Fish, birds, and mammals, when they feel themselves fit for love and wish to win it, develop new organs, new songs, the newest seductions, and with æsthetic or musical fascination engage in the pleasant warfare of voluptuousness. They show the female all they have of the best, all that is most irresistible, and thus obtain the prize of victory. So do men and women. They adorn themselves, hide their defects, and make a show of their beauty, but as the battle between them is fought on a higher plane, each one polishes up rusty virtues, invents new ones, and sends his vices or moral weaknesses to prison or into exile.
Painters, carpenters, artists are about the house from morning to evening, in order to make everything clean and bright, as if in expectation of an illustrious guest or a great personage.
And they are right, for the guest they expect is no less than love.
The fish, birds, and mammals cease to sing and shed their horns when the breeding season is over, and become lowly and ordinary, even as they were before the marriage. And the companion, who has been enticed by the representation now realized, finds no room for odious comparisons or regrets, for she and her mate are already separated and neither thinks of the other.
With man, however, when once the victory is gained, the curtain of the comedy of love falls. But the marriage remains.
It remains with the defects which return to view, with the vices which spring afresh from the pollard boughs; and with the little sins, returning from their exile and creeping home, one after the other.
This is one of the most fruitful sources of the deceptions of matrimony, and it must be prevented. We ought to discover the real truth, under all the coquetry of the sex, and to know what metal lies beneath the varnish and polish. This artificial beautifying of man and woman who woo is not hypocrisy, but a natural and irresistible desire of showing our best to the person we love, and hiding from him our worst. But from this innocent desire we mount a flight of many steps, until we come to the blackest hypocrisy, which transmutes brass into gold, glass into diamond, demon into angel.
Exceedingly few see clearly when they have the spectacles of love before their eyes, and love has, not unjustly, been painted from the remotest antiquity with his eyes bandaged.
The lover is so blind, or, perhaps one would rather say, is so afflicted with altruism as to mistake colours, and, under such an hallucination, to see virtues where there are vices, to find weakness of character agreeable, a lie a jest, and treachery a game.
The most acute spirit of observation, the most profound knowledge of the human heart, do not suffice to protect us from these seductions, which make us see the loved one through a rose-coloured glass.