We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

III

The coquette in Flirt is a lady of the ordinary bourgeois type. She is determined to have admirers at any price, and despises no means whereby to capture the indifferent, fears no humiliation if only she can render submissive those who seek to resist her, nor does she hesitate to hold out hopes wherewith to attract the doubtful. She would have them all burn on the altar of her vanity like incense rising in her nostrils, but for the sake of convenience she remains an honourable woman. Her toilet is the sole occupation of her mind; to charm and afterwards reject is the daily excitement without which she cannot live.

L’Amour Artificiel is a truer and more striking picture of the age. Jules Cazes has emancipated himself from the conventional French custom of never describing any erotic experiences except those of married women. This story takes place before marriage. Stella is a daughter of the Plutocracy, probably half a Jewess, spoilt, pretentious, talented, with all the coldness of soul and temperament that belongs to the emancipated woman, and which she mistakes for pride, she has that same feeling of superiority over the man combined with the consciousness of being unloveable—a new type that is very un-French, and which offers a singular proof of the manner in which foreign influence has forced its way through the closed circle of culture belonging to French perception. Stella is a young lady imbued with the tone of Ibsen’s and Kielland’s women’s rights women. Her story is a continual withering of the soul.

She has a fine voice and a remarkable talent for execution, but what is she to sing when she feels nothing? She is a stranger to the depths of life; a young girl comme il faut, belonging to the moneyed aristocracy, is not likely to experience anything very deep—from lack of disposition, lack of opportunity, or both; she is unbearably bored in the society to which she belongs, and has a longing for sensations; her mornings are spent in gazing at herself in the looking-glass, in paying visits and trying on dresses, in annoying her friends, and in practising the newest songs; but how in the world is she to spend her evenings? She lures a penniless young author, flirts with him and makes prodigious advances, only to chase him away again like a dog. The young man sees through her game, but his poor, foolish head is turned by her perfumes, her fashionable dresses and her cold, proud beauty, and his sufferings are quite sufficient to afford her an agreeable distraction. The type which she represents bears a certain resemblance to that which Marie Bashkirtseff records in her diary. It is the same fever of girlhood, the same wild desire to attract men, the same self-deification combined with the utter incapacity for loving which undermined that great talent and hot temperament, and drove its possessor to an early illness and death. But Stella is far from possessing a hot temperament. She has that injured consciousness of her actions which is the property of all calculating souls. She seizes one initiative after the other with regard to the poor silly youth, to whose modest mind the idea never occurs of seducing such a self-possessed young lady. But Stella, who has been over hasty in breaking with her intended who did not allow himself to be sufficiently tyrannised over to please her, has grown anxious to be married. Without love, without tenderness, without ever forgetting herself, cold and brutal, she tempts him to the act of love. The hardness of her heart undergoes no change through the experience, and when soon afterwards her father becomes bankrupt, she marries a rich old dandy who had always been the object of her scorn.

In this study of a girl the new element is compounded of shallow curiosity and soulless impulse; it is an unprejudiced attempt to depict a degenerate woman, who among the many caricatures of nature and society, is no rarity; it is a step on the way towards a psychological analysis of modern humanity. Though it were nothing more than a search after a truer description of human nature than that presented to us in the models of the old æsthetic school, the author would still have rendered an undoubted service.

The cleverest and most profound study of a woman occurs in the description of Madame de Burne in Maupassant’s Notre Cœur.

Maupassant was in fact the only realist among modern French authors, whereby I mean that he had the clearest and most spontaneous vision for the nature of things and their connection with one another; he had that nobility of temperament and sense of proportion that never thrust itself between the world and himself, to distort the former after the manner of a bad looking-glass. He let the facts speak for themselves, and as he was possessed of that health which neither requires the digestive expedient of moralising, not yet that of sentimentalising, one could feel tolerably certain of protection from the so-called “contemplation of the world,” from which one never escapes in the writings of Daudet, Zola and Bourget. It is certainly not the great depths that are measured in such transparent water, but we will return to that subject another time.

Notre Cœur is a very clever book, and Madame de Burne, herself a clever lady, is at the same time a very clever study of a woman. There is a philosopher in the book, a French novelist called Lamarthe, who has many characteristics in common with Paul Bourget, amongst others an unceasing interest in the analysis of woman. This man, who loves in order that he may study the object of his affections, and in whose mind the most intimate experiences are changed into psychological perceptions, passes the following judgment on the present generation of ladies in society.

“No, they are not women; the more we know them, the less they give us that sensation of sweet intoxication which the real woman never fails to give. Look at their toilets; they are birds, they are flowers, they are serpents, but they are not women. The object of their lives is to rival one another and to pursue their admirers. It amuses them to see men overpowered, conquered and governed by the irresistible force of woman, and, as time goes on, the tendency develops like a hidden instinct, and grows gradually into an instinct of war and conquest. Take Madame de Burne for an example. She is a widow. Perhaps it was her marriage with a despotic churl that awoke in her heart a longing to execute vengeance, a sombre craving to make men suffer for all that she had endured at the hands of one of them, to feel herself for once the strongest, able to bend the will of others, to inflict suffering, and to conquer opposition. But before all else she is a born coquette. Her heart does not hunger for emotion, like the hearts of tender and sensitive women. She does not desire the love of one man, she does not seek the happiness of a strong passion; what she would like is the admiration of all, and if you would remain her friend, you must love her. It is not the real wine of former times. Love was different under the Restoration, it was different under the Second Empire, and now it has become different again. When the romanticists idealised women and made them dream dreams, women introduced into life the experiences of their hearts whilst reading. Nowadays you pride yourselves on the suppression of all deceitful, poetic glamour, and your novels are as dry as your lives; but believe me, no more love in your books, no more love in your lives!”