You deceive yourself grossly, when you think that you have been ruined by books. The empire of Russia is two thousand leagues in extent, and there are not six men who are aware of the points disputed by the Greek and Latin Church. If the monk Luther, John Calvin, and the vicar Zuinglius had been content with writing, Rome would still hold in subjugation all the states that it has lost; but these people and their adherents ran from town to town, from house to house, exciting the women, and they were supported by princes. The fury, which tormented Amata, and which, according to Virgil, whipped her like a top, was not more turbulent. Be assured that one enthusiastic, factious, ignorant, supple, vehement Capuchin—the emissary of some ambitious monks—who goes about preaching, confessing, communicating, and caballing, will much sooner overthrow a province than a hundred authors can enlighten it. It was not the Koran which made Mohammed succeed: it was Mohammed who caused the success of the Koran.
No! Rome has not been vanquished by books. It has been vanquished because it revolted Europe by its rapacity, by the public sale of indulgences, by insulting men and wishing to govern them like domestic animals, for having abused its power to such an extent that it is astonishing a single village remains to it. Henry VIII. Elizabeth, the duke of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the princes of Orange, the Condes and Colignys, have done all, and books nothing. Trumpets have never gained battles, nor caused any walls to fall except those of Jericho.
You fear books, as certain small cantons fear violins. Let men read, and let men dance—these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
LOVE
There are so many sorts of love that one does not know where to seek a definition of it. The name of “love” is given boldly to a caprice of a few days’ duration; to a sentiment devoid of esteem; to a casual liaison; to the affectations of a cicisbeo; to a frigid habit; to a romantic fantasy; to relish followed by prompt disrelish: —yes, people give this name to a thousand chimeras.
If philosophers wish to probe to the bottom this hardly philosophical matter, let them meditate on Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates, the honorable lover of Alcibiades and Agathon, converses with them on the metaphysics of love.
Lucretius deals with it more from the point of view of a natural philosopher: Virgil follows in the steps of Lucretius; amor omnibus idem.
It is the stuff of nature embroidered by imagination. Do you want an idea of love? look at the sparrows in your garden; look at your pigeons; look at the bull which is brought to the heifer. Look at this proud horse which two of your grooms lead to the quiet mare awaiting him; she draws aside her tail to welcome him; see how her eyes sparkle; hark to the weighing; watch the prancing, the curvetting, the ears pricked, the mouth opening with little convulsions, the swelling nostrils, the fiery breath, the manes rising and floating, the impetuous movement with which he hurls himself on the object which nature has destined for him. But do not be jealous of him. Think of the advantages of the human species; love compensates them for all those qualities that nature has given to the animals—strength, beauty, nimbleness, and speed.
There are even animals who do not know the joy of intercourse. Scale fish are deprived of this delight: the female throws millions of eggs on the mud; the male who encounters them swims over them, and fertilizes them with his seed, without troubling about the female to whom they belong.
Most animals that couple, taste pleasure only by a single sense, and as soon as the appetite is satisfied, everything is extinguished. You are the only animal who knows what kissing is. The whole of your body is sensitive, but your lips especially are capable of a pleasure that is tireless; and this pleasure belongs to no species but yours. You can give yourself up to love at any time, and the animals have but a fixed time. If you reflect on these superiorities, you will say with the earl of Rochester: “In a country of atheists, love would cause the Deity to be worshiped.”
As men have received the gift of perfecting all the gifts of nature, they have perfected love. Cleanliness and the care of oneself, by making the skin more delicate, increase the pleasure of contact; and attention to one’s health renders the organs of pleasure more sensitive. All the other sentiments enter into that of love, just like metals which amalgamate with gold: friendship and esteem come to help; the faculties of mind and body are still further chains.
Self-love, above all, tightens all these bonds. One applauds oneself for one’s choice, and a crowd of illusions form the decoration of the building of which nature has laid the foundations.
There are the advantages you have over the animals. But if you taste so many pleasures unknown to them, how many sorrows, too, are there of which the beasts have no idea! How terrible for you that over three-fourths of the earth nature has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life with an appalling disease to which man alone is subject, and by which only man’s organs of generation are infected!
This plague is not like so many other maladies which are caused by our excesses. It was not debauch that introduced it into the world. Phryne, Lais, Flora, Messalina and those like them, were not attacked by it. It was born in some islands where men lived in innocence, and thence spread itself over the ancient world.
If ever one could accuse nature of despising her work, of contradicting her plans, of acting against her designs, it is in this detestable scourge which has soiled the earth with horror and filth. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Even if Caesar, Antony, Octavius never had this disease, might it not have been possible for it to spare François I? “No,” people say, “things were ordered thus for the best.” I should like to think so; but it is sad for those to whom Rabelais dedicated his book.
