Non, madame, the gander, unfortunately for your sex, is not constituted like the goose, and it is for him an impossibility to eat the dish you offer him if his appetite is not tempted. You can, but he cannot. The whole problem of happiness in matrimony lies in this nutshell.
CHAPTER XVIII
DOES JEALOUSY COME FROM TRUE LOVE?
The different kinds of girls that men seek in matrimony — Jealousy is intensified, not created, by love — Why should not a married man continue to admire women? — I want to knock down a newly-married woman's husband — 'Who would "polyg" with him?'
There are men who would not think of courting a woman with a view to marrying her if they knew she had been engaged before. On the contrary, there are others who marry women who have spent their girlhoods in flirting and have been engaged a dozen times. These women seem to have a special sort of attraction for men who feel proud of winning a 'prize' that has been so much sought after, and who are very much like those people who do not know the value of a picture until, at a sale, they hear men bid higher and higher for the purchase, and conclude that the picture must be a priceless treasure. So they bid higher still, and get it. As a rule, these men are remarkable neither for their intelligence nor for their appreciation of true womanhood.
This remark, however, would apply to Englishmen or Americans rather than to Frenchmen, because in France, when a girl has been engaged, she has only met her fiancé in the presence of her parents, whereas in England or America the young people have had lonely and sentimental walks together, indulged in many little familiarities—proper, no doubt, but still familiarities, all the same; and the young Anglo-Saxon girl who has been engaged is a flower whose bloom has been a little rubbed off. In the eyes of the real, true man, she has lost—indeed, she must have lost—some of her value, a bit of her innocence, as it were. How can a man marry such a girl and run the risk, when he gives her a kiss, of hearing her exclaim: 'Oh, Jack used to give me much better kisses than that!' He must be a very brave man, one very sure of himself, who is not afraid of competition, or a very conceited, if not a very foolish, one.
Not only are there men who court women because they are run after, but there are some who never really fall in love with their wives until they have some serious reasons to be jealous of them. Then, and then only, do they seem to realize that their wives must possess some attractions, since other men are attracted by them. But this sentiment I should not care to call love, but rather false pride, because that man might have exactly the same feeling toward a horse or a dog the possession of which other men envied him. Many a man, on hearing the beauty of his wife praised, has said to himself: 'I wonder if it is true. I must have a look at her.'
I have heard many men and women say that there is no love without jealousy—in fact, that jealousy is the natural consequence of love. St. Augustine said: 'He that is not jealous is not in love.' I believe these people are wrong, including St. Augustine, before whose authority on love and women I decline to bow. There is no room for jealousy in the heart that loves really and truly. There is no real love where there is no abandon and complete confidence.
Jealousy may be intensified by love, but not created by it. Jealousy is a characteristic of men and women which manifests itself in love as it does in friendship and in every phase of life. Love gives it a special opportunity, but it existed before the man or the woman was in love. Such men and women, who are jealous of their wives and their husbands, were jealous before of their brothers, sisters, or acquaintances, whenever they imagined that they were displaced by them in the affections of the family or of their friends.