On Love. Stendhal

bloom.

If the loved one yields to the passion, which she shares, and falls into the enormous error of killing fear by the eagerness of her transports,[1] crystallisation ceases for an instant; but when love loses some of its eagerness, that is to say some of its fears, it acquires the charm of entire abandon, of confidence without limits: a sense of sweet familiarity comes to take the edge from all the pains of life, and give to fruition another kind of interest.

Are you deserted?—Crystallisation begins again; and every glance of admiration, the sight of every happiness which she can give you, and of which you thought no longer, leads up to this agonising reflexion: "That happiness, that charm, I shall meet it no more. It is lost and the fault is mine!" You may look for happiness in sensations of another kind. Your heart refuses to feel them. Imagination depicts for you well enough the physical situation, mounts you well enough on a fast hunter in Devonshire woods.[2] But you feel quite certain that there you would find no pleasure. It is the optical illusion produced by a pistol shot.

      Gaming has also its crystallisation, provoked by the use of the sum of money to be won.

      The hazards of Court life, so regretted by the nobility, under the name of Legitimists, attached themselves so dearly only by the crystallisation they provoked. No courtier existed who did not dream of the rapid fortune of a Luynes or a Lauzun, no charming woman who did not see in prospect the duchy of Madame de Polignac. No rationalist government can give back that crystallisation. Nothing is so anti-imagination as the government of the United States of America. We have noticed that to their neighbours, the savages, crystallisation is almost unknown. The Romans scarcely had an idea of it, and discovered it only for physical love.

      Hate has its crystallisation: as soon as it is possible to hope for revenge, hate begins again.

      If every creed, in which there is absurdity and inconsequence, tends to place at the head of the party the people who are most absurd, that is one more of the effects of crystallisation. Even in mathematics (observe the Newtonians in 1740) crystallisation goes on in the mind, which cannot keep before it at every moment every part of the demonstration of that which it believes.

      In proof, see the destiny of the great German philosophers, whose immortality, proclaimed so often, never manages to last longer than thirty or forty years.

      It is the impossibility of fathoming the "why?" of our feelings, which makes the most reasonable man a fanatic in music.

      In face of certain contradictions it is not possible to be convinced at will that we are right.

[1] Diane de Poitiers, in the Princesse de Clèves, by Mme. de Lafayette.

[2] If you could imagine being happy in that position, crystallisation would have deferred to your mistress the exclusive privilege of giving you that happiness.

CHAPTER VII

       DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE BIRTH OF LOVE IN THE TWO SEXES

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      Women attach themselves by the favours they dispense. As nineteen-twentieths of their ordinary dreams are relative to love, after intimate intercourse these day-dreams group themselves round a single object; they have to justify a course so extraordinary, so decisive, so contrary to all the habits of modesty. Men have no such task; and, besides, the imagination of women has time to work in detail upon the sweetness of such moments.

      As love casts doubts upon things the best proved, the woman who, before she gave herself, was perfectly sure that her lover was a man above the crowd, no sooner thinks she has nothing left to refuse him, than she is all fears lest he was only trying to put one more woman on his list.

Then, and then only appears the second crystallisation, which, being hand in hand with fear, is far the stronger.[1]

      Yesterday a queen, to-day she sees herself a slave. This state of soul and mind is encouraged in a woman by the nervous intoxication resulting from pleasures, which are just so much keener as they are more rare. Besides, a woman before her embroidery frame—insipid work which only occupies the hand—is thinking about her lover; while he is galloping with his squadron over the plain, where leading one wrong movement would bring him under arrest.

      I should think, therefore, that the second crystallisation must be far stronger in the case of women, because theirs are more vivid fears; their vanity and honour are compromised; distraction at least is more difficult.

      A woman cannot be guided by the habit of being reasonable, which I, Man, working at things cold and reasonable for six hours every day, contract at my office perforce. Even outside love, women are inclined to abandon themselves to their imagination and habitual high spirits: faults, therefore, in the object of their love ought more rapidly to disappear.

      Women prefer emotion to reason—that is plain: in virtue of the futility of our customs, none of the affairs of the family fall on their shoulders, so that reason is of no use to them and they never find it of any practical good.

      On the contrary, to them it is always harmful; for the only object of its appearance is to scold them for the pleasures of yesterday, or forbid them others for tomorrow.

      Give over to your wife the management of your dealings with the bailiffs of two of your farms—I wager the accounts will be kept better than by you, and then, sorry tyrant, you will have the right at least to complain, since to make yourself loved you do not possess the talent. As soon as women enter on general reasonings, they are unconsciously making love. But in matters of detail they take pride in being stricter and more exact than men. Half the small trading is put into the hands of women, who acquit themselves of it better than their husbands. It is a well-known maxim that, if you are speaking business with a woman, you cannot be too serious.

      This is because they are at all times and in all places greedy of emotion.—Observe the pleasures of burial rites in Scotland.

[1] This second crystallisation is wanting in light women, who are far away from all these romantic ideas.

CHAPTER VIII

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      This was her favoured fairy realm, and here she erected her aerial palaces.—Bride of Lammermoor, Chap. III.

      A girl of eighteen has not enough crystallisation in her power, forms desires too limited by her narrow experiences of the things of life, to be in a position to love with as much passion as a woman of twenty-eight(4).

      This evening I was exposing this doctrine to a clever woman, who maintains the contrary. "A girl's imagination being chilled by no disagreeable experience, and the prime of youth burning with all its force, any man can be the motive upon which she creates a ravishing image. Every time that she meets her lover, she will enjoy, not what he is in reality, but that image of delight which she has created for herself.

      "Later, she is by this lover and by all men disillusioned, experience of the dark reality has lessened in her the power of crystallisation, mistrust has clipped the wings of imagination. At the instance of no man on earth, were he a very prodigy, could she form so irresistible an image: she could love no more with the same fire of her first youth. And as in love it is only the illusion formed by ourselves which we enjoy, never can the image, which she may create herself at twenty-eight, have the brilliance and the loftiness on which first