Book III, Chapter XIFatal Love

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Animals are subjected by nature to a striking condition, called rutting, which urges them to reproduce their species. Only man is capable of a sublime sentiment which makes him choose his companion and tempers the carnal appetites by the most absolute devotion. This sentiment is called love. Among animals, the male mounts all the females indiscriminately and the females submit to all the males. Man is made to love an individual woman, and the woman who is worthy of respect keeps herself for her own man.

In men as in women, the allurement of the senses does not deserve the name of love: it resembles the rut in animals. Libertines, both male and female, are brute beasts.

Love gives an intuition of the absolute to the human soul, because it is absolute itself. It does not exist otherwise. When love reveals itself in a great soul, it is eternity which is revealed. In the woman whom he loves, a man sees and adores divine motherhood, and bestows his heart for ever on the virgin whom he aspires to award with the dignity of mother. The woman adores, in the man whom she loves, that divine fecundity which shall create in her the object of all her vows, the aim of her life, the crown of all her ambitions: the child! So these two souls are only one which must be completed by a third. They are a single man in three souls as God is One in Three Persons.

Our intelligence is made for truth and our heart for love. This is why Saint Augustin spoke so truly when he said to God: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart can find no rest until it has found its rest in Thee.’ Now, God who is infinite can only be loved by man by means of an intermediary. He causes Himself to be loved by the man in the woman and by the woman in the man. That is why the honour and happiness of those whom we love imparts to us divine grandeur and bliss.

When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creature. When we are the objects oflove, we are representatives of God; His ambassadors to a certain soul, fully empowered to grant it paradise on earth. Souls live by truth and love; without love and truth, they suffer and pine away like the body when it is deprived of light and heat.

‘What is truth?’ Tiberius's representative asked scornfully when faced with Jesus Christ, and Tiberius himself posed a question with more insolent disdain and bitter irony: ‘What is love?’

The rage at being unable to understand and believe anything, the frenzy at being incapable of love, this is the true definition of Hell; and how many men and how many women are delivered after this life to the tortures of this appalling damnation? How many are delivered to the passionate mania for falsehood; to the deceptions of love which consign the soul to fatal insanity? The need to know being always outstripped by the unknown and the need for love being always betrayed by the impotence of the heart?

Don Juan went on from crime to crime in the pursuit of love and was finally crushed to death in the embrace of a stone statue. Faust, when prompted by the emptiness of knowledge without faith, amused himself with the over-credulous Margaret, and was left with nothing but remorse after he had lost her. Perhaps Margaret will save him, because she, poor child, was really in love, and it is not God's will surely that she should be parted for ever from the one she adored.

Do you want to enter into the secrets of love? Study the mysteries of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from love, because love is an absolute preference which cries out to be reciprocated; but it cannot exist without that absolute trust which common jealousy naturally tends to destroy. The reason is that common jealousy is an egotistical sentiment, the usual result of which is to substitute hatred for affection. It is a secret calumny against the loved object, a doubt which insults it; often it is a frenzy which vents itself in ill-usage and destruction.

Therefore, judge love according to its works: if it elevates the soul, it will inspire devotion and heroic actions; if it is only jealous of the perfection and well-being of the one it loves, if it is capable of sacrificing itself to the honour and peace of the loved one, it is an immortal and sublime sentiment; but if it breaks the courage, enervates the will, lowers the aspirations, and perverts duty, then it is a fatal passion and one must conquer it or perish.

When love is pure, absolute, divine and sublime, ir is in itself the most sacred of all obligations. We admire Romeo and Juliet in spite of all the prejudices and passions of the Capulets and Montagues, and do not think that Piramus and This be should be separated for ever by their family feud. Yet we also admire Cnimène asking for the death of Le Cid to avenge that of her father, because Chimène, by sacrificing love, made herself worthy of love; she felt sure that if she failed in her duty, Roderick would no longer esteem her. The heroine did not hesitate for a moment between the death of her lover and the devaluation of his love, and she justified that great saying of Solomon that love is more unyielding than Hell.

True love is a dazzling revelation of the immortality of the soul; for a man, its ideal is unstained purity and for a woman, unfailing generosity; it is jealous of the integrity of these ideals and one might term this noble jealousy ‘Zelatype’ or the standard of zeal. The eternal dream oflove is the immaculate mother, and the dogma recently enunciated by the Church and borrowed from the Song of Solomon was revealed by love itself.

