No token of love permitted by Venus has been the recipient of half the secret kisses the miniature may boast; none has so frequently been washed in tears. Almost, in fact, the tiny bit of color set in bijou jewels might be hidden by a single pressure of the lips, and one tear would be to it a bath of beauty. Indeed, its very name reveals it as the love token, for it comes to us from a certain word of French having in English the most velvet sounding and most endearing meaning in our somewhat limited language of passion.
Miniatures, to be sure, are the love tokens of comparative maturity—and, unfortunately, of comparative prosperity. Professor Sanford Bell, fellow in Clark University, who has the somewhat dubious honor of being the pioneer in the scientific treatment of the emotion of love between the sexes—I dislike that line intensely, but, really, I see no way out of it—has discovered that “as early as the sixth and seventh year presents are taken from their places of safekeeping, kissed and fondled as expressions of love for the absent giver.” This is very beautiful and, doubtless, very true, but at the presumable age of the reader—anywhere from eighteen to eighty—one would kiss a miniature rather than a bird’s nest or an apple, however rosy the latter may have been last winter.
Miniatures, flowers, handkerchiefs, gloves and ribbons, then, ever have been the favorite love tokens. We in the America of to-day are inclined to substitute houses and lots or steam yachts. But this is a temporary error. In time we will return to the glove, which means the same as the honestly outstretched or lovingly clasping hand; and to the flowers, the significance of each of which was perfectly understood by the old time Greek and Roman, himself gathering the chaplet that was to grace his sweetheart’s brow. Better a thousand times than the wretched watch chains of hair worn by our fathers would be the embroidered handkerchiefs tucked triumphantly in their hats by the gallants of Elizabeth’s day. That, to be sure, was a bit flamboyantly boastful; to exhibit a love token is as criminal as to boast of a kiss. The actor-lover is alone in clamoring for the calcium.
In this secrecy, so essential to the love token, our writers of romance have found salvation. Even Fielding, to whom we owe the birth of the English novel, could not overlook it—although we are almost asleep when we reach the point where Billy Booth, about to depart, is presented by Amelia with a collection of trinkets packed in a casket worked by her own fair hands. It wasn’t the least bit like it, was it?
The fact is, we must turn to France for the real thing, and to whom more satisfyingly than to Dumas and his reckless musketeers, each of whom, as well as the author, dwelt in “a careless paradise,” and constantly at hand had some reminder of her who, for the moment, was the one woman on earth. We scarcely have a bowing acquaintance with these three worthies before the valiant D’Artagnan makes the almost fatal but well-intentioned mistake of calling the attention of Aramis to the fact that he has stepped upon a handkerchief—a handkerchief Aramis, in fact, has covered with his foot to conceal from a crowd of roisterers; a love token from Mme. de Bois-Tracy—a dainty affair, all richly embroidered, and with a coronet in one corner.
Again, surely you are neither too old nor too young to remember this:
At the moment she spoke these words a rap on the ceiling made her raise her head, and a voice which reached her through the ceiling cried:
“Dear Madame Bonacieux, open the little passage door for me, and I will come down to you.”
Melodramatic? Certainly. Cheap? I’m not so sure—in fact, no! not to any man whose heart is not far grayer than his beard. For then commenced as pretty a race as ever was—Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan speeding from Paris to London, D’Artagnan bearing a letter; each in turn to take it as they are killed by the cardinal’s hirelings—all this to save the honor of Anne of Austria by bringing back the love token given by her to the Duke of Buckingham, who keeps it in a tiny chapel draped with gold-worked tapestry of Persian silk, on an altar beneath a portrait of the woman he loves.
D’Artagnan’s part in that adventure is the most gallant deed known in all the literature of love tokens. There have been similar gifts that were more tragic; what was the famous diamond necklace but a hopeless, mad love token from the Cardinal de Rohan to Marie Antoinette? And there have been those that were more sad; recall the great Mirabeau, dying amid flowers that were themselves death, drinking the hasheesh that was poison, placing on his forehead the tiny handkerchief drenched with the tears of the one beautiful woman that disinterestedly had loved him; the one that, forced from his last bedside, had refused a casket filled with gold and had left behind this final, mute and eloquent token of her love.
The poets, of course, ever have had a greater affection for love tokens than have the novelists. With some this has been real; with others “copy.” Keats, who, through all his brief life, knew the consummate luxury of sadness, had on his deathbed the melancholy ecstasy of a letter from his love—and this he lacked the courage to read, for it would have anguished him with a clearer knowledge of all the exquisite happiness he was leaving on earth; his love, like his art, having been beautiful in its immaturity. And so this last token of love, unread, was placed at his own desire beside him in his coffin.