The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

At the risk of seeing many disciples and many masters of love smile skeptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she loves, lies less than we do, and during the life of love she is less unfaithful than we are. Man, in his first declaration, even when quite sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite affection; while woman, more modest, more timid, more reserved, answers that she does not love yet; that she has not yet consulted her heart; that, perhaps, she will love. The less one swears, the less one forswears; and if a holy horror may deprive speech of some fiery accent and some amorous expansion of inebriating expressions, it nevertheless stamps it with virile dignity which makes it blessed among women, while it gives the sexual relations a character of tender reserve and delicate serenity. Man often uses the "eternal oaths" as weapons of seduction, and parades them at every hour as a measure of the bottomless depths of his love; but sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because nothing so boldly generates eternity and infinity as does armed desire. It is only too true, however, that the hasty and imprudent vow is a fruitful father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of infidelity.

Very few are the eternal loves, as are geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos. We all anxiously climb the mountain of the ideal, but few can get a branch or a leaf of the sacred tree. Some loves of the lower orders last years; others, months; some of them are as transient as the ephemera, for which long is the life of a day. Now, frankness can give all loves the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man can die without amorous remorse if his loves were all honest. He has loved much and fleetingly, but he has never lied, never betrayed anybody, never perjured himself.

Sometimes lies are told through compassion, and woman, more frequently than we, striving in vain to keep alive a dying love, is loath to inflict a cruel wound on the companion who still loves her, and endeavors with a mighty effort to deceive herself and him, until through habit of hypocrisy she succeeds in feigning a love that no longer exists; and from lie to betrayal the road is short and slippery. The lie at first was merciful, then it grew into a habit, and at last became transformed into a crime.

No; lovers or husbands, companions of voluptuousness or vestals of the family, never tell an untruth, even when it is suggested to you by pity. It is hard, cruel, to see the blooming tree of a happy passion felled by a sudden hurricane; tremendous is the rending of a heart that breaks in a day under the shock of an atrocious blight; but these sorrows do not debase us, and, although capable of killing, do not humiliate us. Love killed by violence remains stretched on the ground as beautiful as a thunderstruck angel, and memory weaves a wreath for him and with the most precious aromas and balsams preserves him from putrefaction. Love killed by the lingering tabes of a secret betrayal, is a leper who dies in the fetidness of a hospital, a horror to himself and to the others; a corpse slowly corroded by phthisis and scrofula, leaving no trace whatever of the time when he, too, was a young and robust organism.

False and cruel is the pity that causes us to simulate a love which no longer exists. No sorrow is greater than that which deception inflicts upon us; love, self-esteem, self-love, love of ownership, all the warmest and most powerful of human affections, are pierced with a hundred stabs at the same time, and the pain is so intense that it poisons all our life with wormwood and gall. How beautiful, instead, how sublime is a love that, without swearing eternity or infinity, lasts eternal and infinite as long as two human hearts throb together; how beautiful is a love that needs no chains and lives on faith and liberty!

To love means to be all of another; to be loved means to have become a living part of another: the lie begins when, with cynical licentiousness, the man or the woman is divided in two parts, and the body is given to one, the soul, as it were, to the other. Love is a whole that cannot be divided without being killed, and, unless voluptuousness is reduced to a plain question of hygiene, one cannot love two human creatures at the same time with that sentiment which for its superiority over all other affections is called love, without betraying both. I hold in much higher estimation a woman who, after a long career of facile loves, can say, "I have never loved two men at the same time," than a bigoted matron who boasts of having never betrayed her duties as a spouse because with wise and cautious lechery she knows how to sell voluptuousness without seriously compromising the property reserved for the husband.

Lies are all infamous; but in love there are some venial and some perfidious: it is one thing to deceive an old libertine and another to betray a faithful husband; one to lie to a frivolous coquette, another to deceive a virtuous woman. Further on we shall outline the rights and duties of love; but here we must point out the stem from which they hang, like the grapes from their stalk. Woman belongs to man, man belongs to woman; Love is the son of the most free selection; it is born when it wants and as it wants; it appears on the plains or on the summit of the mountains; it is born nude and as free as the air; it does not ask for passports, because it passes with impunity through all the police lines.

Men and women, free and pure, you should seek and love each other; study true love, and consecrate it with the only vow that love should make when it would close itself in the temple of the family. If you truly love, if you are worthy of each other, if your love offends no superior duty, no human force can oppose your powerful attraction, and nature and men will bless your selection. Read and read again all that I have written on the first loves; swear seldom; never swear if you possess this virtue; at most swear but once, the first and last oath that will unite you in wedlock. The compact violated in the first steps of the life of love is a murder and prepares the career of a brigand tolerated by civilization. To betray a virgin is, in so far as the law is concerned, a question for the public prosecutor or for the mayor of your town; to betray her without dishonoring her is an anonymous infamy that poisons two existences and two loves, that leaves in you an eternal bitterness, in the woman an eternal rancor. Love, seek, study each other, but never swear, never lie to the maiden who at the dawn of youth demands of the first sun a ray to enlighten and warm her.

There is, however, a lie in love that excels all lies, a betrayal that surpasses all others; there is a perfidiousness that outclasses every assassination, every homicide, every rape: love with the wife of another, a crime which, protected by the law, cherished by consuetudes, fêted by our infamously hypocritical customs, avoids prison and scaffold only because it takes the simple and easy precaution not to be termed adultery. To introduce ourselves into the sanctuary of a happy family, to become a friend to him whom we wish to betray, to cover him with the mantle of our benevolent protection; to seduce slowly and pitilessly the wife of another; with surprise, with the thousand pitfalls of moral violence to open for her an abyss into which she will fall; to acquire with the first conquest the impunity of a long series of crimes and open in the family a large spring of gall that will poison two or three generations: to do all this without expense and without danger,—these in our century are termed the deeds of astute men, the consolation of unhappy wives; and it can be done once, twice, ten times without the perpetrators losing either the love of women or the esteem of men.

To be seized by a vertigo of the senses, to embrace publicly the wife of another, or to let oneself be seen by her husband, is called adultery, and, according to the circumstances and, above all, the gravity of the scandal, it means a journey to prison or to some other rigorous penal institution; it means disgrace to one's name and to that of one's children. Modern society particularly recommends prudence; it does not want any scandal; it does not want to be disturbed in its loves so amply polygamous, but so piously cautious; modern civilization does not wish to behold publicly any nudity whatever; it wishes to be believed moral, respectful and respected. It matters little and is none of its concern if an astute libertine spends his youth in filling families with bastards, awaiting the day when he can abandon the betrayed wives for a convenient marriage. It is a private affair with which husbands and wives should occupy themselves individually. It is recommended to do things nicely, to make no noise, to take good care of the keyholes and listen attentively to the footsteps of those who walk in the apartments. The meshes of the law are wide, very wide; he must be more than an idiot who falls into them and cannot extricate himself. The flag of matrimony covers all contraband; to try to establish one's paternity is prohibited; the sons born of a legitimate couple are legitimate. Onward, onward! For heaven's sake do not bother with your whims and your embarrassing declarations of foreign merchandise. The customs, officers close their eyes and do not see, shut their ears and do not hear; why are you such an idiotic crowd as to wish to awaken them with your imprudent cries? Onward, onward! The meshes of the law are wide. Bastardize families, falsify names and surnames, spread mendacity and sow deception in all the paths of social and civil life! Disseminate lies and scatter deceptions everywhere! See to it that there shall be no wall against which to lean, no road that can be trod without injuring the foot with a sharp stone or a piece of poisoned glass! Make the name of father a senseless word, that of mother a blasphemy!