The Physiology of Marriage. Honore de Balzac
as a contract, it relates to the transmission of property; as an institution, it is a guarantee which all men give and by which all are bound: they have father and mother, and they will have children. Marriage, therefore, ought to be the object of universal respect. Society can only take into consideration those cardinal points, which, from a social point of view, dominate the conjugal question.
Most men have no other views in marrying, than reproduction, property or children; but neither reproduction nor property nor children constitutes happiness. The command, “Increase and multiply,” does not imply love. To ask of a young girl whom we have seen fourteen times in fifteen days, to give you love in the name of law, the king and justice, is an absurdity worthy of the majority of the predestined.
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment; happiness in marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair. Hence it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by certain rules of honor and delicacy. After having enjoyed the benefit of the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.
But to feel this passion is always to feel desire. Can a man always desire his wife?
Yes.
It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a charming melody.
Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.
Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this investigation for the next century to carry out.
If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression, pleasure should be even more diversified. For in the three arts which aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy, the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of two bodies and of two souls. If the three principal methods upon which we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those whom nature has made poets, musicians or painters, is it not obvious that, in order, to be happy, it is necessary to be initiated into the secrets of pleasure? All men experience the craving for reproduction, as all feel hunger and thirst; but all are not called to be lovers and gastronomists. Our present civilization has proved that taste is a science, and it is only certain privileged beings who have learned how to eat and drink. Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its physiologists. As for ourselves, we are contented with pointing out that ignorance of the principles upon which happiness is founded, is the sole cause of that misfortune which is the lot of all the predestined.
It is with the greatest timidity that we venture upon the publication of a few aphorisms which may give birth to this new art, as casts have created the science of geology; and we offer them for the meditation of philosophers, of young marrying people and of the predestined.
CATECHISM OF MARRIAGE.
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Marriage is a science.
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A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected
at least one woman.
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The fate of the home depends on the first night.
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A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making
a sacrifice.
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In love, putting aside all consideration of the soul, the heart of a
woman is like a lyre which does not reveal its secret, excepting to him
who is a skillful player.
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Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of
all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all
pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.
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The interest of a husband as much as his honor forbids him to indulge
a pleasure which he has not had the skill to make his wife desire.
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Pleasure being caused by the union of sensation and sentiment, we can
say without fear of contradiction that pleasures are a sort of material
ideas.
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As ideas are capable of infinite combination, it ought to be the same
with pleasures.
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In the life of man there are no two moments of pleasure exactly alike,
any more than there are two leaves of identical shape upon the same
tree.
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If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a
man can always be happy with the same woman.
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To seize adroitly upon the varieties of pleasure, to develop them, to
impart to them a new style, an original expression, constitutes the
genius of a husband.
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Between two beings who do not love each other this genius is
licentiousness; but the caresses over which love presides are always
pure.
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The married woman who is the most chaste may be also the most
voluptuous.
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The most virtuous woman can be forward without knowing it.
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When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social
conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which
many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is
a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love
ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes,
excepting at the due season.
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Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but
in striking true.
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To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring
it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of
itself.
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The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from
the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the
ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the
dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.
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Each night ought to have its menu.
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Marriage