Quélus was passing by. Sampson stopped two passing shades and gestured
towards Quélus. "Would you do me the honour of introducing me?"
One of the two shades: "Who should be presented to whom?"
The other shade: "To Quélus because of his title."
Samson: "No, to me, I am the elder."
The first shade: "Call Quélus. Comte de Quélus. Monsieur Samson."
Quélus: "Sir, I have heard much spoken about you during my earthly life."
Samson: "The decree of time was pitted against any reciprocity. Had it not
been for that I would no doubt have spent my captivity amassing
unpublished documents about you. You interest me immensely Sir.
Nevertheless I have predicted it to you, did I not say:
Woman will have Gomorrah and man will have Sodom,
And casting from afar an irritated look,
The two sexes will die each in a place apart."
Quélus made a slight gesture of agreement, with the elegant bow of a
man of the world.
Samson: "How right you were sir, and if everyone, and I myself included,
had behaved in the same way as you, there is no doubt that Delilah would
have turned out to have been more accommodating. But yet it is not out of
flirtatiousness, indirect homage paid to feminine grace that I approve
these boys' games. It is for a man to have banished far from us that
creature less human than animal, bizarre surrogate for the cat, strange
intermediate between the viper and the rose, woman, perdition of all our
thoughts, poison to all our friendships, to everything we admire, to all
our devotions, of everything we worship; thanks to you and your kind love
is no longer a malady that places us in quarantine from all our friends
and prevents us from discussing philosophy with them. It is on the
contrary merely a richer blossoming of friendship, the happy consummation
of our tender loyalties and its virile outpourings. It is like the
dialectics and the cestus of the Ancient Greeks, a recreation to be
encouraged and which, far from over stretching them, strengthens the bonds
that unite men with their brothers. But my heart finds a deeper joy still
by finally being able to gaze on you, Sir. What a confidant have I found
for my resentment towards womanhood, we will now be able to unite our
resentments, and curse it together. To curse womanhood, alas so delightful
a deed as it may be, because in some ways to curse it is also to evoke it,
is then again also somewhat to relive one's time with it."
"I should like to be of your opinion Sir but I cannot. I have never
been troubled by a woman and I do not understand either the mysterious
attachment which in your wrath you still associate to her by painful and
tremulously tangible threads - nor the alleged motivation that she
inspires in you. Incapable of discussing with you the sorcery of woman, I
find myself more incapable still of detesting her as you do. I feel some
rancour towards men, but I have always infinitely appreciated women. I
have written pages about them that people were kind enough to describe as
exquisite and which were at least sincere and taken from personal
experience. I have counted among women some firm friends. Their grace,
their delicacy, their beauty, their spirit has often intoxicated me with a
joy that without owing anything to the senses would not have been any less
intense if it was more solid and more pure. I would go and console myself
in their company over the treacheries of my male lovers and there is
something sweet about weeping endlessly and without desire against a
perfect bosom. For me women have been both Madonnas and nurses. I would
adore them and they would cradle me. The less I asked of them the more
they gave to me. I paid court to several of them, imbued with a
discernment that the pangs of desire could never manage to discompose. In
exchange they gave me exquisite teas, delightful conversation, and
disinterested and gracious friendship. It could hardly be my desire for
those who by a cruel and rather silly joke wish by offering themselves to
me to make me confess that I feel no appetite for them at all. But instead
of a quite legitimate pride, the most elementary flirtatiousness, the fear
of compromising their charm beside such a genuine admirer, a little bit of
goodwill and magnanimity of mind dissuade the best of them from such an
attitude."
1M. Renan goes by.
"Hold your tongue, man of letters though you might be. How can you
really believe that there is not more arrogant theoretician's cunning in
your speeches than any approximate summary of your ideas. At most you have
safeguarded yourself from loving women, just like those table guests who
disdain the most delicious fruits that are offered to them. They have
eaten before coming to the feast. Yet unquestionably you have loved women.
