"Not in the least. But she'll be in love with me—perhaps madly in love."
And for a whole year she did love him—often to distraction. For three whole months together she never even gave him subject for complaint. He had put a state of pique, disgraceful in many ways, between his mistress and his daughter.
Pique wins the day in gallant-love, being its very life and blood. It is the ordeal best fitted to differentiate between gallant-love and passion-love. There is an old maxim of war, given to young fellows new to their regiment, that if you are billeted on a house, where there are two sisters, and you want to have one, you must pay your attentions to the other. To win the majority of Spanish women, who are still young and ready for love affairs, it is enough to give out, seriously and modestly, that you have no feelings whatever for the lady of the house. I have this useful maxim from dear General Lassale. This is the most dangerous way of attacking passion-love.
Piqued self-esteem is the bond which ties the happiest marriages, after those formed by love. Many husbands make sure of their wives' love for many years, by taking up with some little woman a couple of months after their marriage.[6] In this way the habit is engendered of thinking only of one man, and family ties succeed in making the habit invincible.
If in the past century at the Court of Louis XV a great lady (Madame de Choiseul) was seen to worship her husband,[7] the reason is that he seemed to take a keen interest in her sister, the Duchesse de Grammont.
The most neglected mistress, once she makes us see that she prefers another man, robs us of our peace and afflicts our heart with all the semblance of passion.
The courage of an Italian is an access of rage; the courage of a German a moment of intoxication; that of a Spaniard an outburst of pride. If there were a nation, in which courage were generally a matter of piqued self-esteem between the soldiers of each company and the regiments of each division, in the case of a rout there would be no support, and consequently there would be no means of rallying the armies of such a nation. To foresee the danger and try to remedy it, would be the greatest of all absurdities with such conceited runaways.
"It is enough to have opened any single description of a voyage among the savages of North America," says one of the most delightful philosophers of France,[8] "to know that the ordinary fate of prisoners of war is not only to be burnt alive and eaten, but first to be bound to a stake near a flaming bonfire and to be tortured there for several hours, by all the most ferocious and refined devices that fury can imagine. Read what travellers, who have witnessed these fearful scenes, tell of the cannibal joy of the assistants, above all, of the fury of the women and children, and of their gruesome delight in this competition of cruelty. See also what they add about the heroic firmness and immutable self-possession of the prisoner, who not only gives no sign of pain, but taunts and defies his torturers, by all that pride can make most haughty, irony most bitter, and sarcasm most insulting—singing his own glorious deeds, going through the number of the relations and friends of the onlookers whom he has killed, detailing the sufferings he has inflicted on them, and accusing all that stand around him of cowardice, timidity and ignorance of the methods of torture; until falling limb from limb, devoured alive under his own eyes by enemies drunk with fury, he gasps out his last whisper and his last insult together with his life's breath.[9] All this would be beyond belief in civilised nations, will look like fable to the most fearless captains of our grenadiers, and will one day be brought into doubt by posterity."
This physiological phenomenon is closely connected with a particular moral state in the prisoner, which constitutes, between him on the one side and all his torturers on the other, a combat of self-esteem—of vanity against vanity, as to who can hold out longer.
Our brave military doctors have often observed that wounded soldiers, who, in a calm state of mind and senses, would have shrieked out, during certain operations, display, on the contrary, only calmness and heroism, if they are prepared for it in a certain manner. It is a matter of piquing their sense of honour; you have to pretend, first in a roundabout way, and then with irritating persistence, that it is beyond their present power to bear the operation without shrieking.