I know several cases in which a very rich woman fell desperately in love with a handsome, cultivated, but poor young man, and he to save his own dignity fled from her love. And the lady followed and conquered him, trusting courageously to the proverb, Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut!
They were married, and he loved her, working constantly with his pen, brush, or chisel, having sworn to himself and to her that he would only live by his work. Noble and touching struggles for personal dignity, of love and pride, which one but seldom sees, but which console our sight, daily saddened by so many simonies of luxuries, so many pretences of heroism, so many individual, social, and political lies, which darken the air so heavily that it is difficult for the sun to penetrate the cloud.
Whoever makes a business of marriage will laugh cordially at me, and at my sentimental fantasies.
Let him laugh! I do not pretend to teach him how to make marriage a paradise on earth. He will continue to seek a golden dowry, and if he has a great coat of arms and an empty purse he will put the first up at auction in order to fill the second; and if the game should succeed he will carry his wife’s money to the gaming table, the turf, or to the cabinet of the cocotte, and feel himself happy to have gained in one day that which others cannot obtain with all the hard work of a laborious and pure life.
Lying on a Turkish divan, smoking a perfumed Havana, he will raise to himself a monument of admiration and acknowledgment amidst the blue fumes of his cigar.
And is he happy? Happy, perhaps, but never enviable; for I know no true and durable happiness which degrades dignity, which hides itself in the depths of the soul, which can silence itself with the gag of sophism and the accommodation of conscience, but that, like a steel spring, it will burst and spring from its bonds the more unexpectedly the greater the repression. A man who in the inexorable soliloquies of his own conscience has something on which he dare not think, or has a room in his house which he can never visit without a shudder or remorse, is never happy.
And even if the long training in cynicism succeeds in silencing the cry of repressed dignity, there will come a day of domestic discord, of duels fought between husband and wife, with the weapon of bitter smiles, cruel compliments, and insinuations full of perfidy and venom, a day when the wife, striking her fan on the arm-chair with little convulsive blows, will cry: But in short, my good fellow, I keep you.... If that man, in such a moment does not redden to the roots of his hair, if at that moment his saliva is not changed to gall, nor forms a lump in his throat, if he does not feel his very heart and source of life poisoned, that man is not a man, but an unclean animal who has sold his manhood for a handful of gold; he is a most abject being, a hundred times more despicable than the poor prostitute who sells her body to gain her daily bread.