As for the utility of modesty—she is the mother of love: impossible, therefore, to doubt her claims. And for the mechanism of the sentiment—it's simple enough. The soul is busy feeling shame instead of busy desiring. You deny yourself desires and your desires lead to actions.
Evidently every woman of feeling and pride—and, these two things being cause and effect, one can hardly go without the other—must fall into ways of coldness, which the people whom they disconcert call prudery.
The accusation is all the more specious because of the extreme difficulty of steering a middle course: a woman has only to have little judgment and a lot of pride, and very soon she will come to believe that in modesty one cannot go too far. In this way, an Englishwoman takes it as an insult, if you pronounce before her the name of certain garments. An Englishwoman must be very careful, in the country, not to be seen in the evening leaving the drawing-room with her husband; and, what is still more serious, she thinks it an outrage to modesty, to show that she is enjoying herself a little in the presence of anyone but her husband.[3] It is perhaps due to such studied scrupulousness that the English, a people of judgment, betray signs of such boredom in their domestic bliss. Theirs the fault—why so much pride?[4]
To make up for this—and to pass straight from Plymouth to Cadiz and Seville—I found in Spain that the warmth of climate and passions caused people to overlook a little the necessary measure of restraint. The very tender caresses, which I noticed could be given in public, far from seeming touching, inspired me with feelings quite the reverse: nothing is more distressing.
We must expect to find incalculable the force of habits, which insinuate themselves into women under the pretext of modesty. A common woman, by carrying modesty to extremes, feels she is getting on a level with a woman of distinction.
Such is the empire of modesty, that a woman of feeling betrays her sentiments for her lover sooner by deed than by word.
The prettiest, richest and most easy-going woman of Bologna has just told me, how yesterday evening a fool of a Frenchman, who is here giving people a strange idea of his nation, thought good to hide under her bed. Apparently he did not want to waste the long string of absurd declarations, with which he has been pestering her for a month. But the great man should have had more presence of mind. He waited all right till Madame M—— sent away her maid and had got to bed, but he had not the patience to give the household time to go to sleep. She seized hold of the bell and had him thrown out ignominiously, in the midst of the jeers and cuffs of five or six lackeys. "And if he had waited two hours?" I asked her. "I should have been very badly off. 'Who is to doubt,' he would have said, 'that I am here by your orders?'"[5]
After leaving this pretty woman's house, I went to see a woman more worthy of being loved than any I know. Her extremely delicate nature is something greater, if possible, than her touching beauty. I found her alone, told the story of Madame M—— and we discussed it. "Listen," was what she said; "if the man, who will go as far as that, was lovable in the eyes of that woman beforehand, he'll have her pardon, and, all in good time, her love." I own I was dumbfounded by this unexpected light thrown on the recesses of the human heart. After a short silence I answered her—"But will a man, who loves, dare go to such violent extremities?"
There would be far less vagueness in this chapter had a woman written it. Everything relating to women's haughtiness or pride, to their habits of modesty and its excesses, to certain delicacies, for the most part dependent wholly on associations of feelings,[6] which cannot exist for men, and often delicacies not founded on Nature—all these things, I say, can only find their way here so far as it is permissible to write from hearsay.
A woman once said to me, in a moment of philosophical frankness, something which amounts to this:—