From man society exacts a hundred different and difficult virtues: he must give his blood for his country and the sweat of his brow for his family and for society; he must be strong, ambitious; he must not allow himself to be corrupted by gold or the seductions of vanity. A physician, he must throw himself into the inglorious and tremendous battle of epidemic; a soldier, he must hold his head high in the face of murderous fire; a lawyer, he must resist the temptations of gold and ambition; a statesman, he must fight against himself, against his family, for the welfare of his country. Defender of the weak, of the shipwrecked, of the poor, natural defender of the female half of the human species and of all the individuals who are of no value to society, he is a warrior perpetually under arms, and should he neglect one of his duties, he is branded as a coward; society despises him, woman does not want him, everyone ignores him.
Woman, on the contrary, can be a coward in the face of fire, of work, of contagion, and of all the battles of life; she can be ignorant and timorous and still be loved and esteemed by all; for in her weakness approaches grace, and it is so sweet to us to take the faint-hearted dove to our bosom and comfort her with our courage, defend her with our strength!
And even blunders are amusing when pronounced by the beautiful lips of a beloved woman! We forgive her if she very rarely reaches the height of genius and more rarely than we attains the average height of the great intellectual minds; we forgive her if she has no profession, if she does not earn her bread with work. Of her we ask only one thing: fidelity; from her we exact only one virtue: fidelity! Pray, O most gentle and divine companions, on what side does the scale of the balance fall? Certainly not our side.
Woman may be humble, ignorant, tremble at every leaf that quivers, at every wing that vibrates in the air; but she should be faithful to him who loves her. She may yield to everything, but must resist the seductions of defiant glances and the corruptions of gold and vanity; she should be the heroine of sentiment, as we are the heroes of all the battles of life. She is the vestal of our heart and blood. While we are fighting in one field for her, for the name she bears, for the honor of our children, she should assiduously and faithfully watch the sacred fire of fidelity, that it may not die out through neglect or be overthrown and extinguished by the hurricane. This virtue only we ask of her; is it, perhaps, too much? What is her duty, then? What is the difficult struggle that shall give her also the mark of character and make her equal to us, worthy to be our companion? If she is beautiful, we are strong; if she is graceful, we are gifted. For her we have conquered our planet, subdued the lightning, destroyed the beasts of prey, invented arts, created sciences. But neither beauty nor grace nor wit is sufficient for a man to deem himself civilized; there are imposed on us a thousand dangers, on her but one: that of seduction. We are dragged into a hundred battles; she has only to gain victory over the senses. From us the world expects a hundred virtues; from her but one: faith. Are we, then, tyrants? Are we too exacting with her whom we love so much, for whom we do everything, to whom we dedicate all our thoughts, our glories, our dreams and our labors?
But there is another powerful reason for which the duties of love are differently distributed between man and woman. Man, by the special mission which his sex imposes on him, is a sudden aggressor and has organic necessities which are unknown to woman, and which he can satisfy with the rapidity of lightning. Without losing his love, he may have a caprice more fleeting than the lightning flash, and which, once vanished, leaves behind not even a pinch of ashes. I neither praise nor justify these sudden surprises of the senses, these passing infidelities; but I describe them because I find them frequently in the aggressive and petulant nature of the virile sex. Woman, instead, must defend herself. Man loses a great part of energy in the tooth that bites and in the claws that firmly hold the prey. Woman draws in her horns, like the snail does in the spires of its labyrinth, and, languidly and voluptuously concealed in the foam of her shell of love, allows herself to be caressed. She loses nothing in the struggle for conquest, and she is wholly consumed in the delights of letting herself be loved. Woman also may have caprices of the senses, but they are light clouds which no sooner appear than they are dissolved in the deep azure of the skies, and do not become ardent desires until the human claws press and condense them. Woman is silent even when she desires. Very weak in the attack, she is formidable in the defense, and has in herself so much energy as to stop and disarm a legion of combatants. With much shrewdness she defends her weakness every day, telling us that seductions wage war upon her from all quarters, while we are the first to seek the opportunities of sin. This is one of the most insidious sophisms, but it is also one of the weakest arguments of defense. Man attacks and assails simply because he is a man and could not wait for the seductions to come to him without condemning himself to be a eunuch and without inverting the most elementary and most inexorable laws of nature. Nor would a woman commit less of a sacrilege in turning from the defensive to the offensive, profaning her sex and violating nature in that which it holds most sacred and immutable.
Not in vain has nature made the human female a virgin, and denied us the sorrowful virtue of virginity. The woman who yields to the first amorous pruriency is a Messalina; the man who darts the first arrow of love is a warrior who with wise prudence prepares the weapons for the long battle that awaits him. Man begins with "yes" and "I will"; woman begins and ends with "no" and "I will not." The sudden caprice of the senses is in her harassed by so many physical, social and religious impediments that she must really be more than an Amazon to overthrow them in a single dash. Everything incites man to a swift assault which perhaps does not even bruise the epidermis of his heart; everything defends woman from these caprices. To yield she must have had a long struggle against nature and society; laws and religions offer her a thousand allies for defense, and not once in a hundred times she can say without touching the frontiers of prostitution: "I had a caprice." No one believes in the efficiency of overbearingness, much less woman herself, unless she should need this faith to justify her own sin. In love every fault, every crime, even patricide and incest, are possible—but not theft. Let woman never profane herself nor spoil the cause, often very just, which she defends, by speaking of seduction and violence. Let her rather speak of the irresistible impulse of vengeance, of the law of retaliation; let her discuss the natural right, because there she is on the ground of truth and justice; let her complain aloud because in the human organism she is the left side, the weakest, the least honored and the most oppressed. Let her demand the right to love and to be loved, but never ask equality of punishment for sins too disparate.
Nor does society measure human guilt only according to the reckoning of the natural right; but the more sorrow a crime generates and the more it offends human needs, the more severe the punishment inflicted by society. Have you ever thought of the various consequences of a caprice of infidelity, according as a man or a woman is guilty? For man the caprice of an hour is a stain that tarnishes the bright mirror of a sworn faith, of an immaculate and sublime love; but a few moments afterward a new kiss, more ardent and pregnant with the pungent aroma of remorse, revives love perhaps more intensely and makes impossible for long years, perhaps forever, another sudden infidelity. The amorous caprice may be a blasphemy that breaks forth from the lips of a saint, but which is immediately deterged by a wave of holy prayer; it is the weakness of a robust runner who stumbles against a stone, but proudly resumes his way and with energetic steps recovers the space lost a hundredfold. The amorous caprice of a woman may in a single instant procreate a bastard, poison the wave of milk and honey of an entire family, sow a generation of fraternal hatreds, of infinite sorrows, overflow into a vast field, inundating everything with wormwood and gall. In man such a caprice is a stain, in woman a gangrene; in man a wound by a pin, in woman the caries of a bone; in man a leaf that falls, in woman a hurricane that fells a whole forest; in man a misdemeanor, in woman a felony; in man the remorse of an hour, in woman a monument of infamy that time will never efface.