Erotic philosophers have often debated the question of whether Heloise could still really love Abelard when he was both a monk and a eunuch. One of these qualities did great harm to the other. But console yourself, Abelard, you were loved. The root of the hewn tree still retains a remnant of sap; the imagination aids the heart. One can still be happy at table even though one eats no longer. Is it love? Is it simply a memory? Is it friendship? It is an indefinable complex of all these elements. It is an obscure feeling resembling the fantastic passions retained by the dead in the Elysian fields. The heroes who, during their lifetime, shone in the chariot races, drove imaginary chariots when they were dead. Heloise lived with you on illusions and memories. She kissed you sometimes, and with all the more pleasure because she had taken a vow at the Paraclete to love you no longer, which made her kisses thereby more precious as they were more culpable. A woman can hardly be seized with a passion for a eunuch: but she can keep her passion for a lover who has become a eunuch, provided that he remains lovable.
It is not the same, ladies, for a lover who has grown old in service. The externals no longer remain the same. The wrinkles horrify, the white eyebrows shock, the lost teeth disgust, the infirmities estrange. All that one can do is to enjoy the virtue of playing nurse, and of tolerating what one once loved. It is burying a dead man.
LOVE OF GOD
The disputes that have occurred over the love of God have kindled as much hatred as any theological quarrel. Jesuits and Jansenists have been contending for a hundred years as to which party loved God in the most correct manner, and which should at the same time most completely discomfit the other.
When the author of Telemachus, who was in high repute at the court of Louis XIV, recommended men to love God in a manner which did not happen to coincide with that of the author of the Funeral Orations, the latter, who was a complete master of the weapons of controversy, declared open war against him, and procured his condemnation in the ancient city of Romulus. where God was the one object most loved—after domination, ease, luxury, pleasure, and money.
LOVE PHILTERS
These were for the young. They were sold by the Jews at Rome and Alexandria, and are at the present day sold in Asia. You will find some of their secrets in the Petit Albert; and will become further initiated by reading the plea composed by Apuleiu
s when he was accused by a Christian, whose daughter he had married, of having bewitched her by philters. Emilian, his father-in-law, alleged that he had made use of certain fishes, since, Venus having been born of the sea, fishes must necessarily have prodigious influence in exciting women to love.
The usual mixture consisted of vervain, tenia, and hippomanes—or a small portion of the placenta of a mare that had just foaled, together with a little bird called wagtail; in Latin motacilla.
But Apuleius was chiefly accused of having employed shellfish, lobster patties, she-hedgehogs, spiced oysters, and cuttlefish, which were celebrated for their fecundity.
Apuleius clearly explains the real philter, or charm, which had made Pudentilla give herself to him. He undoubtedly admits, in his defense, that his wife had called him a magician. “But what,” says he, “if she had called me a consul, would that have made me one?”
The plant satyrion was considered both among the Greeks and Romans as the most powerful of philters. It was called plante aphrodisia, the plant of Venus. That called by the Latins eruca is now often added to the former. Et venerem revocans eruca morantem.
A little essence of amber is frequently used. Mandragora has gone out of fashion. Some exhausted debauchees have employed cantharides, which strongly affects the genitals, and often produces severe and painful consequences.
Youth and health are the only genuine philters. Chocolate was for a long time in great celebrity with our debilitated petits-maitres. But a man may take twenty cups of chocolate without inspiring any attachment to his person. “... ut amoris amabilis esto.” “Wouldst thou be loved, be lovable.”
MAN, GENERAL REFLECTION ON
It requires twenty years for man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother’s womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.
MARRIAGE
I came across a logician who said: “Make your subjects marry as soon as possible; let them be exempt from taxes the first year, and let their tax be distributed among those who at the same age are celibate.
“The more married men you have, the less crime there will be. Look at the frightful records of your criminal registers; you will find there a hundred bachelors hanged or broken on the wheel for one father of a family.
“Marriage makes man wiser and more virtuous. The father of a family, who is on the verge of committing a crime, is often stopped by his wife whose blood, less feverish than his, makes her gentler, more compassionate, more fearful of theft and murder, more timorous, more religious.
“The father of a family does not want to blush before his children. He fears to leave them a heritage of shame.
“Marry your soldiers, they will not desert any more. Bound to their families, they will be bound also to their fatherland. A bachelor soldier is often nothing but a vagabond, to whom it is indifferent whether he serves the king of Naples or the king of Morocco.”
The Roman warriors were married; they fought for their wives and children; and they enslaved the wives and children of other nations.
A great Italian politician, who was also very learned in oriental languages—a very rare thing among our politicians—said to me in my youth: “Caro figlio, remember that the Jews have never had more than one good institution: a horror of virginity.” If this little race of superstitious middlemen had not considered marriage as the first law of man, if there had been convents of nuns in their midst, they would have been irreparably lost.
MEN OF LETTERS
In our barbarous ages, when the Franks, the Germans, the Bretons, the Lombards, and the Spanish Muzarabs, could neither read nor write, there were established schools and universities, composed almost entirely of ecclesiastics who, knowing nothing but their own jargon, taught this jargon to those who wished to learn it. The academies did not come until much later; they despised the foolishness of the schools, but did not al ways dare to rise against them, because there are follies that are respected provided they concern respectable things.
