The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from the peculiar form of the penis, the first approaches are painful; but there is perhaps no female who has better reason than the mole for fearing the male. Her vulva, exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated, undergo a veritable surgical operation. One knows how these beasts live, burrowing in search of food, in long subterranean galleries, of which the wastage, pushed up here and there forms the mole-ridge. In rutting time, forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a female; as soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her direction, furiously excavating the hostile earth. Feeling herself hunted, the female flees. Hereditary instinct makes her tremble before the tool which shall open her belly, before the redoubtable gimlet-armed penis which has perforated her mother and all her female ancestors. She flees, digs, as the male advances, cross-hatching tunnels in which her persecutor may end by losing his way; but the male also is educated by heredity: he does not follow the female but circles round her, heads her off, ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still ramming her blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, operates, fecundates. Charming emblem of modesty, this small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human virgin would show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who, alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is the she-bat violent, the she-mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts which are always provisory, and which a change of perspective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy of an accident, an unexpected encounter; and yet, without the idea of law all would be mere night in our consciousness.

"The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Generation, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter. She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is active."

Sexual modesty is a fact of sexual passivity. The moment will come for the female to be in her turn active and strong, when she has been fecundated, and when she must give birth and food to the posterity of her race. The male then becomes inert; equable sharing of the expense of forces, just division of labour. This passivity of the female element is found again in the very figuration of animality, formed by the egg and the spermatozoide. One sees the play under the microscope: the egg waits, solid as a fortress or as a woman whom many men look on and covet; the little animals begin their attack, they besiege the enclosure, they butt it with their heads; one of them breaks the wall, he enters, and as soon as his tad-pole tail passes the breach, the wound recloses. The entire activity of this embryonic female reduces itself to this gesture; the greater part of her great sisters know no other. Their free-will nearly always consists in this: they receive one among the arrivals, without one's being able to know very well whether the choice is psychological or mechanical.

The female waits, or flees, which is but another way of waiting, the active way; for not only se cupit ante videnti but she desires to be taken, she wishes to fulfill her destiny. It is doubtless for this reason that, in species where the male is feeble or timid, the female resigns herself to an aggression demanded by care for future generations. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and the needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes she is the needle. These are details of mechanism which do not modify the general march of the machine to its goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a fact irreducible and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning starts from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd result of making thought run in a set track, like a horse in a circus. Kantian ignorantism is the masterpiece of these training exercises, where, starting from the categoric stable the learned quadruped necessarily thither returns, having jumped through all the paper disks of scholastic reasoning. Observers of animal habits fall regularly into the prejudice of attributing, regularly, to beasts directive principles which only a long philosophic education and especially Christianity have rammed into restive human docility. Toussenel and Romanes are rarely superior to the possessors of a prodigious dog or miraculous cat: one must reject as apocryphal the anecdotes of animals' intelligence, and especially those boasting their sensibility, or celebrating their virtues; not that these are of necessity, inexact, but because the manner of interpreting them has vitiated, in principle, the manner of observation. One sole observer appears to me trustworthy in these matters, namely J. H. Fabre, the man who, since Réaumur, has penetrated furthest into the intimacy of insects, and whose work is veritably the creator, perhaps without his having suspected it, of a general psychology of animals.

The madness of attributing to beasts the intuitive knowledge of our moral catechism has created the legend of the elephant's sexual modesty. These chaste monsters hide, they say, to make love; animated by a wholly romantic sensibility, they can not give way to their feelings save in the mystery of the jungle, in the labyrinth of the virgin forests: that is why they have never been known to breed in captivity. Nothing is more idiotic; the elephant in the public garden or the circus is ready enough to make love, although with less enthusiasm than in his native forest, as is the case with nearly all beasts newly captive. He breeds under man's eye with perfect indifference, and no showman can prevent the she-elephant, who is very lecherous, from manifesting with full voice her shameless desires. As her vulva opens not between her legs but toward the middle of her abdomen, Buffon believed that she had to lie on her back to receive the male. This is not so, but she has to make a particular gesture: she kneels.

Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey a special rite, imposed by their lack of members and the element in which they live; the two colossi heave over on their sides like sprung ships, and join obliquely, belly to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the state of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches in circumference. The vulva of the female is longitudinal; near it is found the udder which projects greatly when she gives suck. This udder has ejectory power, the whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is sent to him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of organs to the necessities of the milieu.

Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over to receive the male. In the specie commonly called the sea-lion, she seems according to observations perhaps too sketchy, to make the advances. The male being stretched out at rest she rolls before him, plagues him, while he grumbles. She succeeds in moving him, and they go to play in the water. On return the female lies on her back, the male who is much thicker and longer covers her, propping himself on his arms. The coupling lasts seven or eight minutes. The posture of female seals is also that of hedgehogs, and truly the cavalage here must be particularly thorny. Despite his roof the male tortoise climbs onto the female and installs himself there, clinging to her shell with the nails of his forefeet; there he stays fifteen days having slowly introduced into her patient organs his long round prong, ending in a sort of pointed ball, pressing with all his strength the enormous clitoris of the female. We find ourselves far from mammifers and from the excitability of the bull; this coupling which lasts a whole season leads us toward the voluptuous laziness of disgusting and marvellous gasteropodes. According to tales which are, perhaps, not contradictory, crocodiles couple in the water, according to some, and on land according to others; in water laterally; on land, the female on her back. It is said to be the male who puts her on her back, and who, coition completed, helps her to right herself; charming spectacle, which I can not guarantee to be so, but which would improve our idea of the gallantry of these ancient divinities.

I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that the caduceus of Mercury represents two serpents coupled. To describe the caduceus is to describe the love mechanism of ophidians. The bifurcated penis penetrates the vagina, the bodies interlace fold on fold while the two heads rise over the stiffened coils and look fixedly at each other, for a long time, eye gazing into eye.

Certain fish have penial organs; they can then realize true copulation; thus dog-fish, bounce, sharks, sea-hinds (biches). The males grip the females and hold them with hooks often formed at the expense of the abdominal fin, by cartilaginous pieces which penetrate the female orifice and serve as slide to the penis. The male skate seizes the female, turns her over, clamps himself to her, belly to belly, holds her with his penial tentacles and finishes the coupling, releasing his seed which flows into the cloaca. The operation is repeated several times; separated by the emission of skatelets who are born alive, it continues until the female has discharged the greater part of her eggs.

[1] Here R. de G. uses the term marmotte; up to this the word I have translated marmoset has been ouistiti.