On Love

by Stendhal

I can only see one answer to be made here: at Paris no self-respecting woman has a lover. Certainly prudence has much more right to counsel the woman of to-day not to abandon herself to passion-love. But does not another prudence, which, of course, I am far from approving, counsel her to make up for it with physical love? Our hypocrisy and asceticism[2] imply no homage to virtue; for you can never oppose nature with impunity: there is only less happiness on earth and infinitely less generous inspiration.

A lover who, after ten years of intimate intercourse, deserted his poor mistress, because he began to notice her two-and-thirty years, was lost to honour in this lovable Provence; he had no resource left but to bury himself in the solitude of a cloister. In those days it was to the interest of a man, not only of generosity but even of prudence, to make display of no more passion than he really had. We conjecture all this; for very few remains are left to give us any exact notions....

We must judge manners as a whole, by certain particular facts. You know the anecdote of the poet who had offended his lady: after two years of despair she deigned at last to answer his many messages and let him know that if he had one of his nails torn off and had this nail presented to her by fifty loving and faithful knights, she might perhaps pardon him. The poet made all haste to submit to the painful operation. Fifty knights, who stood in their ladies' good graces, went to present this nail with all imaginable pomp to the offended beauty. It was as imposing a ceremony as the entry of a prince of the blood into one of the royal towns. The lover, dressed in the garb of a penitent, followed his nail from afar. The lady, after having watched the ceremony, which was of great length, right through, deigned to pardon him; he was restored to all the sweets of his former happiness. History tells that they spent long and happy years together. Sure it is that two such years of unhappiness prove a real passion and would have given birth to it, had it not existed before in that high degree.

I could cite twenty anecdotes which show us everywhere gallantry, pleasing, polished and conducted between the two sexes on principles of justice. I say gallantry, because in all ages passion-love is an exception, rather curious than frequent, a something we cannot reduce to rules. In Provence every calculation, everything within the domain of reason, was founded on justice and the equality of rights between the two sexes; and I admire it for this reason especially, that it eliminates unhappiness as far as possible. The absolute monarchy under Lewis XV, on the contrary, had come to make baseness and perfidy the fashion in these relations.[3]

Although this charming Provencal language, so full of delicacy and so laboured in its rhymes,[4] was probably not the language of the people, the manners of the upper classes had permeated the lower classes, which in Provence were at that time far from coarse, for they enjoyed a great deal of comfort. They were in the first enjoyment of a very prosperous and very valuable trade. The inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean had just realised (in the ninth century) that to engage in commerce, by risking a few ships on this sea, was less troublesome and almost as amusing as following some little feudal lord and robbing the passers-by on the neighbouring high-road. Soon after, the Provencals of the tenth century learnt from the Arabs that there are sweeter pleasures than pillage, violence and war.

One must think of the Mediterranean as the home of European civilisation. The happy shores of this lovely sea, so favoured in its climate, were still more favoured in the prosperous state of their inhabitants and in the absence of all religion or miserable legislation. The eminently gay genius of the Provencals had by then passed through the Christian religion, without being altered by it.

We see a lively image of a like effect from a like cause in the cities of Italy, whose history has come down to us more distinctly and which have had the good fortune besides of bequeathing to us Dante, Petrarch and the art of painting.

The Provencals have not left us a great poem like the Divine Comedy, in which are reflected all the peculiarities of the manners of the time. They had, it seems to me, less passion and much more gaiety than the Italians. They learnt this pleasant way of taking life from their neighbours, the Moors of Spain. Love reigned with joy, festivity and pleasure in the castles of happy Provence.

Have you seen at the opera the finale of one of Rossini's beautiful operettas? On the stage all is gaiety, beauty, ideal magnificence. We are miles away from all the mean side of human nature. The opera is over, the curtain falls, the spectators go out, the great chandelier is drawn up, the lights are extinguished. The house is filled with the smell of lamps hastily put out; the curtain is pulled up half-way, and you see dirty, ill-dressed roughs tumble on to the stage; they bustle about it in a hideous way, occupying the place of the young women who filled it with their graces only a moment ago.

Such for the kingdom of Provence was the effect of the conquest of Toulouse by the army of Crusaders. Instead of love, of grace, of gaiety, we have the Barbarians from the North and Saint Dominic. I shall not darken these pages with a blood-curdling account of the horrors of the Inquisition in all the zeal of its early days. As for the Barbarians, they were our fathers; they killed and plundered everywhere; they destroyed, for the pleasure of destroying, whatever they could not carry off; a savage madness animated them against everything that showed the least trace of civilisation; above all, they understood not a word of that beautiful southern language; and that redoubled their fury. Highly superstitious and guided by the terrible S. Dominic, they thought to gain Heaven by killing the Provencals. For the latter all was over; no more love, no more gaiety, no more poetry. Less than twenty years after the conquest (1335), they were almost as barbarous and as coarse as the French, as our fathers.[5]