only with our own society, where the compact of love has but one moral form: matrimony; while it has various forms that belong to the world of pathology, namely, prostitution, rape, concubinage.

We have already studied prostitution. It is the sale of voluptuousness, the possession of bodies without love, the swindling and deceiving of nature; and if nature, only too often cruel, causes a new creature to be generated through a purchased embrace, that creature will enter the world with the mark of infamy on its brow, and, anonymous child of vice, will be cast by society into the most obscure corner of the social vaults, where the things lie which we wish to efface, forget and allow to die. Prostitution is a safety-valve only too necessary in our immoral and hypocritical society, wretchedly constituted, and it exists to prove with most[Pg 229] cruel eloquence that many men cannot love, that very many men should not love.

We have also dealt with rape in the house of others. Even this greatest of the crimes of love we have been compelled to discuss: secret agreement of two traitors who, in the shadow of a social and holy compact, violate the faith of the family and bastardize the world; vile contract of the thief with the procurer, who assassinate in the dark and conceal the victim in the wide folds or the deep fissures of our written codes.

Concubinage in many imperfect societies, and even among us, is a form of matrimony which lacks only religious and civil consecration. It is more despicable for its origin than for the nature of the compact that binds it, because if it lasted eternally, supported only by the word of honor of two creatures who love each other, it would be a true and proper marriage, sealed by the faith of two lovers. Only too often, however, concubinage has an obscure and even shameful origin: it is domestic lechery which has become a habit; it is a vulgar custom that has a periodical type: mustiness of the kitchen or stench of the hospital. Born between the Turkish babooshes and the nightcaps, between the after-dinner yawns and the advices of the hygienist, it has a tinge of prostitution and rape, but knows neither the inebriation of the one nor the pungent remorse of the other. It is a vulgar pickpocket, who begs pardon of the public and is ashamed of himself and weeps when caught............