CHAPTER XLI

OF NATIONS WITH REGARD TO LOVE.

FRANCE

I mean to put aside my natural affections and be only a cold philosopher. French women, fashioned by their amiable men, themselves creatures only of vanity and physical desires, are less active, less energetic, less feared, and, what's more, less loved and less powerful, than Spanish and Italian women.

A woman is powerful only according to the degree of unhappiness, which she can inflict as punishment on her lover. Where men have nothing but vanity, every woman is useful, but none is indispensable. It is success in winning a woman's love, not in keeping it, which flatters a man. When men have only physical desires, they go to prostitutes, and that is why the prostitutes of France are charming and those of Spain the very reverse. In France, to a great many men prostitutes can give as much happiness as virtuous women--happiness, that is to say, without love. There is always one thing for which a Frenchman has much more respect than for his mistress--his vanity.

In Paris a young man sees in his mistress a kind of slave, whose destiny it is, before everything, to please his vanity. If she resist the orders of this dominating passion, he leaves her--and is only the better pleased with himself, when he can tell his friends in what a piquant way, with how smart a gesture, he waved her off.

A Frenchman, who knew his own country well (Meilhan), said: "In France, great passions are as rare as great men."

[Pg 159] No language has words to express how impossible it is for a Frenchman to play the role of a deserted and desperate lover, in full view of a whole town--yet no sight is commoner at Venice or Bologna.

To find love at Paris, we must descend to those classes, in which the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle against real want, have left more energy.

To let oneself be seen with a great and unsatisfied desire, is to let oneself be seen in a position of inferiority--and that is impossible in France, except for people of no position at all. It means exposing oneself to all kinds of sneers--hence come the exaggerated praises bestowed on prostitutes by young men who mistrust their own hearts. A vulgar susceptibility and dread of appearing in a position of inferiority forms the principle of conversation among provincial people. Think of the man who only lately, when told of the assassination of H. R. H. the Duke of Berri(25), answered: "I knew it."[1]

In the Middle Ages hearts were tempered by the presence of danger, and therein, unless I am mistaken, lies another cause of the astonishing superiority of the men of the sixteenth century. Originality, which among us is rare, comical, dangerous and often affected, was then of everyday and unadorned. Countries where even to-day danger often shows its iron hand, such as Corsica,[2]

[Pg 160] Spain or Italy, can still produce great men. In those climates, where men's gall cooks for three months under the burning heat, it is activity's direction that is to seek; at Paris, I fear, it is activity itself.[3]

Many young men, fine enough to be sure at Montmirail or the Bois de Boulogne, are afraid of love; and when you see them, at the age of twenty, fly the sight of a young girl who has struck them as pretty, you may know that cowardice is the real cause. When they remember what they have read in novels is expected of a lover, their blood runs cold. These chilly spirits cannot conceive how the storm of passion, which lashes the sea to waves, also fills the sails of the ship and gives her the power of riding over them.

Love is a delicious flower, but one must have the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a frightful precipice. Besides ridicule, love has always staring it in the face the desperate plight of being deserted by the loved one, and in her place only a _dead blank_ for all the rest of one's life.

Civilisation would be perfect, if it could continue the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with a more frequent presence of danger.[4]

[Pg 161] It ought to be possible to augment a thousandfold the pleasures of private life by exposing it frequently to danger. I do not speak only of military danger. I would have this danger present at every instant, in every shape, and threatening all the interests of existence, such as formed the essence of life in the Middle Ages. Such danger as our civilisation has trained and refined, goes hand in hand quite naturally with the most insipid feebleness of character.

I hear the words of a great man in _A Voice from St Helena_ by Mr. O'Meara:--

Order Murat to attack and destroy four or five thousand men in such a direction, it was done in a moment; but leave him to himself, he was an imbecile without judgment. I cannot conceive how so brave a man could be so "lâche." He was nowhere brave unless before the enemy. There he was probably the bravest man in the world.... He was a paladin, in fact a Don Quixote in the field; but take him into the Cabinet, he was a poltroon without judgment or decision. Murat and Ney were the bravest men I ever witnessed. (O'Meara, Vol. II, p. 95.)

[1] This is historical. Many people, though very curious, are annoyed at being told news; they are frightened of appearing inferior to him who tells them the news.

[2] Memoirs of M. Realier-Dumas. Corsica, which, as regards its population of one hundred and eighty thousand souls, would not form a half of most French Departments, has produced in modern times Salliceti, Pozzo di Borgo, General Sebastiani, Cervioni, Abbatucci, Lucien and Napoleon Bonaparte and Aréna. The Département du Nord, with its nine hundred thousand inhabitants, is far from being able to show a similar list. The reason is that in Corsica anyone, on leaving his house, may be greeted by a bullet; and the Corsican, instead of submitting like a good Christian, tries to defend himself and still more to be revenged. That is the way spirits like Napoleon are forged. It's a long cry from such surroundings to a palace with its lords-in-waiting and chamberlains, and a Fénelon obliged to find reasons for his respect to His Royal Highness, when speaking to H. R. H. himself, aged twelve years. See the works of that great writer.

[3] At Paris, to get on, you must pay attention to a million little details. None the less there is this very powerful objection. Statistics show many more women who commit suicide from love at Paris than in all the towns of Italy together. This fact gives me great difficulty; I do not know what to say to it for the moment, but it doesn't change my opinion. It may be that our ultra-civilised life is so wearisome, that death seems a small matter to the Frenchman of to-day--or more likely, overwhelmed by the wreck of his vanity, he blows out his brains.

[4] I admire the manners of the time of Lewis XIV: many a man might pass in three days from the salons of Marly to the battlefield of Senet or Ramillies. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, were all in a continual state of apprehension. See the Letters of Madame de Sévigné. The presence of danger had kept in the language an energy and a freshness that we would not dare to hazard nowadays; and yet M. de Lameth killed his wife's lover. If a Walter Scott were to write a novel of the times of Lewis XIV, we should be a good deal surprised.

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