CHAPTER XXXVIII

OF SELF-ESTEEM PIQUED[1]

Pique is a manifestation of vanity; I do not want my antagonist to go higher than myself and _I take that antagonist himself as judge of my worth_. I want to produce an effect on his heart. It is this that carries us so far beyond all reasonable limits.

Sometimes, to justify our own extravagance, we go so far as to tell ourselves that this rival has a mind to dupe us.

Pique, being an infirmity of honour, is far more common in monarchies; it must, surely, be exceedingly rare in countries, where the habit is rampant of valuing things according to their utility--for example, in the United States.

Every man, and a Frenchman sooner than any other, loathes being taken for a dupe; and yet the lightness of the French character under the old monarchic _régime_[2], prevented pique from working great havoc beyond the domains of gallantry and gallant-love. Pique has produced serious tragedies only in monarchies, where, through the climate, the shade of character is darker (Portugal, Piedmont).

The provincial in France forms a ludicrous idea of what is considered a gentleman in good society--and then he takes cover behind his model, and waits there all his

[Pg 135] life to see that no one trespasses. And so good-bye naturalness! He is always in a state of pique, a mania which gives a laughable character even to his love affairs. This enviousness is what makes it most unbearable to live in small towns, and one should remind oneself of this, when one admires the picturesque situation of any of them. The most generous and noble emotions are there paralysed by contact with all that is most low in the products of civilisation. In order to put the finishing touch to their awfulness, these bourgeois talk of nothing but the corruption of great cities.[3]

Pique cannot exist in passion-love; it is feminine pride. "If I let my lover treat me badly, he will despise me and no longer be able to love me." It may also be jealousy in all its fury.

Jealousy desires the death of the object it fears. The man in a state of pique is miles away from that--he wants his enemy to live, and, above all, be witness of his triumph.

He would be sorry to see his rival renounce the struggle, for the fellow may have the insolence to say in the depth of his heart: "If I had persevered in my original object, I should have outdone him."

With pique, there is no interest in the apparent purpose--the point of everything is victory. This is well brought out in the love affairs of chorus-girls; take away the rival, and the boasted passion, which threatened suicide from the fifth-floor window, instantly subsides.

Love from pique, contrary to passion-love, passes in a moment; it is enough for the antagonist by an irrevocable step to own that he renounces the struggle. I hesitate, however, to advance this maxim, having only one example, and that leaves doubts in my mind. Here are the facts--the reader will judge. Dona Diana is a

[Pg 136] young person of twenty-three, daughter of one of the richest and proudest citizens of Seville. She is beautiful, without any doubt, but of a peculiar type of beauty, and is credited with ever so much wit and still more pride. She was passionately in love, to all appearances at least, with a young officer, with whom her family would have nothing to do. The officer left for America with Morillo, and they corresponded continuously. One day in the midst of a lot of people, assembled round the mother of Dona Diana, a fool announced the death of the charming officer. All eyes are turned upon Dona Diana; Dona Diana says nothing but these words: "What a pity--so young."

Just that day we had been reading a play of old Massinger, which ends tragically, but in which the heroine takes the death of her lover with this apparent tranquillity. I saw the mother shudder in spite of her pride and dislike; the father went out of the room to hide his joy. In the midst of this scene and the dismay of all present, who were making eyes at the fool who had told the story, Dona Diana, the only one at ease, proceeded with the conversation, as if nothing had happened. Her mother, in apprehension, set her maid to watch her, but nothing seemed to be altered in her behaviour.

Two years later, a very fine young man paid his attentions to her. This time again, and, still for the same reason, Dona Diana's parents violently opposed the marriage, because the aspirant was not of noble birth. She herself declared it should take place. A state of pique ensues between the daughter's sense of honour and the father's. The young man is forbidden the house. Dona Diana is no longer taken to the country and hardly ever to church. With scrupulous care, every means of meeting her lover is taken from her. He disguises himself and sees her secretly at long intervals. She becomes more and more resolute, and refuses the most

[Pg 137] brilliant matches, even a title and a great establishment at the Court of Ferdinand VII. The whole town is talking of the misfortunes of the two lovers and of their heroic constancy. At last the majority of Dona Diana draws near. She gives her father to understand that she means to make use of her right of disposing of her own hand. The family, driven back on its last resources, opens negotiations for the marriage. When it is half concluded, at an official meeting of the two families, the young man, after six years' constancy, refuses Dona Diana.[4]

A quarter of an hour later no trace of anything--she was consoled. Did she love from pique? Or are we face to face with a great soul, that disclaims to parade its sorrow before the eyes of the world?

In passion-love satisfaction, if I can call it such, is often only to be won by piquing the loved one's self-esteem. Then, in appearance, the lover realises all that can be desired; complaints would be ridiculous and seem senseless. He cannot speak of his misfortune, and yet how constantly he knows and feels its prick! Its traces are inwoven, so to speak, with circumstances, the most flattering and the most fit to awaken illusions of enchantment. This misfortune rears its monstrous head at the tenderest moments, as if to taunt the lover and make him feel, at one and the same instant, all the delight of being loved by the charming and unfeeling creature in his arms, and the impossibility of this delight being his. Perhaps after jealousy, this is the cruellest unhappiness.

