Mademoiselle de Maupin. Theophile Gautier
occupation which makes women feel as little kindly toward you as possible.
Women have very little liking for contemplative men and take strangely to those who put their ideas into action. After all, they are not wrong. Compelled by their education and social position to hold their tongues and to wait, they naturally prefer those men who come to them and talk, for they relieve them from an unnatural and wearisome silence: I realize all that; but never as long as I live shall I be able to make up my mind, as I see many men do, to leave my seat, walk across a salon and say unexpectedly to a woman: "Your dress makes you look like an angel," or: "Your eyes are particularly bright to-night."
All this does not make it any less essential for me to have a mistress. I don't know who it will be, but I see no one among the women I know who can fill that dignified and important position properly. I find in them but very few of the qualities I must have. Those who are young enough haven't sufficient beauty or charm of mind; those who are young and beautiful are disgracefully and repulsively virtuous or lack the necessary freedom of action; and then there is always some husband or brother about, or a mother or an aunt, or I don't know what, who has big eyes and long ears, and whom one must cajole or throw out of the window.—Every rose has its grub, every woman has heaps of relations whom you must get rid of like the caterpillars on a tree, if you want to pluck the fruit of her beauty some day. There is not one of them, even to the third cousins in the provinces, whom no one has ever seen, who is not determined to maintain his or her dear cousin's immaculate purity in all its snowy whiteness. That is nauseating, and I shall never have the necessary patience to tear up all the rank weeds and lop off the thorns that fatally obstruct the approaches to a pretty woman.
I don't care much for mammas and I care still less for little girls. I must confess, too, that married women have very moderate attractions for me.—There is a confusion and mixture in the latter case that disgust me; I cannot endure the idea of going shares. The woman who has a husband and a lover is a prostitute to one of them, often to both, and then I could never consent to give place to another. My natural pride would be incapable of stooping to such degradation. Never will I go away because another man is coming. Though the woman should be compromised and ruined, though we should fight with knives, each with one foot on her body—I would remain.—Secret staircases, closets, wardrobes, and all the machinery of adultery would be poor expedients with me.
I am but little enamored of what is known as virgin purity, the innocence of the flower of life, purity of heart, and other charming things which sound most beautiful in verse; I call it all pure nonsense, ignorance, imbecility, or hypocrisy.—Virgin purity, which consists in sitting on the edge of a chair, with the arms pressed close against the body, the eye on the point of the corset, and in speaking only after permission from its grandparents, the innocence which has a monopoly of uncurled hair and white dresses, the purity of heart which wears the corsage high in the neck, because it has as yet no breast or shoulders, do not seem to me, in very truth, a marvellously tempting pleasure.
I am not at all anxious to teach little fools to say the alphabet of love.—I am not old enough or corrupt enough to take any great pleasure in that. I should have but ill-success, too, for I have never had the knack of teaching anybody, even the things that I knew best. I prefer women who can read freely, you get to the end of the chapter sooner; and in all things, but especially in love, what one must consider, is the end. In that respect I am much like those people who take a novel by the tail and read the conclusion first, being prepared then to go backward to the first page. That method of reading and loving has its charm. One relishes the details better when one's mind is at ease concerning the end, and reversing the natural order of things brings the unexpected to pass.
So young girls and married women are excluded from the category. Therefore we must select our divinity from among the widows.—Alas! I am very much afraid that although we have nothing left but them, we shall still fail to find what we want.
If I should fall in love with one of those pale narcissuses bathed in a warm dew of tears and stooping with melancholy grace over the brand-new marble gravestone of some husband happily and recently deceased, I should certainly be, and in a very short time, as unhappy as the defunct spouse in his lifetime. Widows, however young and charming they may be, have one terrible inconvenience that other women have not; the instant that everything does not go well with them and the slightest cloud floats across the sky of love, they say at once, with a high and mighty, contemptuous manner: "Oh! how you act to-day! You are exactly like monsieur: when we quarrelled he never said anything but that; it's very strange, you have the same tone and the same expression; when you are angry, you can't imagine how much you resemble my husband:—it's enough to make one shudder."—It's very pleasant to have such things thrown in your face point-blank! There are some who carry their impudence to the point of praising the departed like an epitaph and extolling his heart and his leg at the expense of your leg and your—heart.—With women who have only one or several lovers, one has, at all events, the inestimable advantage of never hearing of one's predecessor, which is no trifling consideration. Women have too great an affection for what is proper and legitimate not to be very careful to keep quiet under such circumstances, and all those matters are relegated as speedily as possible to the old records.—It is always understood that one is always a woman's first lover.
I do not consider that there is any serious answer to be made to such a well-founded aversion. It is not that I look upon widows as altogether unpleasing, when they are young and pretty and haven't put off their mourning. There are the little languishing airs, the little tricks of letting the arms fall, bending the neck and puffing up like a half-fledged turtle-dove; a multitude of charming mannerisms prettily veiled behind the transparent mask of crêpe, a coquetry of despair so skilfully managed, sighs so adroitly husbanded, tears that fall so in the nick of time and make the eyes so bright!—Certainly, after my wine, if not before, the liqueur I love best to drink is a lovely, clear, limpid tear trembling at the end of a dark or light eyelash.—How is a man to resist that!—We don't resist it;—and then black is so becoming to women!—The fair skin, poetry aside, turns to ivory, snow, milk, alabaster, to everything pure and white on earth that madrigal-makers can use: the dark skin has only a dash of brown, full of animation and fire.—Mourning is good fortune for a woman, and the reason why I shall never marry is that I am afraid my wife would get rid of me in order to wear mourning for me.—There are women, however, who do not know how to make the most of their affliction and who weep in such a way as to make their noses red and to distort their features so that they look like the grotesque figures we see on fountains: that's a great stumbling-block. A woman must have many charms and much art to weep agreeably; lacking those, she runs the risk of not being consoled for a long time.—Nevertheless, great as the pleasure may be of making some Artemisia unfaithful to the shade of her Mausolus, I do not intend to choose definitely, from among the lamenting swarm, the one whom I will ask to give me her heart in exchange for mine.
I hear you say at that: "Whom will you take, then?—You won't have unmarried girls nor married women, nor widows.—You don't love mammas; I don't imagine that you love grandmammas any better.—Whom in the devil do you love?"—That is the key to the charade, and if I knew it I should not torment myself so. Thus far I have never loved any woman, but I have loved and I do love love. Although I have had no mistresses and the women I have had have aroused in me nothing but desire, I have felt and I know the sensation of love itself: I do not love this one or that one, one rather than another, but some one I have never seen, who must exist somewhere, and whom I shall find, God willing. I know what she looks like, and when I meet her I shall know her.
I have very often imagined the place she lives in, the dress she wears, the color of her eyes and her hair.—I can hear her voice; I should know her step among a thousand others, and if, by chance, any one should mention her name, I should turn to look; it is impossible that she should not have one of five or six names I have assigned to her in my head.
She is twenty-six years old—no more, neither less nor more.—She is not ignorant and she has not yet become blasé. It is a charming age at which to make love as it should be made, without puerile nonsense and without libertinage.—She is of medium height. I don't like a giant or a dwarf. I want to be able to carry my deity from the sofa to the bed without assistance; but it would be unpleasant to me to have to hunt for her there. She must be just tall enough