The Art of Taking a Wife

For the majority of men, and for at least thirty years of their lives, love is the strongest necessity, and governs them like a tyrant with no other curb than the wretched brake of written codes, which they do not read, and of social conventionalities, which they can easily silence by employing hypocrisy’s mask; an hypocrisy, let it be well understood, well dressed, well curled, and well educated. How can one satisfy this greatest of all human needs? By buying love, at so much an hour, so much a month, or so much a year. By gaining it by seduction or violence. By taking a wife. It would seem as if these three ways of loving were totally distinct, one from the other; in fact, that any one would exclude the others, and that they would stand in direct opposition to each other. But when hypocrisy is at the helm of the vessel which bears us over the great sea of life, it contrives so ably and so cleverly, as to enable us to enjoy all three methods at one moment, and, while we are sailing between rocks free of danger or shipwreck, it affords us, as it were, all the delights of a voyage in a beautiful archipelago, where islands and islets seem to meet and touch each other; and where land, mountains, and scenery all form a bright, picturesque, and beautiful picture. We row upon the tranquil waters of matrimony, and yet glide so near to the shores of venal love that we can grasp the flowers and gather the shells and precious pearls which lie there. We sail with the wind over the more tempestuous sea of seduction, but all the while we coast the island of poetic, faithful, and constant love; thus, vice, adultery, and domestic peace, debauchery and eternal vows, angels and beasts, find themselves guests at the same table, without false modesty, and without remorse. Civilisation has opened three ways of loving to men of the present day, and one would have thought that since they are free to choose one, they would have been satisfied with that. Not at all. Civilised man is by nature insatiable, for the hammer of the excelsior beats ever at his heart, the thirst for something better wears him away, and the hunger for something more consumes him; hence he has set himself to destroy the boundaries and walls which separate the three roads, so that he can easily take short cuts from one to the other without risk; and so matrimony, prostitution, and adultery walk hand in hand; and if in public they appear very cool to each other, that is only a blind, for in the secrecy of their houses they wink at each other, sup and sleep together. If all this is indeed so, a Turk would say it is so because it must be. If all this can indeed be, an epicurean optimist would say, let us, too, try and sail in this sea, now so calm, and now so tempestuous, and let us set that sanctified hypocrisy at the helm. However, I am neither Turk nor cynic, and I still believe in moral progress, and in the efficacy of books and the spoken word; and even though I be left alone in the belief that there is no happiness save in the good, nor cheerfulness save in sincerity, and in being the same inwardly as outwardly, I would still die in this conviction. I like a mixture of things at table, but I have no heart for it in the field of morality. I wish to see the family on one side, and the brothel on the other; and when two natures living together have become an intolerable torment to each other, I should wish the law to apply the instrument of divorce to their chains and to set them free. The three ways of loving should be separate one from the other, and should never be united. So far from breaking down the walls that divide them, I wish to have them so high as to become impregnable fortresses.