Impurity is promiscuity in one's desires. The man who lusts after all women, the woman who wants the desires of all men, do not know love and are not worthy to know it. Coquetry is the debasement of feminine vanity; even its name has an animal derivation and recalls the provocative strutting of the hens who want to attract the cock's attention. It is permissible for a woman to look beautiful, but she should only wish to gratify the one she loves or hopes to love one day.

The integrity of his wife's modesty is a man's especial ideal and is the subject of his legitimate jealousy. Refinement and magnaminity in her husband is the special dream of a woman and it is in this ideal that she finds the stimulus or failure of her love.

Marriage is legitimate love. A marriage of convenience is a marriage of despair. A male and female of the human species agree to propagate children under the protection of the law; if neither of them has yet come to love the other, one can but hope that love will develop in the intimacy of the family circle, but love is not always obedient to social conventions and those who marry without love often run the risk of adultery.

The woman who is in love and does not marry the man she loves is sinning against nature. Julie de Volmar is inexcusable and her husband is impossible, even in a novel; Saint-Preux must have been mistaken over this impossible pair. A girl who gets engaged and then jilts a man, dishonours her first love; it may be tacitly regarded as an earnest of adultery when she does marry. No woman worthy of the name need blush in the presence of the man who has shown himself worthy of her first love.

We can understand a tender-hearted man marrying, and rehabilitating in this way, a decent girl who has been seduced and abandoned; but that a girl should surrender herself when she is no longer her own mistress, and under the pretext that the baron d'Etange is threatening her life no less, or because she supposes that her father will die if she does not obey him, provokes us to comment that this indelicacy of heart is hardly justified by cowardice or a foolish sensibility. A father who talks of killing his daughter or of dying if she does not act becomingly and nobly, is no longer a father but a ferocious egotist, a despot one should reprove or fly from. In a word, Rousseau's Julie is a ‘nice girl’ who is not nice at all, but manages to betray two men at the same time. Her father is a pander who dishonours daughter and friend together; Volmar is a coward and Saint-Preux is an ass. Once he knew Julie was married, he had no business to see her again.

To marry a woman who is given to another and whom this other had not abandoned is the same thing as marrying someone else's wife. Such a marriage is null and void before nature and before human dignity. This is something which Rousseau did not understand. I will allow the happy-go-lucky marriages of Henri Murger's heroines, who treat life as a farce; but I will not admit the marriage of Julie, because she makes a show of taking love seriously. To be or not to be, that is the question, as Hamlet said; well, the essence of a human being is in his thoughts and in his affections.

For a person to abjure his thoughts publicly without being convinced of their falsehood, is an apostasy of the spirit; to forswear love when one feels its existence, is an apostasy of the heart.

Loves which change are passing whims; and those at which one must blush are misadventures whose influence ought to be shaken off.

Homer, in showing us Odysseus, after he had triumphed over the wiles of Calypso and Circe, ordering himself to be bound to the mast of his ship so that he could hear, without yielding to it, the seductive song of the sirens, gave us the true model of the wise man escaping the deceptions of fatal love; Odysseus owed everything to Penelope, who kept herself for him, and the nuptial bed of the king of Ithaca, with posts which were the eternal trees rooted deep in the earth, was, in the sometimes licentious days of antiquity, the symbolic monument to venerable and chaste love.

True love is an invincible passion motivated by right sentiment; it can never be in contradiction with duty, because it becomes in its own right the most absolute of duties; but unjustified passion constitutes fatal love and it is this which must be resisted even if one suffers and dies in doing so.

One could call fatal love the prince of demons, because it is evil magnetism armed with all its power; nothing can confine or disarm him when he goes on the rampage. It is a fever, a mania, a transport of delirium. The victim feels himself burn slowly and there is none to pity. Memories torture him, unfulfilled desires make him desperate; he entertains thoughts of death but more often prefers to love and suffer than to die. What is the cure for this disease? How can the wounds of this poisoned arrow be healed?

Who will rescue us from the aberrations of this folly?

To cure fatal love, one must break the magnetic chain by applying another current and neutralizing one kind of electricity with its opposite.

