Bab Bab 12 · Chapter XII

. Chapter XII

“Strange theory!” cried I.

“Strange in what? According to all the doctrines of the Church, the

world will have an end. Science teaches the same fatal conclusions.

Why, then, is it strange that the same thing should result from moral

Doctrine? ‘Let those who can, contain,’ said Christ. And I take this

passage literally, as it is written. That morality may exist between

people in their worldly relations, they must make complete chastity

their object. In tending toward this end, man humiliates himself. When

he shall reach the last degree of humiliation, we shall have moral

marriage.

“But if man, as in our society, tends only toward physical love, though

he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will

have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral

life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call

the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must

arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked

upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best

situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear

and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice

their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they

may not remain virgins,—that is, superiors! Through fear of finding

themselves in that ideal state, they ruin themselves.

“But I did not understand formerly, I did not understand that the words

of the Gospel, that ‘he who looks upon a woman to lust after her has

already committed adultery,’ do not apply to the wives of others, but

notably and especially to our own wives. I did not understand this, and

I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period were

virtuous, and that to satisfy one’s desires with his wife is an

eminently chaste thing. Know, then, that I consider these departures,

these isolations, which young married couples arrange with the

permission of their parents, as nothing else than a license to engage

in debauchery.

“I saw, then, in this nothing bad or shameful, and, hoping for great

joys, I began to live the honeymoon. And very certainly none of these

joys followed. But I had faith, and was determined to have them, cost

what they might. But the more I tried to secure them, the less I

succeeded. All this time I felt anxious, ashamed, and weary. Soon I

began to suffer. I believe that on the third or fourth day I found my

wife sad and asked her the reason. I began to embrace her, which in my

opinion was all that she could desire. She put me away with her hand,

and began to weep.

“At what? She could not tell me. She was filled with sorrow, with

anguish. Probably her tortured nerves had suggested to her the truth

about the baseness of our relations, but she found no words in which to

say it. I began to question her; she answered that she missed her

absent mother. It seemed to me that she was not telling the truth. I

sought to console her by maintaining silence in regard to her parents.

I did not imagine that she felt herself simply overwhelmed, and that

her parents had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to

me, and I accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She

dried her tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms,

for my selfishness and cruelty.

“I looked at her. Her whole face expressed hatred, and hatred of me. I

cannot describe to you the fright which this sight gave me. ‘How?

What?’ thought I, ‘love is the unity of souls, and here she hates me?

Me? Why? But it is impossible! It is no longer she!’

“I tried to calm her. I came in conflict with an immovable and cold

hostility, so that, having no time to reflect, I was seized with keen

irritation. We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this

first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It

was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us.

Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. We stood face

to face in our true light, like two egoists trying to procure the

greatest possible enjoyment, like two individuals trying to mutually

exploit each other.

“So what I called our quarrel was our actual situation as it appeared

after the satisfaction of sensual desire. I did not realize that this

cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would

soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I

thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become

reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same

honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be

necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out.

“It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. ‘It was

inevitable,’ I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more,

because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something

like a question of money,—and never had I haggled on that score; it was

even impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember

that, in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was

my intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money

that I based my sole right over her. In short, something

extraordinarily stupid and base, which was neither in my character nor

in hers.

“I was beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same

accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the

expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that

had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had

occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this

fierce spite. Some time passed. Our mutual hatred was again concealed

beneath an access of sensual desire, and I again consoled myself with

the reflection that these scenes were reparable faults.

“But when they were repeated a third and a fourth time, I understood

that they were not simply faults, but a fatality that must happen

again. I was no longer frightened, I was simply astonished that I

should be precisely the one to live so uncomfortably with my wife, and

that the same thing did not happen in other households. I did not know

that in all households the same sudden changes take place, but that

all, like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved

for themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not

only to others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.

“That was what happened to me. Begun in the early days, it continued

and increased with characteristics of fury that were ever more

pronounced. At the bottom of my soul, from the first weeks, I felt that

I was in a trap, that I had what I did not expect, and that marriage is

not a joy, but a painful trial. Like everybody else, I refused to

confess it (I should not have confessed it even now but for the

outcome). Now I am astonished to think that I did not see my real

situation. It was so easy to perceive it, in view of those quarrels,

begun for reasons so trivial that afterwards one could not recall them.

“Just as it often happens among gay young people that, in the absence

of jokes, they laugh at their own laughter, so we found no reasons for

our hatred, and we hated each other because hatred was naturally

boiling up in us. More extraordinary still was the absence of causes

for reconciliation.

“Sometimes words, explanations, or even tears, but sometimes, I

remember, after insulting words, there tacitly followed embraces and

declarations. Abomination! Why is it that I did not then perceive this

baseness?”