Believe me my dear friend that there is no blame in these words, at least
philosophically on my part, and do not read into my reproaches the
conviction without appeal of any excessively absolute morality. How,
without deserving of being accused of narrowness of mind, can we clumsily
deny ourselves any understanding of those games that Socrates speaks of
with a smile. That master, who loved Justice to the point of dying for it,
and at the same time so to speak to give it to the world, tolerated
without any ill humour those practices among his most intimate of friends
which today seem so outdated. And if remoteness in space closely imitates
remoteness in time, it would not seem absurd to claim that still today the
Orient, of such interest from many other points of view besides, remains
the unextinguished hearth of those peculiar flames. Nevertheless just as
the Ancients believed, love is indisputably a disease. How then can we
compare these customs to a vice? Unquestionably albuminuria would not be
associated with any form of immorality if in certain people it resulted in
the production of salt instead of sugar in the urine. Far be it from me,
in spite of these reasons, to have any thought of absolving you, my dear
friend. You have been inept on two counts. An unpardonable crime if, as I
am inclined to believe, life is for the most part a game of skill. It is
not good, from any point of view, to take pleasure in spending one's time
going against the grain. A man endowed with a perfectly normal formation
of the palate, who was however in the habit of finding it a most exquisite
treat to devour excrement, would be received with difficulty, at least in
polite society. Certain forms of physical repulsion are the most powerful
of all and carry with them a note of infamy. Inevitably our disgust and
our consideration cannot extend to the same people. And yet who would dare
say that disgust is not eminently relative? Why do you turn away from the
most exquisite perfumes offered to you and bend down in front of the mouth
of a drain, convincing yourself that you are inhaling the scents of a bed
of flowers. A position assuredly neither more nor less founded on the
absolute than that of the devotee of gardens and perfumes - but a strange
position which rests only on the physical disposition of the nasal
receptors and which, be in no doubt about it, will be very much remarked
upon. But you have committed an even more serious blunder because it
implies fault in a wider circle, in a more subtle degree of knowledge.
Love, as I have said, is an illness. But over-excitement of the mind or
madness is one too. There is no doubt then that the day poetry made its
first appearance on earth it uniquely raised the level of madness. Almost
all poets are madmen. Who, however, would dare to criticize them? The
doctors say that they are sick, people who are clearly over praised, but
among whom I count, however, some exceedingly distinguished and dear
friends. Moreover, by causing us to perish, do they not contribute
significantly to widen the circle of our knowledge and to shift (strong
prefix2) the point of view of our meditations? Therefore the
doctors say quite reasonably about the poets that they are sick and mad.
So be it. But a blessed sickness, a divine madness, as the mystics say.
The appearance of woman and above all modern woman in the world has
likewise considerably exalted the beneficial path, although somewhat
limited in horizon, that love seemed destined to create in the world in
the earliest ages. The rich woman, synonymous with comfort and ardour has
truly made out of love a sublime sickness that you can only depreciate by
eliminating this prime factor my dear Quélus. Difference of sex is of
primary importance here. To whom but she can be attributed the refreshment
that comes from our love for a being so different from ourselves,
refreshment that is so analogous to the peaceful days enjoyed by the city
worker who spends his holidays in the countryside? Finally in the same way
that this romanticism, by making it play an even greater role in
inspirational poetry, has ultimately sanctioned mental derangement among
people of taste, since the XVIIIth century it seems to me that your
mistake has become a heresy, woman having been divinely perfected, having
been enriched with every sensitivity that the most refined minds revere.
Today she is an object of art and of luxury who need fear no rivalry. It
is true that you claim to savour dainty pleasures with her and to satisfy
your senses elsewhere. What a needless and clumsy complication to one's
existence. The pleasure of your senses would be enriched and refined by
all those pleasures that woman alone can give to our imagination. Besides,
this separation of which you speak, is it possible? What force could
prevent us from embracing the woman that we admire to such a degree? And
to the verb embrace I should also like to add some others that would
perhaps sound shocking in the discourse of a philosopher, which in any
case is already long enough.
1. Paragraph crossed out: A philosopher goes by. Hold your tongue Quélus and don't talk about women with the sort of detachment that you haven't always had. And then you are about to be summonsed before the Judge and it would be better for you to repent. Most certainly.
2. Interpretation is conjectural.
Created 28.10.19