Put a distance between you and the one you love; keep nothing which reminds you of her; even get rid of the clothes she has seen you wearing. Take up tiring work of all sorts, never be idle, and never daydream; wear yourself out with toil during the day so that you will sleep soundly at night; find some ambition to fulfil, some interest to satisfy, and go higher than your love to find them. In this way you will achieve tranquillity, if not forgetfulness. What must be avoided at all costs is solitude, that nurse of the affections and dreams, unless one is drawn towards religious devotion, like Louise de la Vallière and like de Rancé, without intending to torture the body to relieve the agony of the soul.

Above all, it has to be understood that, as far as human sentiments are concerned, the absolute is an ideal which is never realized here below; all beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with a marvellous rapidity; beautiful Helen has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

Any love which one cannot or should not declare is fatal love. There is no legitimacy in the passions outside the laws of nature and society. They must be exterminated at birth and suppressed with this axiom, ‘That which must not exist does not exist’. Nothing will ever excuse incest or adultery. These are shameful things, offensive to chaste ears even in name, and the pure must not allow their existence. Acts which are unjustified by reason are not human acts, they are bestial and foolish. They are falls from which one must recover, falls whose stains must be removed; they are acts of depravity which decency must hide, which morals, cleansed by the magnetic breeze, must not admit even to punish them. Look at Jesus, in the presence of the woman taken in adultery. He did not listen to those who accused her, he did not look at her so as not to see her blushes, and when they kept on pressing Him to judge her, He answered with these wonderful words which would be the end of all penalties imposed by human justice, if their meaning were not that certain acts must remain unrecognized and as it were impossible before the modesty of the law: ‘Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more’.

This is how our sublime Master spoke to the unhappy woman whose accusers He had refused to hear.

Jesus does not use the word adultery; He calls it fornication, and for punishment He allows a man to send away his wife.

The wife, for her part, has the right to leave the husband who has deceived her. Then, if she has no children, she becomes free again before nature; but, if she is a mother, she loses her rights in her children by her husband, at least if he is not a notorious scoundrel. In renouncing him, she renounces her children; and if she has not the melancholy courage to leave them and lose their regard, she must resign herself to the heroism of maternal sacrifice, remaining a widow in marriage and consoling her misery as a woman in her maternal devotion.

Hen birds never desert their nests before the fledglings can fly, and why should women be inferior to the birds as mothers?

Love as an absolute ideal defies human generation in a certain respect, and this ideal demands the unity of love. The lovely dream of Christianity is the reality of noble souls, and it is because they would not sully themselves in the promiscuity of the ancient world that so many loving hearts entered the cloisters to live and die in an eternal desire. This occasionally sublime error is always regrettable. Ought one to refuse to live because one is not immortal? Ought one to stop eating because the food for the soul is better than that for the body? Ought one to give up walking for lack of wings?

Happy the noble Hidalgo, Don Quixote, who imagines he pays homage to Dulcinea when kissing the big, ill-shod feet of a peasant girl from Toboso!

Rousseau's Heloise, which we have just been criticizing so severely from the point of view of the absolute in love, is for all that a delightful creation, which is the more true for being defective, and reproduces in a truly human novel all the contradictions and weaknesses which made Rousseau a combination of the Don Quixote of virtue and a gossipy old retainer. After failing with Mrs de Warens, of whom he thought himself jealous, after losing his head over Mrs de Larnage, after adoring Mrs de Houdetot, who loved another, he philosophically married his housekeeper, and if it is true that the poor man died of a broken heart on dis covering that Theresa had been unfaithful to him, one must admire and pity him, his heart was made for love.

There is only one woman in the world for the heart which is worthy of love, but the woman, this earthly divinity, sometimes reveals herself in several persons, and her incarnations are often more numerous than the avatars of Vishnu. Happy are those believers who never lose hope and, in the winter of the heart, await the return of the swallows.

The sun glows inside a drop of water. It is a diamond, a world. Blessed in the man who, when the drop of water evaporates, does not think that the sun has gone away. Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal Beauty, the unique object of our love affairs. I should like to have the eyes of the eagle and soar up towards the sun, but if the sun comes down to me, scattering his splendours in the dewdrops, I shall be grateful to nature without grieving too much when the diamond disappears. Alas! for that fickle creature who loves me no more in her search for her heart's ideal, I too was but a drop of water; must I accuse and curse her because, in her sight, I have become a fallen tear where she no longer sees the sun?

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