The men of letters who have rendered the greatest services to the small number of thinking beings spread over the world are the isolated writers, the true scholars shut in their studies, who have neither argued on the benches of the universities, nor told half-truths in the academies; and almost all of them have been persecuted. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are opening a new road.
Montesquieu says that the Scythians pierced their slaves’ eyes, so that they might be less subject to distraction when they were churning their butter. This is exactly how the Inquisition functions, and in the land where this monster reigns almost everyone is blind. In England people have had two eyes for more than two hundred years; the French are starting to open one eye; but sometimes there are men in power who do not want the people to have even this one eye open.
These poor persons in power are like Doctor Balouard of the Italian Comedy, who does not want to be served by anyone but the dolt Harlequin, and who is afraid of having too shrewd a valet.
Compose some odes in praise of My Lord Superbus Fadus, some madrigals for his mistress; dedicate a book on geography to his doorkeeper, and you will be well received; enlighten mankind, and you will be exterminated.
Descartes was forced to leave his country, Cassendi was calumniated, Arnauld dragged out his days in exile; every philosopher is treated as the prophets were among the Jews.
Who would believe that in the eighteenth century a philosopher was dragged before a secular tribunal, and accused of impiety for having said that men could not practice the arts if they had no hands? I should not be surprised if the first person so insolent as to say that men could not think if they had no heads were immediately condemned to the galleys. “For,” some young graduate will say to him, “the soul is a pure spirit, the head is only matter; God can put the soul in the heel, as well as in the brain; therefore I denounce you as impious.”
Perhaps the greatest misfortune of a man of letters is not in being the object of his confreres’ jealousy, the victim of a cabal, or despised by men in power; but in being judged by fools. Fools go far sometimes, particularly when bigotry is added to ineptitude, and to ineptitude the spirit of vengeance. Another great misfortune of a man of letters is that ordinarily he stands alone. A bourgeois buys himself a small position, and in it he is backed by his colleagues. If he suffers an injustice, he finds defenders at once. The man of letters is unsuccored; he resembles a flying-fish; if he rises a little, the birds devour him; if he dives, the fish eat him.
Every public man pays tribute to malignity, but he is repaid in honors and gold.
MOHAMMEDANS
I tell you again, you ignorant imbeciles, whom other ignoramuses have convinced that the Mohammedan religion is voluptuous and sensual, that there is not a word of truth in it. You have been deceived on this point, as on so many others.
Canons, monks, vicars even, if a law were imposed on you not to eat or drink from four in the morning till ten at night, during the month of July, when Lent came at this period; if you were forbidden to play at any game of chance under pain of damnation; if wine were forbidden you under the same penalty; if you had to make a pilgrimage into the burning desert; if you were compelled to give at least two and a half per cent of your income to the poor; if, accustomed to enjoy possession of eighteen women, the number were cut down suddenly by fourteen—honestly, would you dare call that religion sensual?
The Latin Christians have so many advantages over the Mussulmans, I do not say in the matter of war, but in the matter of doctrines, and the Greek Christians have beaten them so thoroughly from 1769 to 1773, that spreading unjust charges against Islam is hardly worth the trouble.
Try, if you will, to retake from the Mohammedans al
l that they usurped. But it is easier to calumniate them.
I hate calumny so much that I do not wish to accuse even the Turks of foolishness although I detest them as tyrants over women and enemies of the arts.
I do not know why the historian of the Lower Empire maintains that Mohammed speaks in his Koran of his journey into the sky: Mohammed does not say a word about it; we have proved it.
But one must fight on ceaselessly. When one has destroyed an error, there is always someone to resuscitate it.
MOUNTAIN
It is a very old, universal fable that tells of the mountain which, having frightened all the countryside by its outcry that it was in labor, was hissed by all present when it brought into the world a mere mouse. The people in the pit were not philosophers. Those who hissed should have admired. It was as remarkable for the mountain to give birth to a mouse, as for the mouse to give birth to a mountain. A rock which produces a rat is a very prodigious thing; and never has the world seen anything approaching this miracle. All the globes of the universe could not call a fly into existence. Where the vulgar laugh, the philosopher admires; and he laughs where the vulgar open their big, stupid eyes in astonishment.
NAKEDNESS
Why should we lock up a man or a woman who chooses to walk stark naked in the street? And why is no one shocked by absolutely nude statues, by pictures of the Madonna and of Jesus that may be seen in some churches?
It is quite probable that the human race lived for a long time without clothes. People unacquainted with clothing have been found in more than one island and on the American continent. The most civilized, however, hide the organs of generation with leaves, woven rushes, or feathers. Whence comes this form of modesty? Is it the instinct to arouse desire by hiding what gives pleasure when discovered?
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