Than one true manly lover blest;”
he had evidently just left the chill atmosphere of a coquette. “A coquette,” says A. Duprey, “is more occupied with the homage we withhold than with that which we bestow upon her.” “Coquettes are the quacks of love,” says Rochefoucauld. “Heartlessness and fascination, in about equal proportions, constitute,” according to Mme. Deluzy, “the receipt for forming the character of a coquette.” And Poincelot caps the climax: “An asp would render its sting more venomous by dipping it into the heart of a coquette.”
There are masculine as well as feminine Coquettes; but there is one striking difference between them. To the female Coquette all is game that gets into her net; she will turn away from a man of genius, an Apollo, already at her feet, to fascinate a rough and freckled country lad at first sight; whereas a male Coquette rarely wastes his powder on a girl who isn’t pretty. And even herein is seen the superiority of man’s Love to woman’s. The male Coquette is actuated by Admiration of Beauty as well as by Pride; the female Coquette by Pride alone.
Cannibals have a quaint old custom of eating certain parts of a formidable enemy’s body, in the belief that they will thus inherit his qualities,—as by eating his tongue, his eloquence; his heart, his courage. What a delicious gastronomic morsel a Coquette’s heart would be to these savages, whose principal amusement is cruelty!
Perhaps the best description ever given of a Coquette is Thackeray’s portraiture of Beatrix—"A woman who has listened to" her admirers, “and played with them and laughed with them,—who, beckoning them with lures and caresses, and with Yes smiling from her eyes, has tricked them on to their knees, and turned her back and left them.”
Love and Rank.—Not so many years ago the newspapers of a certain European country made a great deal of ado about a forthcoming marriage between a blue-blooded youth and a ditto maiden, for the reason that it was “a real Love-match.” Poor princes! so rarely are they allowed to choose their own Juliet, they who are supposed to be the rulers of the land. Until quite recently, it is true, public opinion on the Continent sanctioned a Love-marriage between an aristocrat and a non-aristocrat provided it was unlawful, i.e. morganatic, a special royal euphemy for bigamy; but now even this privilege is abolished, and princes can marry one of equal rank only, in pursuance of a custom more tyrannical, more restrictive than the parental command on which marriage-unions depended in ancient and mediæval times.
German novelists have made considerable progress in their art in recent years, but in one respect it seems to be very difficult for them to substitute realism for romance. In every love story, almost, one of the leading characters must be either a prince or a princess. As if it were not the very essence of a prince and a princess that they shall not be allowed to love and marry for Love—unless they are clever enough to fall in Love with the partner singled out for them, which happens once in a hundred times, perhaps.
But it is not only in the highest circles that aristocratic Pride is opposed to free Sexual Selection. It extends through a hundred scales of the social ladder. Germany presents a remarkable example. The metaphysician Eduard von Hartmann credits the government of that country with great astuteness. Not having much money to pay its officials, it has established a legion of distinctions of rank and titles, for the sake of which the officials are quite willing to forego a larger salary. Of the ludicrous conceit inspired by this distinction of having even the slightest kind of a “handle” to their name, I can give an amusing instance from my own experience. Some years ago, desiring to see the Intendant, or Manager, of the Munich Opera-house, I entered a little room, marked Portier, and found that gentleman comfortably seated, with his cap on. He took my card, on which there was no “handle” of any sort, and replied sternly, “The Intendant is in; I will send up your card;” adding, more severely still, “And, young man, let me tell you, that when you come into the presence of a royal official, it behoves you to remove your hat!”
Harmless as such childish vanity may seem, it is yet one of the reasons why there are fewer good-looking women in Germany than in most European countries—France always excepted. For a girl, whose father wears on his coat the order of the black eagle, to marry a young man whose father only has the order of the green eagle, would be considered an unpardonable mésalliance, and would scandalise the whole neighbourhood. Of course it does not make much difference in a woman’s own looks whether she marries a man she loves or one whom she can barely tolerate, and who is forced on her by parental desire and public opinion, but it does make a difference with her children; and even in her own case, is it not self-evident that the smile of pleasure at being happily married is a better preservative of youthful beauty than the constant frown of disappointment, perhaps of disgust?
The highest treason against Cupid, however, is committed by those American women, who, without the excuse of inherited custom, come to Europe with their money to marry a baron. Fortunately such marriages have almost always ended so wretchedly that the fashion has somewhat lost its popularity. What is a baron? Perhaps a man whose great-great-great-grandfather “lent” some duke or king a few thousand gold pieces, in return for which he was allowed to place “von” or “de” before his name. And on the strength of this little word the family Pride has gone on steadily increasing through various generations—or rather, degenerations.