The story is still fresh in a certain large town[5] of a man of soft and gentle nature, who was carried away by a rage of this kind to spill the blood of his mistress, who only loved him from pique against her sister. He arranged

[Pg 138] with her, one evening, to come for a row on the sea by themselves, in a pretty little boat he had devised himself. Once well out to sea, he touches a spring, the boat divides and disappears for ever.

I have seen a man of sixty set out to keep an actress, the most capricious, irresponsible, delightful and wonderful on the London stage--Miss Cornel.

"And you expect that she'll be faithful?" people asked him.

"Not in the least. But she'll be in love with me--perhaps madly in love."

And for a whole year she did love him--often to distraction. For three whole months together she never even gave him subject for complaint. He had put a state of pique, disgraceful in many ways, between his mistress and his daughter.

Pique wins the day in gallant-love, being its very life and blood. It is the ordeal best fitted to differentiate between gallant-love and passion-love. There is an old maxim of war, given to young fellows new to their regiment, that if you are billeted on a house, where there are two sisters, and you want to have one, you must pay your attentions to the other. To win the majority of Spanish women, who are still young and ready for love affairs, it is enough to give out, seriously and modestly, that you have no feelings whatever for the lady of the house. I have this useful maxim from dear General Lassale. This is the most dangerous way of attacking passion-love.

Piqued self-esteem is the bond which ties the happiest marriages, after those formed by love. Many husbands make sure of their wives' love for many years, by taking up with some little woman a couple of months after their marriage.[6] In this way the habit is engendered of thinking only of one man, and family ties succeed in making the habit invincible.

[Pg 139] If in the past century at the Court of Louis XV a great lady (Madame de Choiseul) was seen to worship her husband,[7] the reason is that he seemed to take a keen interest in her sister, the Duchesse de Grammont.

The most neglected mistress, once she makes us see that she prefers another man, robs us of our peace and afflicts our heart with all the semblance of passion.

The courage of an Italian is an access of rage; the courage of a German a moment of intoxication; that of a Spaniard an outburst of pride. If there were a nation, in which courage were generally a matter of piqued self-esteem between the soldiers of each company and the regiments of each division, in the case of a rout there would be no support, and consequently there would be no means of rallying the armies of such a nation. To foresee the danger and try to remedy it, would be the greatest of all absurdities with such conceited runaways.

"It is enough to have opened any single description of a voyage among the savages of North America," says one of the most delightful philosophers of France,[8] "to know that the ordinary fate of prisoners of war is not only to be burnt alive and eaten, but first to be bound to a stake near a flaming bonfire and to be tortured there for several hours, by all the most ferocious and refined devices that fury can imagine. Read what travellers, who have witnessed these fearful scenes, tell of the cannibal joy of the assistants, above all, of the fury of the women and children, and of their gruesome delight in this competition of cruelty. See also what they add about the heroic firmness and immutable self-possession of the prisoner, who not only gives no sign of pain, but taunts and defies his torturers, by all that pride can make most haughty, irony most bitter, and sarcasm most insulting--singing his own glorious deeds, going through the number of the relations and friends of the onlookers whom he has killed, detailing the sufferings he has inflicted on them, and accusing all that stand around him of cowardice, timidity and ignorance of the methods of torture; until falling limb from limb, devoured alive

[Pg 140] under his own eyes by enemies drunk with fury, he gasps out his last whisper and his last insult together with his life's breath.[9] All this would be beyond belief in civilised nations, will look like fable to the most fearless captains of our grenadiers, and will one day be brought into doubt by posterity."

This physiological phenomenon is closely connected with a particular moral state in the prisoner, which constitutes, between him on the one side and all his torturers on the other, a combat of self-esteem--of vanity against vanity, as to who can hold out longer.

Our brave military doctors have often observed that wounded soldiers, who, in a calm state of mind and senses, would have shrieked out, during certain operations, display, on the contrary, only calmness and heroism, if they are prepared for it in a certain manner. It is a matter of piquing their sense of honour; you have to pretend, first in a roundabout way, and then with irritating persistence, that it is beyond their present power to bear the operation without shrieking.

[1] In Italian _puntiglio_(20).

[2] Three-quarters of the great French noblemen about 1778 would have been on the high road to prison in a country where the laws were executed without respect of persons.

[3] As the one keeps strict watch on the other in all that touches love, there is less love and more immorality in provincial towns. Italy is luckier.

[4] Every year there is more than one example of women abandoned just as vilely, and so I can pardon suspiciousness in respectable women. Mirabeau, _Lettres à Sophie_(21). Opinion is powerless in despotic countries: there is nothing solid but the friendship of the pasha.

[5] Leghorn, 1819.

[6] See _The Confessions of an Odd-tempered Man_. Story by Mrs. Opie.

[7] Letters of Madame du Deffant, Memoirs of Lauzun.

[8] Volney, _Tableau des États-Unis d'Amérique_, pp. 491-96.

[9] Anyone accustomed to a spectacle like this, who feels the risk of being the hero of such another, may possibly be interested only in its heroic aspect, and, in that case, the spectacle must be the foremost and most intimate of the non-active pleasures.

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